The Inspector's Visit

Inspector Rennick Hale came up the drive at twenty past ten on the eighth day in a hired gig, in the rain, and Nell watched him from the hall window and knew three things about him before he was out of it.

He paid the driver first and counted the change. He looked at the roof of the house before he looked at the door of it. And he took his gloves off finger by finger on the step, in the wet, rather than carry them wet into somebody’s hall.

A careful man. She had been hoping for a tired one.

“Miss Hartigan.” He had a damp overcoat, a clerk’s satchel, fifty-odd years and a Midland voice underneath a guild-house one. “I’ll not want luncheon and I’ll not want the drawing room. I want a table under a window, the ledger, the preliminary, and an hour without anybody being helpful at me.”

“There’s the library.”

“Is there a fire in it?”

“There is, sir,” Nell said, “and I can’t always tell you why.”

He looked at her then, for the first time, properly, the way she looked at a room.

“No,” he said. “Well. That is what I have come about.”

· · ·Scene break

He counted the pages before he read a word of them.

Nell had known he would, because she would have, and because it was the first thing in the inspector’s own standing orders; but knowing it and watching it were different things. He laid the ledger flat and ran his thumb up the numbered corners from the flyleaf to the last written page, moving his lips, and then again from the back, and then he wrote a figure in his own book and drew a line under it.

“Forty-one houses,” he said.

“Forty-one before this one.”

“I read your Ashfield report two winters ago. A well and a child. You wrote four lines where most operators write a page, and the four lines were the right four.” He turned to day one without waiting for her to be pleased about it. “Sit down. I’ll ask as I go.”

She sat where he put her, which was across the table and slightly into the light, and she let him read.

He read for fifty minutes. He asked about the salt line and she told him it had lain unbroken for three hours while the fourth step creaked four times, and he wrote that down and said “hm” in a way that meant he did not like it either. He asked why the glass had been dismantled and rebuilt on the first night and she said because it would not give a settled reading and she would not enter a reading she could not prove, and he said that was correct, and wrote that down too.

Then he came to the night of the fourth day, and he stopped, and went back a page, and read it again.

Nell had written it in the dark on the half-landing with the stand on the tread below her, and she could have recited it with her eyes shut.

No dead signature recovered on the east flight at any point. Signature present is periodic, 61–62, regular, consistent with a living working. No living person on the stairs.

“Read me that last line, Miss Hartigan.”

“No living person on the stairs.”

“Your own words.” He set his pencil down flat, which she came to learn was what he did when he had stopped taking a walk through a document and started taking a position in it. “I am going to put some questions to you and I am going to minute them. You know the form. You’ll sign it read over before I leave the house.”

“I know the form, sir.”

He took a sheet of minute paper out of the satchel and headed it and dated it.

“At the time of this reading, was any person in this house awake and within thirty feet of your instrument?”

The long gallery had a clock in it that Nell had never once heard, and she heard it now, through two walls, or thought she did.

“No,” she said.

He wrote No.

Thirty feet was generous of him and he did not know he was being generous. Héloïse had come out of her own door at the head of that flight and crossed the landing with a candle at something under twenty feet and the needle had gone up the scale after her like a dog off a step, and then had climbed from sixty-one to near eighty when she stopped to think about something, and had come down again as she went away along the corridor.

None of that was in the ledger. Nell had written the numbers that night and left the woman out, and she had told herself at the time that a reading is a reading and a landing is not a stair.

“Second question. Did the signature vary in rate at any point during your observation?”

“It held between sixty-one and sixty-two for the period I observed it.” That was true, in the sense that a wall is true.

He wrote it. He read both answers back to her in a level voice, the way she read a ledger to a client, and Nell heard her own first lie come back at her in somebody else’s mouth and found that it sounded exactly like everything else on the page.

“Now,” Hale said. “Your classification box says residual haunting. Your ledger says no dead signature at any point in the house. In nineteen years I have read perhaps four thousand of these and I will tell you plainly, Miss Hartigan: those two sentences have never yet been in the same report by an operator who was any good.”

“The assessment is continuing.”

“Yes,” he said. “It says so. Six days of it.”

· · ·Scene break

He walked the premises after noon and Héloïse walked with him, because she had said she would.

Nell had told her the night before what it would be: he will go where you go, he will ask questions with no edge on them, he will be perfectly courteous and he will write down what your hands do. And Héloïse had said, I have been performing for a very long time, Miss Hartigan, and Nell had said, don’t. He reads performance the way I read a cold room. Be short with him. Short is believable.

She was short with him. She was also, Nell thought, watching from four feet behind, the most frightening person in the corridor, because she had walked out of the morning room at one o’clock as a duchess in half-mourning with her hands loose at her sides and had not once put her thumb into her palm.

Hale stood on the fourth step for six minutes with his eyes shut. He laid his own salt at the head of the flight and left it. He took the temperature of the blue bedroom and the still-room and the hall, and he asked Mrs Pardoe what she called it, and Mrs Pardoe said “the house,” and he wrote that down without any expression at all.

He asked Sibyl for her inventory, and Sibyl gave it to him, with the dates and the weather and who had been under the roof.

Nell stood in the passage and watched a woman who had been making a case for a year hand it over in eleven minutes.

The candlestick. The gun-room. The ladder and the wrist. The linen room, four hours, the door sound in its frame — and Sibyl, being an honest witness, gave him the end of it as well, the way she had given it to Nell on the second morning: that the door had opened while her grace was still six feet from it and had not touched it.

Hale’s pencil stopped.

“Six feet,” he said.

“Or seven. I was on the floor and I did not measure it.”

“Thank you, Miss Vantreux. That is the most useful thing anybody has said to me today.”

Then he came to the last door on the east corridor, and put his hand on it, and turned the handle, and it did not move.

“This one.”

“My husband’s study,” Héloïse said. “It has been shut since the week of the funeral. No key in the house turns in it.”

“Has it been forced?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

There was a pause of about a second and a half, and in it Nell watched the whole of the last eighteen months arrive at the back of that woman’s face and be dealt with.

“Because I did not want it forced,” Héloïse said.

Hale wrote for longer than that sentence needed.

· · ·Scene break

He took the second minute in the dining room at three o’clock, with the rain going across the windows and the table laid for nobody.

“Miss Hartigan. On the record. Have you formed any opinion, however provisional, that the working at Wexhall proceeds from a living person under this roof?”

Nell had had five hours to get ready for it and it still went through her like a hand into cold water.

She thought about the mill town. She thought about two hundred pounds paid over a kitchen table to a woman whose hands were finished at forty-five, and about four years still owing, and about a street full of people who would come out onto their steps to watch her walk up it. She thought about a farmhouse kitchen, and salt in the turn-ups of her cuffs for a week afterwards, and a woman of forty sitting down on her own floor.

“No,” she said.

“You have no such opinion.”

“None, sir.”

He read it back. He turned the sheet round and gave her the pen, and she signed it under the words read over by the operator and confirmed, in her own hand, with her licence number beside it, the way she had signed two hundred others.

Then he asked Héloïse the same thing, more gently, because she was not bond-sworn and it was not a minute.

“Your grace. Has any person in this household any magical faculty, to your knowledge?”

And Nell, who was watching her hands and not her face, saw the right thumb go into the left palm and stop halfway.

“No,” said Héloïse.

· · ·Scene break

He did not stay to dinner. He stood in the hall at half past four with his gloves in his hand and his overcoat still damp and gave them both, courteously, the shape of the rest of their lives.

“I’ll be back on the fourteenth day. That is the day your engagement ends, Miss Hartigan, and the day my discretion in this matter ends with it. If the house is cleared by then, I sign it off and we are all of us very glad. If it is not cleared, and the classification is still continuing, the file goes up to a senior inspector, who will not have met your grace and will not walk your corridors and will read what I have written and what is in that ledger, and he will apply to the magistrate at Ambry. Verel has the list in November.”

“And after a ruling?” Héloïse said.

“After a ruling, your grace, your consent is no longer one of the things anybody is obliged to collect.” He said it without relish and without apology, which was worse. “I would rather it did not come to that, and I am not able to prevent it, and those are two separate facts and I’d not have you confuse them.”

“That is a good deal of machinery,” Héloïse said, “for one staircase.”

“It is. The schedule is not there to be cruel, ma’am. It is there so that a man like me is never required to be clever about somebody else’s house.” He put his gloves on. “Miss Hartigan. A word on the step.”

She went out with him into the wet.

“Your ledger,” Hale said, “is the best-kept record I have read this year. Your report is not a report. I have been at this nineteen years and I know what it looks like when an operator has found something she has not got a box for, and it looks precisely like a ledger that is better than the form on top of it.” He pulled his collar up. “Six days. Find me something I can defend, or find me the other thing and write it down, and if it is the other thing, Miss Hartigan, write it down early. The ones that go badly are the ones that are left until the last morning.”

He got into the gig. He did not look at the roof again.

· · ·Scene break

Héloïse was in the hall when Nell came back in, standing where she had been standing, in a house where every door in the east corridor was now off its latch again and one at the far end was not.

“You lied to a guild inspector on a minute you signed,” she said. “Twice.”

“I did.”

“You signed it with your licence number under your name.”

“That’s how it’s done,” Nell said. “I’d not have it thought I was sneaky about it.”

Héloïse did not laugh. She crossed the hall and stopped at a distance that was still, just about, the distance a client stands at, and her eyes were wet and absolutely steady, and Nell had been in that house eight days and had never seen her look at anybody for that long without arranging something first.

“Why?”

“Because I’ve watched that done once,” Nell said, “and I’ve spent nine years finding out what I’m like afterwards, and I find I’d rather be poor.”

“That is not a reason. That is a history.”

“It’s what I’ve got.”

“Then I shall give you something for it.” Héloïse took a breath, and let it go, and it shook. “Tomorrow. The long gallery, at noon, before the light goes off the wall. There is a thing in that room I have not looked at in ten months and I would rather not do it on my own.”