Everything in Its Place

By noon the office on Bell Street smelled of wet wool and cold tea, and there were three invitations on the blotter and no room left for them. The first came on cream paper from Constance Ward, Chair of the Chamber of Commerce, in the voice of a woman who has already decided what the conversation will have been about. The second arrived by a boy on a bicycle: Tom Rudd and the strike committee would talk, if you were prepared to stand in the rain to do it. The third came with no paper at all. Vera Mead, landlady of the Anchor, had simply sent word that she’d be behind her bar, “as ever”, and that the bar, in her experience, knew everything.

The cream envelope from the Fairweather Foundation still leaned against the kettle on the filing cabinet, the black-tie invitation to the Grand Lantern, unanswered and increasingly smug. You moved it an inch to the left to make room for a map.

“Three people,” said Jonah, tapping each name. “Three Saltmarshes.”

“Four, if you count the one that put a man at the bottom of a staircase,” you said. “We take them in any order we like. The thing to remember is that each of them will tell us, with complete sincerity, what kind of town this is. Our job isn’t to pick the best story. It’s to find the one that’s true.”

Outside, the gulls had started up on the roofs, quarrelling over the cannery’s abandoned heads and tails. In Saltmarsh even the birds took sides.