Everything in Its Place

That night, with the cheque refused and the second question still in your head, you went to Crane House after ten, on foot, with Jonah two paces behind and the rain coming in sideways off the quay. The laurels were black against the street lamp. There was a light in the kitchen. Before you had raised your hand, the door opened.

“Rook’s been asking about a lamp,” said Lilian Crane. She wore her good coat over her nightdress and held a lamp, as if she had been standing with it for some time. “Come in. There’s tea. I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me properly.”

In the kitchen, under the loud painted clock, she told it the way she did the books, in a column. She had gone out at half past ten. Hollis hadn’t come home, and there was something about the evening she could not name. She had gone in by the side gate with her lamp and Gil had let her through without a word. She had found him at the foot of the back stair, by the wall, quite still. He was still warm. She had known at once, in the way one knows a cold room, that he was dead.

“I sat with him,” she said. “I don’t know for how long. I don’t know what I felt. I know that for the first time in thirty years there was no one telling me what had been decided.” The clock ticked. “Then I went up the stair. I looked at his office. I took the Harborline papers out of his drawer, because I didn’t want anyone to read the page of figures with my initial on it. And I came down and went home, and I said nothing to anyone until the constable knocked at seven.” She looked at you steadily. “I know what it makes me.”

“It makes you a woman who was alone,” you said gently, “and who ought to have told someone.”

“Who? The constable who writes down ‘confused’? The Chamber?” She almost laughed. “I’m telling you.”

She put her hand in the pocket of her apron and laid something on the table beside the ledgers: a small enamel pin, the Thrift Day badge, its clasp bent. Along the bottom ran a row of tiny brass bars, one for each year of unbroken attendance. You counted them twice. There were eleven.

“It was by his hand,” she said. “Torn from a lapel. I knew whose it was before I picked it up. Every man in Saltmarsh wears the badge. Only one has eleven bars.” She turned her wedding ring a quarter-turn. “I sent that man a tin of shortbread every Christmas for twenty years. I didn’t say a word, and I’m not sure it was loyalty.”

Jonah looked at the badge and then at the clock. It was nearly midnight. Somewhere in the town a bell, patient and flat, was telling the hour to nobody.