The Inside Stair

Anthony Lacey came along the blue carpet at ten to ten with his wig in one hand and a slim file in the other, and held the door of Court Three open for the usher, which Aled noted, because men who held doors for ushers were usually men who wanted it known they were the kind who did.

Then he saw that Lacey had not looked round to see who had noticed. He had held the door because the usher’s hands were full. He went in after her, and the closer let the door down behind him with its long sigh, and that was the last Aled saw of him until eleven.

He was taller than his photograph. Sixty, perhaps. A face like a kind headmaster’s. He had nodded to Aled on the way past, one professional to another, “Officer,” and Aled had said, “Sir,” and neither of them had broken step.

The best in the building, Kofi had said. Never raises his voice.

Aled stood with his back to the wall a yard from the door and faced the corridor, and behind him, through an inch of oak and a closer, a man who never raised his voice stood up and began to ask Esther Mayhew questions, and Aled heard nothing at all.

· · ·Scene break

He had stood outside doors for fourteen years. He knew how to do it. You did not lean. You did not look at your phone. You kept your weight even on both feet, and every twenty minutes you moved it without anybody seeing you move it, and you watched the corridor as though the corridor were the job, because it was.

He had never stood outside a door and wanted to know what was being said on the other side of it. That was new. He noticed it the way he would have noticed a limp in himself: something that was not there yesterday and would have to be allowed for.

At twenty past ten the chairs moved, all at once, and settled. At quarter to eleven somebody in the room laughed, one person, briefly, and it was not her; he did not know her laugh well enough to swear to it in a statement, and he knew it well enough to know that.

At five past eleven the door opened and she came out.

She came out first, ahead of the usher, the way witnesses did at a break, with the look of someone let out of a lift between floors. She saw him. She came the yard to him and stopped, and they went up the twenty-two yards together, nineteen seconds, and into the suite, and she went into the small room and he stood inside its door, and she sat down and put both hands flat on the table and looked at them.

He read her.

It was all he was allowed to do, and he did it the way he had been taught to read a crowd, from the edges in. Her shoulders were down. Her hair was still up and none of it had come loose. She had her figure face on, the level one, and when Mr Pym came in with tea she said, “Thank you, that’s kind,” in the long voice, the sure one, all its clauses in place.

She had been asked about things she knew. That was what it looked like. She had been asked about things she knew, politely, for an hour, and she had known them.

And she was waiting. That was the other thing. He had watched men wait for the phone to go with the same set to the jaw. She drank the tea and looked at the frosted window and her right hand turned the mug a quarter turn, and another, and did not stop at three o’clock.

“Quarter past,” she said, before he could.

“Quarter past.”

· · ·Scene break

It went on like that all day.

At one she came out and ate the whole of the sandwich Rashid had bought, which she had not done on Thursday, and he did not know whether that was a good sign or a bad one, and wrote neither down. At quarter past three she came out tired, with a mark on the side of her finger where she had pressed it against the edge of the ledge, and sat in the small room with her eyes shut for the whole of the ten minutes, and he stood by the door and watched the second hand on the wall clock go round and did not say it was time until it was.

At twenty past four the door opened and the usher came out first, and then her.

“Monday,” she said, in the corridor. Only that.

He knew what it meant. It meant the judge had told her again that she was in the middle of her evidence, and would be until Monday, and must not speak of it to anyone. It meant Lacey had not finished. And from her face, from the tiredness in it and the thing under the tiredness, which was not relief, he thought it meant that Lacey had spent a whole day walking round her, pleasantly, looking at her from every side, and had not yet gone in.

He did not know that. He could not have known it. He put it where he put the things he was not allowed to know, and walked her to the lift.

· · ·Scene break

Friday night he sat at the table in his own flat and wrote it down.

Not the day. The other thing. On the back of an envelope, with the chewed biro, because that was how he had always written them first.

Thu 11 Feb, 17:25. Annex. Rang DC Gill, gave her N 11–14. Reason given: “I’d rather days.” True reason: not given.

Tue 16 Feb, approx 01:00. Bakery flat kitchen, after the move. Principal asked why. Told her.

Tue 16 Feb, 05:50. Principal asked me not to report until her evidence finished. Gave reasons. Gave terms. I agreed.

He wrote the terms out, all of them, in the order she had given them. He found he did not have to try to remember them. He wrote Sat 20 Feb, 15:14, hand to head and put logged after it. He wrote Wed 24 Feb, Totterdown, one step over threshold at her request, not logged, and looked at not logged for a while and did not cross it out. He wrote Mon 1 Mar, 15:30, Insp. Adair asked about nights. Answered “I swapped them with Jas. She wanted the overtime.” True. Reason not given. Second time.

Then he wrote Nothing happened, and underlined it, and looked at that as well.

It was true. It was the truest line on the envelope. And he knew already how it would sound to anyone reading it at a desk, after the rest: like the one line a man would write whether it was true or not.

He left it underlined. It was what there was.

The flat was very quiet. One room and a bathroom and nothing on the walls. He looked at the door, the inside of it, the chain and the Yale and the hook with his coat on, and thought about the other side of it, where there was a bell and a space by the bell where a card could go, and nothing in the space.

He put the envelope in his inside pocket and went to bed, and did not sleep much, and was not surprised.

· · ·Scene break

Rashid did not bring a newspaper on Saturday.

He came up the outside stair at eight with the rolls, and no paper under his arm, and when Esther asked, from the table, he said the shop had sold out.

It was a town with four charity shops and one newsagent, and the newsagent had not sold out of anything in living memory. Aled looked at Rashid, and Rashid looked at the kettle.

“Sold out,” said Rashid again, and took his roll into the front room.

Esther did not say anything. But she looked at the closed door of the front room for a moment, and something in her face went soft and was put away.

She could not read about herself. Nobody had told her not to; nobody had needed to. She could not read the report in the carton, or open the blue file, or go over Schedule Nine or Fourteen or any of them, not because a rule said so but because a judge had looked at her over his glasses and told her she was in the middle of something, and she was the kind of woman who, when she was in the middle of a thing, did not take it out and look at it.

So she had nothing to do. He watched her discover that at about ten o’clock on Saturday morning, and he did not think it had happened to her before.

She swam in the bath. She walked the yard, to the wall and back, fourteen times; he counted from the window and then made himself stop. She did Pat’s crossword, which had come through the officers’ phone at nine, Freed, clever people get the better of (7), and got it before he had finished saying it, and told him to tell her mother that was a hint and not a clue, and did not tell him the answer.

He worked it out at the window in the front room with Rashid watching him. Outwits. It took him most of a minute. He did not think it was a hint. He thought Pat Mayhew had sat in her chair by the phone and looked for a word that would get her daughter through a weekend, and found one.

Nobody rang about the case. Kofi did not ring, because he could not. Nicholls could not. The Crown’s office, the Witness Service, the unit: all of them had been told, and all of them had gone quiet, and it came to him on Saturday afternoon that there was nobody in England she could talk to about the only thing in her head, and that it would be like this until Monday at ten, and that he was standing in the kitchen with her while it was.

He could not help. It was the one thing he had never been trained to do nothing about.

· · ·Scene break

On Sunday evening she found the stairs.

They had been there since the first night. The flat had two ways in: the outside stair from the yard, which everybody used, and an inside one, which nobody did. It went down from the far end of the passage, between her door and the bathroom, fourteen steep bare treads to a door at the bottom that let into the back of the old bakehouse. The door was bolted on this side, top and bottom, and padlocked, and the key to the padlock was on his ring. He went down twice a day and tried it. Twice, and then once more.

At half past five he went down and tried it, and came back up the bottom three treads, and she was sitting at the top.

She had her knees up and her arms round them and her back against the wall. She was in socks. She had not been there when he went down.

“Don’t come up,” she said.

He stopped.

“I’m not asking you to go away. I’m asking you not to come up.” She looked down the fourteen steps at him. “You can’t sit in the kitchen. I know you can’t. I’ve stopped wanting you to. But I can’t sit in there on my own again tonight either, looking at the chair. So I thought, there’s a staircase. Nobody eats on a staircase. Nobody could write down that anybody had a meal on a staircase.”

He looked at the bolt beside him, and the padlock, and up at her.

Rashid was in the front room with the door half to. Twenty feet away, less. He could hear the monitor’s fan. It was not night; Jas was on at quarter to eight. He went through it the way he went through everything, and at the end of it there was nothing he could put in a log that would make it anything but a man standing at the bottom of some stairs.

“All right,” he said.

He did not sit. There was a step he could have sat on, the bottom one, and he did not. He stood with his shoulder against the wall and his hands in his pockets, and looked up, and she looked down, and there were fourteen treads between them, and a bare bulb over her head, and the smell of old flour coming up through the boards from the bakehouse behind him.

“Tell me about Port Talbot,” she said. “Not the works. I’ve had the works. The beach.”

· · ·Scene break

They talked for two hours.

He had not talked for two hours in his life. He had been in rooms for two hours, and cars for five, and once in the corridor of an embassy for eleven. He had not talked.

He told her about the beach. How it went on for miles, flat and grey, with the steelworks at one end breathing out over it, and how on a clear day you could see across to Devon, and on most days you could not. How his mam took him and his sister in the summer holidays with sandwiches in greaseproof paper that had sand in them by the time you ate them, every time, whatever she did. How the first time he swam in the sea he was six, and it was August, and it was so cold he thought he had been hit.

“Seven and a half degrees,” she said.

“Colder.”

“There’s no colder in August.”

“There is in Aberavon.”

She laughed. It went down the stairs and he heard it all the way.

She told him about Weston. How the tide went out so far that as a child she had thought the sea was something that had to be fetched. How she had counted everything, always, from when she was small: the steps up to the school, the tiles round the swimming baths, the stairs in other people’s houses.

“Other people’s?”

“We lived in a bungalow,” she said. “I had to borrow them.”

He told her about his sister, who was in Swansea with three children and a husband who did something with computers that nobody in the family had ever understood, and who rang him on his birthday and at Christmas and asked him every time whether he had met anybody, and had stopped expecting an answer.

She told him about her first job, at sixteen, on the counter of a chip shop on the front, and how she had been trusted with the float after a week because she was the only one who could tell by the weight of the bag whether it was right.

“By the weight.”

“Pound coins weigh nine and a half grams. Twenty to a bag. You get to know.”

“You’d have made a good copper.”

“I’d have made a terrible copper. I’d have wanted to know why about everything.” She rested her chin on her knees. “You’d have made a terrible accountant.”

“I would.”

“You’d have been the one they forgot was in the meeting.”

“I was the one they forgot was in the meeting,” he said, “and I wasn’t even an accountant.”

He told her why he listened to the shipping forecast, which nobody had ever asked: because it was the only thing on the radio that told you what was going to happen and then it did. She told him she had been late for one thing in her life, her own graduation, by forty minutes, because the car had broken down on the Cumberland Basin, and that she still dreamed about it. He told her the worst meal he had ever eaten standing up, which was a curry at a party conference in Blackpool at two in the morning out of a paper cup. She told him the best thing she had ever eaten sitting down, which was the corner of her mother’s cottage pie at a school dinner, aged seven, before she knew it was her mother who had made it.

They did not talk about the case. They did not talk about Monday, or the witness box, or a figure in a schedule, or the seven o’clock call. They did not talk about the kitchen at ten to six on the sixteenth, or the hall in Totterdown, or what either of them would do on the first morning that none of this was true any more.

They talked about everything else. He understood, somewhere in the second hour, standing with his shoulder going numb against the wall, that everything else was the whole of it. That there was nothing he had told her that was not about him, and nothing she had said that he would not remember. That he knew now where she had learned to swim and what the float weighed, and she knew his sister’s name and the cold at Aberavon, and none of it was the thing they were not allowed to say, and all of it was.

At twenty to eight Jas’s car came into the yard. He heard it over the monitor’s fan. So did she.

She did not get up at once.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow.”

“If I get something wrong—“ She stopped. He watched her hear herself. “No. That’s evidence. Forget I started it.”

“I didn’t hear it.”

“You’re very good at that.” She stood, one hand on the wall, and looked down at him from the top of the fourteen stairs. “Thank you. For staying at the bottom.”

“It’s where I was.”

“It’s where you stayed,” said Esther, and went along the passage to the kitchen, where Jas was coming up the outside stair with her flask.

He stayed a moment longer. He had not sat down for two hours. His legs told him so, now that there was nobody to talk to. He looked at the bottom step, the one he could have sat on, and thought that if she had asked him to, he did not know whether he would have known how.

Then he went up the fourteen treads, and past her door, and into the kitchen to hand over, and said quiet to Jas, and meant something else by it entirely.