Esther Mayhew stood on her own pavement at twenty to ten at night, with a holdall she had packed in twenty minutes, and watched the man she had taken for the driver hold open the back door of a grey car as if she had already said yes.
She had not said yes. That was what the pavement was for.
The street went down the hill in front of her the way it always did, steep enough that the terraces stepped like a staircase someone had lost interest in, every front door painted by an optimist. Hers was blue. She had locked it. She had checked the lock twice and was thinking about a third time, which she recognised as a way of not deciding anything.
“Ms Mayhew,” the man said. “We’ll give it till nine minutes to.”
“Why nine minutes to?”
“Because by then we’ll have been sat in your street for eleven minutes.” He was not looking at her. He was looking up the hill, then down it, then at the windows opposite, in an order he seemed to have agreed with himself a long time ago. “That’s as long as I’d like anyone to be able to watch us doing it. After that we go, and we come back another night another way, and it won’t be as good as tonight.”
Eleven minutes. Six hundred and sixty seconds. About the time it took her to swim four hundred metres in February on a good morning, which this morning had been, until it wasn’t. She caught herself doing it and stopped, and then finished the sum anyway, because a sum left open bothered her more than the thing it was about.
And then she heard it again in her head: the voice.
Twenty to, ma’am.
She had heard it that afternoon. Inspector Adair had said the car would come at quarter to ten, and from somewhere behind Esther’s left shoulder a man had said, not loudly, “Twenty to, ma’am,” and Adair had said, “Twenty to,” and written it down. Esther had not turned round. She had been looking at the photograph.
The meeting had run from ten past two until ten to three. She knew because she had looked at the clock over Adair’s door when she sat down and again when she stood up; she always did. Forty minutes. A man had been in that room for forty minutes, a yard behind her, and she had not seen him. She, who had once found a round number in a ledger of forty thousand lines because it looked too comfortable where it was.
She looked at him now, properly, to make up for it.
Forties. Dark overcoat, no scarf, no hat, nothing a witness could have given a police artist that the artist would thank her for. Not tall. He stood so that his body was between her and the top of the street, and he held the car door with his left hand and kept his right hand empty, and it occurred to her that both of those were decisions.
“You were in the office,” she said.
“I was.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“No,” he said, with no satisfaction in it at all, the way you’d confirm a train time.
Scene break
The photograph had been under her windscreen wiper at two minutes to eight that morning.
She swam at seven every weekday, all year, in the outdoor pool at the bottom of the park. The board had said seven and a half degrees. She had done her twenty lengths, got changed with her hands not working, crossed the road to the café and bought a flat white at 07:48; the receipt was in her coat pocket now, folded in half, because she kept every receipt, and a woman who kept every receipt did not stop because somebody had frightened her. Then she had walked to the car park and seen the plastic sleeve under the wiper, beaded with rain, and thought it was a leaflet.
It was her. In lane three, in the orange hat, arm coming over, taken through the car park fence with a long lens. In the top corner, the pool clock: 07:21. She had been on her ninth length. Someone had stood in the rain long enough to get the clock in, and had wanted her to know that they had.
Nothing written on the back. It did not need anything written on the back.
She had rung Kofi Asante from the driver’s seat with the doors locked. In twenty-two months of working beside him she had rung him at eleven at night about a dormant company in Swindon and at six in the morning about a bank’s rounding convention, and he had always answered in the voice of a man who wanted his weekends back. This time he answered on the first ring and said, “Don’t drive anywhere. Stay on the phone.”
By two o’clock she was in an office in a building she was not allowed to name, across a desk from Inspector Lorna Adair, a woman of about fifty-five with reading glasses on a cord, being told about risk.
Adair had been good. Esther had noted it the way she would note a clean set of accounts: nothing dressed up. The trial opened on the first of March. Esther’s evidence would follow in the first week. Until she had given it, the assessment was that people connected to the defendants would prefer she did not, and had now shown they could find her in a swimming pool at twenty past seven in the morning. The offer was protection: somewhere else to live, officers with her, until she had finished in the witness box; then a new assessment.
“It’s voluntary,” Adair had said. “Nobody’s going to make you.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then you’ll have an alarm and a number and I’ll have a bad month.” Adair took her glasses off. “You’ll hardly know the officers are there. Nobody ever complains about a protection officer, Ms Mayhew. That’s how I know when one’s good.”
On the desk between them, upside down, had been a typed sheet with a grid on it. Esther had read it the way she read anything with numbers in it, without asking herself to. Names down the left, dates across the top, a letter in each box. GILL: N on the eighth, ninth and tenth. PRYOR: D, D, D, and then N on the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth. She had not meant to keep it. She kept numbers. It was less a talent than a condition, like a knee that told you when it was going to rain.
Adair had said a name at the start of the meeting, too, and nodded at someone. Esther had been looking at the photograph in its evidence bag, at lane three, at her own arm.
Scene break
“Where?” she said, on the pavement.
“I can’t tell you that out here.”
“Then how am I meant to decide whether to go?”
“On what you know.” He said it without any edge. He had a Welsh voice, she noticed, slow and level, the vowels given their full time. “You know what was on your car this morning. You know what the inspector said. You know you can leave whenever you like, and you know what leaving would mean. I’m sorry that’s what you’ve got. It’s what there is.”
She looked at the car. There was a woman at the wheel, a dark shape with a ponytail, both hands on the wheel at ten to two, not looking round. At the top of the hill a second car sat with its lights off and someone in it.
What she was being asked to give up was not complicated, and she could list it. The pool at seven. The office in Bath where she did insolvency work for a practice of six people who had taken her on when her last firm had let her go by mutual agreement. Her mother’s Sunday phone call, made from the same chair, at the same time, for eleven years. Her own front door, and the box on the hall shelf behind it where the receipts went. Twenty-four days, if the trial opened on time, and she was called when they said; however long after that she was kept in the witness box; and then whatever the next assessment said.
And what she was being asked to give it up to was a man she had failed to see.
“One condition,” she said.
“Go on.”
“Tell me one true thing about where we’re going. Not a thing to get me in the car. A true one.”
He took his time. She would learn that about him: that he gave a question the time it needed, and not the time that would look good. His eyes went up the street once more and came back.
“Somewhere with no neighbours,” he said. “And I can’t tell you the name.”
“That’s two things.”
“The second one’s true as well.”
It was twelve minutes to ten. She had three minutes left, and she was annoyed to find she had counted them, and more annoyed to find that what had decided her was not the photograph or the inspector but the second half of his answer: that he had given her the part she would not like without being asked for it.
“All right if I take that?” he said, and nodded at the holdall.
She gave it to him. He put it on the back seat first, then stood aside for her, and closed the door on her without slamming it, and was in the front passenger seat before she had found the seat belt.
“Nine minutes to,” the woman at the wheel said, pulling out. “You cut that fine.”
“Ms Mayhew cut it fine,” he said. “I just stood there.”
Scene break
The woman was DC Jas Gill, and she drove the way Esther wished she did: early, smoothly, without any sign of enjoying it. They went up past the second car, which pulled out behind them without its lights on for the first hundred yards, and down onto the main road, and the city went past in orange and then was gone.
At the first set of lights the man in the front turned round and passed her a clipboard and a small torch.
“It says you understand the arrangements and that they’re voluntary,” he said. “Read it first. Read it twice if you want.”
She read it three times. It was two pages and it had been written by someone who was frightened of lawyers, which she respected. Her date of birth was in the box at the top, the eleventh of June, and the year that made her thirty-two. They had spelled Mayhew right, which most people didn’t, and they had her middle name, which almost nobody knew. It felt like being read. She signed it and passed it forward.
“How old are you?” she said.
There was a pause, not a long one. In the mirror she saw Jas Gill’s eyes come up and go back to the road.
“Forty-three,” he said. He said it the way you’d answer a question in a language you had not spoken for a while, getting it right and checking as you went.
“I’m thirty-two. It’s on the form.” She put the torch in the door pocket. “It seemed only fair to say.”
“Thank you,” he said, seriously.
They were on the motorway for a while, and then off it, and then on roads without lines on them, and she found she was counting the turns. Left. Right. Right again, a long bend, a left so sharp the headlights swung across a gate and a field of something black and wet.
“You’re counting the turns,” he said, without turning round.
“Yes.”
“Most people do. It won’t help. We’ll go round twice.”
“Then why tell me?”
“So you can stop,” he said. “You’ve had a long day.”
She did not stop. But she lost her place, which was nearly the same thing, and she sat back and looked at the side of his face in the dashboard light and thought: he knew I was counting. Nobody knew that. For two years she had been surrounded by people who needed what was in her head, and none of them had ever noticed how it got there.
“There’s one thing that’s mine,” he said, a mile later. “Not a rule for you. For me.”
“Go on.”
“I can’t hear your evidence.” He had turned his head, not his body; she could see one side of his face. “What you found. What you’ll say. If you start telling me, I’ll stop you. If you keep on, I’ll leave the room. It’s not manners, and it’s not that I’m not interested. If I hear it, somebody can stand up in that court and say I shaped it. Then everything you did is about me, and it shouldn’t be.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“No. But you’ll want to, some night. Everybody does.”
For twenty-two months everyone she met had wanted one thing from her, and it was that. The analysts wanted her schedules. Kofi wanted her tracing. The lawyers wanted her report, all three hundred and eighty pages of it, and then they wanted her to explain it to them in shorter words. Her old firm had wanted less of it, and then none of it, and then none of her. And here was a man in the front seat of a car who had made himself the one person in the whole business who was not allowed to have it.
She had expected that to be a relief. It was, partly. The rest of it she put away to look at later, because it was nearly eleven and she was tired.
Scene break
The cottage was stone, low, at the end of a track that went on longer than a track should. There was a yard, and a garage with a room built over it, and a light on in the room. The rain had stopped. The dark was the kind you do not get in cities: it had depth to it.
He went in first. She stood in the porch with Jas and listened to him go through the house, every room, upstairs and down, doors opening and shutting at a steady pace, and then he came back and held the kitchen door for her.
The kitchen had a flagged floor and an old range that somebody had painted cream, a table, four chairs, a kettle, a note from a letting agent about the boiler. It smelled of a house that had been cleaned by someone paid to do it that afternoon.
“Your room’s at the back,” he said. “Over the garden. The front looks at the lane, and I’d rather you didn’t stand at the front windows, if that’s all right. Not because anything’s out there. Because if anything ever is, I’d like it not to be able to see you.”
“Fine.”
“There’s an alarm on the back door and the front. The button’s here, and there’s one by your bed. You press it, we’re across the yard in under a minute. The room over the garage is ours. Jas tonight.” He glanced at the window, where the light over the garage showed through the bare branches of a tree. “Me from seven.”
“You don’t sleep here?”
“Days, I go home. Somebody’s always here.”
He had not sat down. She noticed it because she had been waiting for it; people who came into a kitchen sat, it was what kitchens were for. He stood by the counter with his coat still on, and when he had said everything he stood a moment longer, as though checking a list only he could see, and then went to the back door and tried the handle. He tried it twice.
“Anything else you need tonight?”
“No.” She thought. “Yes. What’s your name again?”
He had said it on the pavement. She had not kept it.
“Aled Pryor.”
“I’ll remember it.”
“People don’t,” he said, and it was not self-pity; it was a fact about his job, offered the way he had offered the eleven minutes. He nodded to her, and went out, and she heard him try the handle from the outside.
She stood in the kitchen with the kettle not yet on and the clock over the range saying seven minutes past eleven.
Of course she would remember it. She already had. It had been on Adair’s desk at ten past two, upside down, in a column she had read before she knew it was a man: PRYOR, and a row of letters. D, D, D. Then N on the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth and the fourteenth.
Thursday, she thought. From Thursday it would be him across the yard at night.
She went up to the back room, and did not go to the front window, because he had asked her not to and told her why; and she lay in a stranger’s bed in a house with no neighbours and listened for his car going down the track, and when it went she found she had been counting, and had no idea what she had been counting to.