Everything in Its Place

Gil Tanner had the paraffin lamp lit although it was not yet dusk, and he held the gate log shut on his knee like a man guarding a hymn book. He knew why you had come. You could tell from the way he looked at the flask and not at you.

“Thirty years,” he said, “and I’ve never rubbed a line out.” He opened the log to Thursday and turned it to the lamp. Between 10.20 and the dawn entry the page had a pale smudge the width of a thumb, and under the smudge, if you tilted the paper, a ghost of graphite stood in the grain. Jonah leaned in until his hair touched the lamp. “It says… ten forty-six,” he said slowly. “‘Mrs C., side gate. Lamp.’”

“She asked me not to put it,” said Gil. His voice was quite level. “She came in with her lamp and her good coat, and she said, ‘Gil, just let me have tonight.’ I didn’t know what had happened. I thought she meant the quarrel. I thought she’d come to find him and have it out.” He looked at the lamp. “She went up the quay side. She was out again at twenty-two minutes to twelve with her hands empty. I rubbed it out in the morning, when the constable came and I heard.”

“Why?”

“Because the constable wrote down confused, Doctor. When a man’s seventy he can say what he likes and it gets written under confused. Mrs Crane has never once been written down as anything but kind, and I wasn’t going to be the one to change it.” He shut the log. “I’m not confused. I’m tidy. It’s the same thing, to a man with a pencil.”

“Labelling,” whispered Jonah, but with no triumph in it. He had seen the page.

You thought about how a record keeps order, and what an eraser does. A page with a hole in it is more honest than a page without one, if you know where to look. And you thought about a widow in a good coat, going up an iron stair in the rain with a lamp, for reasons that were her own.