Chapter 202: Ida Rose I

The flap of the postbox clicked shut on its own spring, and his mother stood looking at it with her hands in her coat pockets.

"Well," she said. "That’s gone, then. It’ll be in Noosa in a week. He’ll be stood on his jetty with a beer, and Sharon’ll be asking who it’s from, and he’ll tell her nobody."

"He’ll know it’s you before he’s opened it, Mum. He taught you them capitals."

"I know that." She took her hands out of her pockets and put her arm through his. "Walk me back up. My feet have gone."

They went back up to the walkway with the frost coming on the railings. Denise’s telly was still going. At the door his mother stopped with her key out.

"I’ve not slept a full night since Friday," she said. "Since you sat at that table and said there was a man called Vic. I’ve been lying there doing the Fridays in my head. Adding them up. I’d get to about 300 and lose it and have to start again."

"Stop counting. Jodie’s done it. It’s 571 and it’s written down."

"I know it is." She put the key in. "I’m going to sleep tonight. I’ve posted it. It’s not in my house any more."

He waited on the walkway till he heard the chain go on.

Deniz was at Pembury at 9 on Monday morning with the blank fire door on the roof of his van and a new frame in 3 pieces. He and Danny carried them up the 3 flights between them, and Deniz talked all the way about intumescent strips and a building inspector in Walthamstow who’d once made him take a door off and hang it the other way round.

Deniz took the ply off the doorway with a drill. Danny held the frame while Deniz fixed it, and held the door while Deniz hung it, and by half 11 there was a heavy white door on the top flat at the end with a closer on it that pulled it shut by itself, slowly, with a hiss.

"Keys," Deniz said, and gave him 2. "Adaeze’s got the third."

"The old hinges. Can I have one of them?"

Deniz looked at him, and dug in his tool bag, and handed him one of the old brass hinges with paint still in its screw holes.

Danny put it in his coat pocket.

At 1 o’clock Priya rang. He took it standing in the new doorway with the closer hissing every time he let go of the door.

"I have been on the telephone all morning," she said. "I want to tell you what I have. It changes what I do. Mr Harrigan’s death was a sudden death at home, so after the ambulance the police attended, and a coroner’s officer. He left no will, and there is no family anybody can trace."

"I know. I sat with him. Nobody came."

"When the police searched the flat for next of kin, they found 44,000 pounds in cash. In shoeboxes under his bed, in twenties and tens." She paused. "They have taken it. Cash in shoeboxes in the flat of a man nobody can explain is cash the police will hold as the possible proceeds of crime. If nobody with a claim comes forward, it goes in the end to the Crown."

Danny leaned on the door frame.

44,000 in shoeboxes. Some of those twenties are mine. Some of them are off somebody else’s Friday.

"I’ve got a claim," he said slowly. "Haven’t I? Not to all of it. To mine."

"You are a victim of the crime that money came from, Mr Flynn, and you can prove it better than most people ever could. You have 571 lines on a door, photographed with a tape measure in every frame. Your mother will give a statement about the Monday. You have 2 letters from your father in his own hand, telling you the debt was never yours."

She went on without a pause.

"I will write to the police this afternoon, and to the government department, to tell them a claim is coming before any of it is paid anywhere. I wanted you to know before I did it."

"And the rest of it? The money that isn’t mine?"

"That belongs to whoever else was paying him." Her voice didn’t change. "I will ask the police whether they found a book. A moneylender with that many customers will have written their names down somewhere. If they did, those people can claim as well."

"Then write every letter you need to, Priya."

At 6 he got the bus to Kensington on his own. He walked down the street of white houses in the dark, past the railings where Jodie had stood with his mother’s page, and stopped at the bottom of the 5 steps of the house with the black door.

The curtains were drawn on all 4 floors, but there was a faint light in the fanlight over the door.

He went up the steps and crouched and pushed the letterbox open with 2 fingers.

The hall was lit. A lamp with a parchment shade stood on a table against the wall, throwing a circle of yellow onto the black and white tiles. The table was back. Dark wood, the same table or its twin. Beside the lamp lay a short stack of cream cards, squared off, and across them, a black fountain pen with its cap off.

He let the letterbox close slowly, so it wouldn’t snap, and went back down the steps.

Ida said it comes back. 1979, dust and all, and the week after, the table was there with a pen on it. A week after Hale stood in an empty hall, it’s back.

He rang Jodie from the bus.

"The table’s out," he said. "A lamp, and a stack of cards, and a pen lying across them with the cap off."

"That’s the one you don’t use," Jodie said straight away. "Ida wrote it down, and Pemberton told you the same the Sunday he gave you his."

"And their cards. That’s what’s been bothering me since I let the letterbox go. Pemberton said that pen of his has never touched their paper in 70 years. He never wrote on their cards. So what did he write on?"

There was a pause while she thought.

"His own paper," she said. "The blue notepaper he wrote you the note on. He’d have taken his own, Danny. His own pen and his own paper. Nothing of theirs except the table."

"I’ve got no paper of my own that means anything."

"You have," Jodie said. "Ida left 2 blank pages in that book. After her last door. Before the list. She left them for something."

He took the book out of his pocket on the bus and opened it on his knee under the yellow light. The last entry, 10 October. Last door. Tired now. Then 2 clean pages. Then the list inside the back cover.

"Tomorrow," he said. "After her funeral. I’ll go straight there from Manor Park."

"Then come home now," Jodie said. "You’ve got a new door. I want to see if it locks."

Jodie turned the key twice and tried the handle and nodded, and then went to the drawer under the window where she kept her sewing things and came back with a long silk scarf, dark green, an offcut from a dress she’d made in the summer.

"Sit on the end of the bed," she said. "Shirt off."

He sat on the end of the mattress and took his shirt off. She knelt up on the mattress behind him.

I felt the silk go over my eyes and round my head, and her fingers tie it at the back, firmly, and the room went dark green and then black.

"You’ve been opening every door for 4 days," she said against my ear, warm. "Vic’s and your mum’s and Priya’s and that house’s. This one I’m opening. You’re going to lie back, and I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m doing, out loud, every bit of it."