The Lane

Esther Mayhew walked the reservoir dam at ten past twelve on Thursday with her hands in her pockets and her face turned into the wind, and Aled walked eight yards behind her and to the left, where he could see her and the car park and the road above it, and thought that he had not seen anyone so glad to be cold.

There was nobody else on the water but two anglers in green who had not looked up and a woman with a spaniel who had. The sky was very big. The hills on the far side were the colour of wet cardboard, and the wind came across the water in long grey lines and hit the dam and went up her coat.

“Horizon,” she said, when he came level with her at the end. “Thank you.”

“It’s the one I could get.”

“It’s a good one.” She turned round and looked back along the dam at the two cars, his and the unit’s, parked nose-out by the toilet block with Rashid leaning on the first and a PC from the local station in the second, eating crisps. “Do they always park like that? Facing out?”

“Always.”

“So you can leave without reversing.”

“So nobody has to think about it.”

She nodded, as though she were putting it somewhere. He had begun to notice that about her: that a fact given to her did not just go in; it went in and was filed, and he could see the drawer open and shut behind her eyes.

· · ·Scene break

They ate in the car because the wind was too much for sandwiches. Rashid in the driver’s seat with the heater on, Aled in the front passenger seat, Esther behind, and the reservoir going on being grey through the windscreen.

He had left the receipt on the dashboard. He would think about that afterwards: that he had filled the car at twelve minutes past six that morning and pushed the receipt up against the glass the way he always did, and forgotten it, and that it was the first time in fourteen years a principal had been in a car of his with nothing to do and a mind like hers.

“Is that yours?” she said.

“It’s the car’s.”

“Can I?”

He passed it back. He did not think about it. It was a petrol receipt.

She read it for longer than a petrol receipt took. He could see her in the mirror on his sun visor, which he had turned down for the purpose some time ago and not turned up. She held it flat on her knee with two fingers, and her lips moved very slightly, and then she looked out of the window at the water for a while, and then back at the receipt.

“Six twelve this morning,” she said. “Diesel, fifty-one litres. And two coffees.”

Rashid glanced at Aled and went back to his sandwich.

“One black,” she said. “One white with two sugars. You don’t take sugar. I have that in evidence.” She did not smile. “You had one cup when you came across the yard at twenty-five to seven. I saw it from the kitchen. At ten to seven you poured the other one down the drain by the garage. It was still full.”

He said nothing. It was a habit, saying nothing; it had been a habit for so long that it came before anything else did, like his eyes going to a door.

“There’s a loyalty card on it,” she went on. “Twenty points this visit. Four thousand two hundred and thirty on the balance. That’s two hundred and eleven visits, near enough, if you always buy the same thing, and I think you always buy the same thing.” She turned the receipt over, and back. “And it says, Your visits this year: six. It’s the eleventh of February. There have been six Thursdays.”

The heater ran. One of the anglers stood up and sat down again.

“So,” she said, more quietly. “Every Thursday. The same services, because it’s six out of six and you wouldn’t vary it. The same time, I’d guess, because you’d not vary that either. Two coffees, one of them for somebody who takes two sugars and isn’t there, and you pour it away and buy it again the next week. About four years, if it’s weekly, and it’s weekly.” She held the receipt out between two fingers. “Tell me if I’m wrong.”

He took it back from her.

He wanted to tell her she was wrong. It would have been easy. It would have been true in one small way and he could have stood on that: not four years. And he found, sitting in the front of a car in a reservoir car park with the heater on, that he did not want to stand on anything.

“Longer,” he said. “The card’s newer than the habit.”

She waited. She did not ask who. He watched her decide not to, in the mirror, and was more grateful for that than he could have said.

Rashid screwed the lid onto his flask. “Well,” he said, to nobody. “I’ll never leave anything in a car again.”

· · ·Scene break

Nobody had read him in fourteen years.

That was not self-pity. It was the job. You stood at the back of a room and the room forgot you, and that was the room working properly. Ministers had told him things in the back of cars that they had not told their wives, because he was not there. A visiting prime minister had once, in a hotel corridor in Park Lane, asked him to hold her shoes. Siobhan had lived with him for nine years and never, as far as he knew, asked him why he stopped at the same services on a Thursday, because she had not known that he did.

And Esther Mayhew had been in the back of his car for forty minutes, with a sandwich, and had taken four years off a petrol receipt and handed them back to him.

He did the afternoon. He did the round at two and the round at four. He stood in the kitchen while she read the paper Rashid had brought, and did not look at the window over the sink, where her reflection was if he chose to find it.

At twenty past five he went up to the annex, and closed the door, and stood in the officers’ room with the sofa bed made up for the night and the log on the table and the monitor showing the yard in grey, and looked at it.

Tonight at eight Jas would go home and he would come on, and until eight in the morning he would be the only officer on this property. He had done a thousand nights like it. You sat in a room like this one with a kettle and the monitor and you did the rounds and you did not sleep, and in the morning you handed over and said quiet and meant it.

He looked at the monitor, at the kitchen window, at the light in it.

She came down for water at night. Jas had logged it on Monday, ten past three, twenty minutes. She had come down on Wednesday too, at ten to four. He knew that because he had read the log, and he had read it twice, and he understood now, standing in a cold room over a garage, what it was he had been doing when he read it twice.

He wanted to be the one who was awake when she came down.

Not to go in. He would never have gone in. He wanted only to be the one sitting here, across the yard, when the kitchen light came on at ten past three; to see it on the monitor and know that she was standing at the sink in the dark with a glass of water, not sleeping, and that he was not sleeping either, and that there were forty yards of gravel between them and he was the one keeping them.

That was the whole of it. It was not much. It was enough.

Because the rota put him here, alone, at night, for four nights, with a woman whose evidence he could not hear and whose face he had started watching in a sun-visor mirror. And a protection officer who wanted to be on the night shift because of who was asleep in the house was not a protection officer any more. He was a man with a reason of his own. The rota would not know that. Adair would not know. Nobody would know unless he told them, and that was why it was his to deal with.

He rang Jas at twenty-five past five.

“You’re on nights from tonight,” she said, before he could speak. “I left you the handover on the table. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Would you take them?”

A pause. In the background, a child’s voice, very close to the phone, saying something about a digger.

“Take which?”

“All of them. Tonight through Sunday. Overtime, your way.” He looked at the monitor. “I’d rather days.”

“You’d rather days,” Jas said slowly.

“If you’ll have them. Say no if you want. I’ll not mind.”

“I’ve got a three-year-old,” Jas said, “and the sergeant’s exam in April, and the overtime would pay for the course and the childminder, and you know all of that, Aled, because I’ve told you.” Another pause. “Is this you doing me a favour?”

“No.”

“Because I don’t mind nights. I mind being told they’re a favour.”

“It’s not a favour,” he said. “I’d rather days. That’s all it is.”

She was quiet long enough that he heard the digger again, and a man’s voice taking it away.

“Fine,” said Jas. “I’ll be there at quarter to eight. Put it through the office, not me.”

“I’ll do it now.”

He did it now. A swap, put through to the duty sergeant as a swap: officers swapped all the time, for children and exams and weddings and bad backs, and nobody would look at it twice. That was the point of doing it this way. It was not a lie. It was the truth with the reason left off, and he had never in twenty-one years left the reason off anything, and he knew it, and did it, and wrote nothing in the log.

He did not tell Rashid. He did not tell Esther. At quarter to eight Jas came up the track with a flask and her exam notes on the passenger seat, and did not look at him when he handed over, which was her way of being kind.

· · ·Scene break

The car came on Thursday night at twenty past midnight.

Jas told him at eight in the morning with the log open. A car in the lane, by the field gate at the bottom of the track, lights off, engine running, four minutes. Then gone, towards the main road. She had got most of a plate off the monitor.

The plate came back at half past nine to a small hatchback sold four times in two years, last keeper an address in Newport that had been a car wash and was now a vape shop. Nothing useful. Nothing anyone could knock on.

On Friday night it came at ten past one and stayed six minutes.

He was at home when it did. He did not know it until the morning, but he was awake at ten past one, at the table in the flat with no pictures on the walls, with the phone face up in front of him and the curtains open on the car park. He had been awake at ten past three on Thursday as well. He had not planned that. He had woken, and looked at the time, and found he had been listening for something forty miles away that he could not have heard.

On Saturday night it came at quarter to one and turned round in the gateway, which it had not done before, so that for about a minute its headlights went across the bottom of the garden and the hedge.

Jas rang the second on call, a sergeant from the unit who lived at Wells, and he came out in twenty minutes and found nothing in the lane but tyre marks in the verge. Jas rang Aled afterwards, at ten past one, because she thought he’d want to know.

“Do you want me to come out?” he said.

He had his keys in his hand. He did not remember picking them up.

“Why?” said Jas. “Sarge is here. She’s asleep. She didn’t even come down.” A pause. “You’re not on, Aled. You gave me them, remember.”

“I remember.”

“Go to bed,” Jas said, not unkindly, and rang off.

He put the keys on the table. He sat looking at them for a long time. It was forty minutes in the car at that hour. He could have been in the lane by two. He could have told himself, driving, that he was worried for her, and it would have been true, and it would not have been the reason.

He did not go.

· · ·Scene break

Adair rang him on Sunday at eleven.

“Three nights,” she said. “Same car, near enough, and turning round in the gate. I’m not waiting for four. Move her.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tomorrow night. She’s got the court visit in the afternoon, so do it after, from the court if you can. Two cars and a change on the way. The Gloucestershire flat’s ready.” A pause. “How is she?”

“Well, ma’am. Better than well.”

“And you?”

“Fine, ma’am.”

“Good,” said Adair, and he heard her write something down. “Nobody’s complained,” she said, and rang off.

· · ·Scene break

He told Esther at four o’clock, in the kitchen, because every decision came with its reason and this was the largest he had made.

“Tomorrow night. After the court. You’ll have an hour to pack when we’re back and we’ll go at midnight.”

“Why?”

He told her. The car. The gate. The plate that led to a vape shop in Newport.

She listened with her hands flat on the table, one on each side of her mug, and when he had finished she did not say anything about the car at all.

“Three nights,” she said. “Thursday, Friday, Saturday.”

“Yes.”

“Who was on?”

It was a small question. It was asked the way she had asked about the receipt, a figure checked against a figure.

“Jas,” he said.

“All three?”

“All three.”

She looked at him. He had watched her look at a petrol receipt in the same way for longer than a petrol receipt took, and he stood at the counter and let her do it, because there was nowhere else to stand.

“All right,” she said. “Midnight.”

She got up and pushed her chair in, and then the other three, and went upstairs to look at what she had to pack. He heard her on the landing, stopping, and then going on. And he knew, the way he knew which way a man would turn at the end of a corridor, that she had not let it go. She had filed it. Somewhere behind her eyes a drawer had opened, and a number had gone in, and the drawer had not quite closed.