Chapter 200 - 571 I

Jodie was the first one to move.

She got down on her knees on the dust sheet beside the door with the torch in one hand, and put the tip of her other finger on the first mark in the top left corner, and started counting under her breath. She counted the way she measured a hem, without hurrying and without losing her place, row by row, and every time she got to the end of a row she said the number out loud.

"25."

Deniz stayed sitting back on his heels and didn’t say anything. The woman from the floor below had sat down on the stairs with her shopping bags at her feet. Adaeze stood behind Danny with her camel coat buttoned wrong.

"50."

Every one of those is a Friday, and 100 quid in his hand at the bottom of those stairs or on his walkway, and a Thursday I didn’t eat.

"100."

She was faster now. Danny watched her finger go along the rows and drop to the next, and he remembered the pencil, a stubby HB he’d kept on the top of the door frame for 11 years, and standing on the kitchen chair at 17 to start the first row as high as he could reach, so there’d be room for however long it took.

"There’s writing," Jodie said. She’d stopped. "Here. Look."

She held the torch flat so the light raked across the paint. At the very first mark, in the top corner, so small you’d miss it unless you were looking, he’d written 100 in pencil beside the line.

"I’d forgot I ever did that, Jodie."

"There’s more." She moved the torch down, a long way down, more than halfway. "Here. 120."

The number sat in the margin beside a row, tiny and neat.

"That’s when he put it up," Danny said. "He said the time had gone up and I said fine. I went home and wrote it there so I’d remember when it changed."

Jodie looked up at him from the floor.

"You wrote the money down, Danny. On the door. Priya said she needed a figure." She went back to counting. "You’ve given her 2 of them."

She counted to the bottom. It took her another 6 minutes. At the bottom right corner the lines stopped, and the last mark wasn’t a line at all. It was a small pencil circle, drawn carefully, closed.

"571 lines," Jodie said. "And a circle."

She had her phone out before anybody else had moved, with the calculator on it.

"The 120 starts at line 332. I counted where it was. So that’s 331 Fridays at 100, and 240 at 120." Her thumb went on the screen. "61,900 pounds, Danny. Not 55. Nearly 62,000. Off a door."

Danny crouched down beside her and put his finger beside the circle without touching it.

"10 October," he said. "I came back here at about half 6 in the morning, the 11th by then, after the ambulance. I hadn’t given him the envelope. I’d still got the 120 in my pocket. So I couldn’t draw a line. I didn’t know what to put. I drew that."

Nobody on the landing said anything.

Then Adaeze took a breath that went all the way down, and talked.

"That door is yours. I’m saying it now in front of Deniz and Mrs Lowe from number 6, so there’s witnesses. That door is your property and I’ll put it in writing.

"I’ll fit a new one Monday. Deniz says he’s got a blank one in his yard, a fire door, better than this one. This one was never a fire door, I’ve had the inspector on at me about it for 2 years.

"And this one goes in my lock-up on Morning Lane tonight, wrapped in this sheet, with a padlock on it, and nobody touches it till your solicitor says. I’ve the van downstairs. Deniz, you’ll help me carry it. And I’ll write her a letter saying when I bought the building and when you were my tenant and that I painted it after the nurse went, with the date off the receipt from the paint shop, so nobody can say it was done last week.

"I’m so sorry, Danny. I stood in there with the roller and I painted over 11 years of you and I didn’t even look. I thought it was a kid’s drawings. I thought the nurse’s boy had done it. I said to my cleaner, children draw on everything, and I put 2 coats on to be sure."

"You weren’t to know, Adaeze. I painted that door myself in my head every Friday so nobody would ask."

She wiped her eyes with her gloved hand. "Somebody photograph it before I do anything else to it."

Jodie was already on her feet with her phone.

"Not like that," she said, when Danny held his out. "Priya said properly. Hold the torch." She got her tape measure out of her coat pocket and pulled it out along the top edge of the door and pinned the end under Deniz’s scraper, so the numbers lay along the paint. "Hold it low, from the side, so the pencil shows up."

She photographed it in sections, a foot at a time, with the tape in every frame, overlapping each one with the last, the way she’d photograph a pattern piece. Then one of the whole door from the top of the stairs, with Danny holding the torch, and then close ones of 100 and 120 and the circle.

"36," she said, when she’d finished. "I’ll email them to Priya tonight. With the tape in, nobody can say you drew it bigger."

Deniz stood up and his knees cracked.

"You’ve no front door tonight," he said. "I’m not hanging the blank till Monday, it wants a new frame. I’ll screw a sheet of ply across the hole before I go, but you’ll not want to sleep behind a sheet of ply."

Danny looked at the doorway, at the flat inside with its new mattress and the window that opened, all of it open to the landing.

"We’ve still got 40 for another fortnight," he said. "Keys go back on the Monday after next. We’ll go there."

They helped Adaeze and Deniz carry the door down the 3 flights in its dust sheet and slide it into the back of her van, and stood on the pavement till the van turned the corner towards Morning Lane.

It was after 8 by the time they’d crossed London and walked the last bit along the river in the dark, so Kieran was off and Osei was on. Osei said evening, Mr Flynn and evening, Miss Carter and looked at them both carefully and didn’t ask.

On the river path, before they went in, Danny had rung his mother.

"It’s me. I’m fine. Listen to me, Mum, before you write anything. There’s a number now." He told her about the door, and the 571, and the 100 and the 120, and Jodie’s sum. Then he told her what was in the 2 letters, word for word, from the photograph Jodie had taken of them on Priya’s blotter.

His mother didn’t say anything for a while. He could hear the telly in the background, and then not, as if she’d turned it off.

"Get Jodie to send me the pictures of that door," she said. "On my phone. I want to see it before I put pen to paper. I want to have looked at it."

"I’ll get her to send them now."

"And Danny." Her voice was steady. "61,900. Say it again so I’ve got it right."

He said it again, and she said it after him, slowly, the way she’d say a bus number she needed to remember. Flat 40 was cold. Danny put the heating on and the big lamp by the sofa and nothing else, and Jodie stood at the window in her coat looking down at the river.

"571," she said, to the glass. "I’ll feel them on the end of my finger for a week."

She’d sent his mother the 36 pictures in the lift. She turned round. "Come and sit down before you fall down."

He sat on the end of the big grey sofa and she took her coat off and dropped it on the floor, and then her jumper over her head, and then she kicked off her boots and pulled her jeans and knickers down together and stepped out of them, and stood there in front of him in the lamplight in nothing but her bra, with the river lights behind her.

"Don’t get up," she said. "I don’t want you to do anything. I want you to sit there."

She put one knee on the sofa beside my hip and swung the other leg over my thigh, and sat down astride it, on my jeans, high up, and I felt how wet she was through the denim. She put both hands on my shoulders.

"Just sit there with your hands on me," she said.