Everything in Its Place

By the end of the week the lining paper ran the full length of the Bell Street office, over the filing cabinet, round the corner by the coat hooks and out of sight behind the door, and Jonah had been given the felt tips on the understanding that he could be trusted to cross things out without sulking. You stood at one end with a mug going cold in your hand and read the case as you would a map of a town you had lived in for years without ever finding the river.

He had ruled it into three columns in red capitals. WHO KNEW. WHO TOLD. WHO WAS THERE. The first was so long that he had run out of paper and carried on across the cabinet: half the people you had spoken to, a constable, an editor, a hundred small people in a hundred small rooms. The second had four names and a telephone. The third had two, with a gap beneath them about the size of a person that nobody had yet dared to fill in.

“Nobody’s lying,” said Jonah. “That’s what I can’t get over. Not properly. They’re all just tidying.”

“A town doesn’t keep a secret,” you said. “It keeps forty small ones, and they hold each other up.” You touched the card for the Thrift Day supper, and the card for the pay notice, and the pencilled WHOSE. “Everyone we’ve spoken to kept one thing back for a reason that was good, and kept it a little longer than was safe. A rumour, a meeting, a notice, a name, a line in a log. And not one of them was on that stair at five to ten.”

“Except two,” said Jonah.

“Except two,” you said. “And one of them can’t tell us.”