Seven O'Clock

Aled sat at the kitchen table over the shut bakery at ten to six in the morning with his phone face down in front of him and Inspector Adair’s number open on the other side of it, and waited for the kettle.

He had not slept. He had lain on the sofa in the front room until three with Jas’s radio murmuring on the desk, and then come in here, where the second chair was, and sat in it, because she was not in the room.

The number had been open since half past four. One touch and it would ring. He had turned the phone over so that he would not have to look at it, and it made no difference; he could see it through the case.

He knew what he would say. He had said it over until it was smooth. Ma’am, I need to report a matter bearing on my judgement. He would give her the date and the reason and the nights, and she would take him off the detail by nine, and there would be a man he had never met standing in this kitchen by lunchtime.

The kettle began to tick as it heated.

He heard her door.

The back bedroom latch, which stuck and had to be lifted. Then her feet on the passage boards: not bare feet, not slippers, but shoes, laced, walking.

He stood up before she reached the door. He did it without deciding to.

She came in dressed: jeans, a dark jumper, her hair combed back wet from the tap, her watch on. Not a dressing gown. She looked as though she were going to work.

He read it. It was what he did; he read what people did before they said anything. A woman who comes down at ten to six in a dressing gown has come to talk. A woman who comes down dressed has decided something, and has dressed for it.

She looked at the phone on the table, face down. Then at him.

The kettle came to the boil behind him and clicked off, and neither of them moved to it.

“You said you’d rather I heard it from you first,” she said. “I’d rather you heard this from me before you do it. That’s all I’m asking. You can still ring her after. It’s your phone.” She pulled out the chair he had been sitting in, and did not sit in it. “Will you hear me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Don’t ring her,” Esther said. “Not yet. Let me tell you why.”

· · ·Scene break

She did it the way she had done it at one o’clock, and the way, he supposed, she had done it for a lender two years ago over sixty-one flats: in order, with the numbers first.

“One,” she said. “If you ring her at seven, there’s a line in the file by nine. It says the officer protecting the prosecution’s main witness has told his inspector that his judgement about her isn’t clean. That’s today, the sixteenth. I give evidence on the fourth of March. That’s sixteen days. And a thing like that bears on me. It isn’t about the flats or the money, it’s about whether I’m to be believed, and anything about whether I’m to be believed may have to go across to the defence. Kofi’s told me that for twenty-two months, about everything. My old firm. The settlement letter. The money I didn’t take. It all goes in the pile, in case.”

He said nothing. She had not asked him to.

“Two. Mr Lacey.” She said the name as if it were a figure she had checked. “Anthony Lacey, King’s Counsel, for Roland Tyrer. Kofi says he’s the best in the building and never raises his voice. He’ll have that line by the end of the month. And he’ll stand up and say, very politely, that for the three weeks before this witness gave her evidence she lived in a series of houses with a police officer who, on his own account, had feelings for her. That she reread her statement at his kitchen table. That nobody can know what was said in those kitchens. He won’t say anything was. He’ll say nobody can know.” Her hands were flat on the back of the chair. “It won’t matter that it isn’t true. The jury will hear it. Once a jury’s heard a thing, you can’t make them unhear it. I know that. I’ve watched Kofi try.”

“Esther.”

“I’m not finished. Three.” She took a breath and let it go. “The men I found would get to say the police wrote my evidence. After twenty-two months. After I walked those flats myself. The one thing I want, the only thing, is to stand in that box and say what I found and be believed, and you’d have handed them the best argument they’ve got, and it would be the only true thing in it.”

The strip light hummed. Down in the yard a gull said something ugly to another gull.

“Four. You could ask to be moved without saying why. Personal reasons. It happens, you’d be moved, nobody would ask.” She looked at him. “But you’d be lying on the record, and you won’t. I’ve watched you for a week not tell lies. You told me the name of a place you couldn’t tell me the name of rather than make one up.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t do that.”

“I know. So that’s four.” Her voice went shorter. He had noticed it did that, when she was less sure; the long qualified sentences were for when she was certain, and the short ones for when she was not. “Five. Your career ends. If you ring her at seven, it ends this morning. If you ring her in three weeks, it ends in three weeks. I don’t know how these things work, not really, but I know that much. You told me there’s a rule, and the rule says you report it, and you’ll have broken the rule either way, by now, by having it to report.” She stopped. “It ends either way. I’m not letting it end for nothing. If it has to end, it ends after I’ve said what I came to say, when the only thing it can cost is you.”

It was very quiet.

He looked at her across the kitchen, with his back to the kettle and the phone on the table between them, and he saw what she had done. She had given him the sixteen days and the twenty-two months, the line in the file and the man in the silk gown, the lie he would not tell and the job he would lose. She had given him five reasons, numbered, and every one of them was about the case, or about him.

She had not given him one word about herself.

He understood that that was deliberate. He understood it the way you understand, from a clean space on a dusty shelf, what used to stand there. She had left it out because it was not allowed to be in, and she had left it out so cleanly that the shape of it was the plainest thing in the room.

· · ·Scene break

“You’re asking me to keep something from my unit,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re asking the man who decides where you sleep to keep a secret that’s about you.” He said it slowly, so that she would hear it the way he heard it. “You wrote that list. You know what it makes me. Think what that is, Esther, before you ask it.”

“I have thought.” She did not look away. “I thought about it from one o’clock until half past five, and then I got dressed. It’s the reason I’m not asking you for a favour. I’m giving you terms.”

“Go on.”

She had them in order. Of course she did.

“Nothing is said about this again until I’ve given evidence. Not by you, not by me. Not a word, not a joke, not a look that means it, if we can manage that, which I doubt.” A flicker of something at the corner of her mouth, gone at once. “Nothing happens. You stay off nights, all of them, every night until I’ve finished. You never drive me anywhere alone; there’s always somebody else in the car. Jas is told nothing she hasn’t already been told, which is that you’d rather days. I keep Inspector Adair’s number, and I can ring it whenever I like, and I don’t have to say why, and that stands, it stands more now than it did on Wednesday, not less.” She took her hands off the chair. “And on the morning I’ve finished, you ring her. At seven. And you tell her all of it. The nights, the reason, this conversation, that it was me who asked you to wait and why. And I stand beside what you say.”

He had been in the rooms where terms were given. He had stood at the back of them for fourteen years while people with more power than either of them told each other what they would and would not do. He had never heard anyone give terms that cost them more than the other side.

“If you’d rather I went,” he said. “Today, now, no reason, I go. I’ll ring her and say I’m unwell and I’ll be gone by nine, and there’ll be no line in any file, because I’ll have told her nothing.” He heard what he was saying and said the rest of it anyway. “That’s yours as well. That’s always been yours.”

“I know.” She held his eyes. “I’d rather you stayed. I’m saying it in words, so that you’ve got it in words. I’d rather you stayed, on these terms, until I’ve finished. If I wanted you gone I’ve had the number since Wednesday and I know it by heart.”

He looked at the phone.

Twenty-one years. He had never kept anything from the job. Not a scratch on a car, not a minute late on a handover, not a principal’s drinking or a principal’s tears or the name of the woman a minister rang from the back of a car. He had given it everything, and the job had kept him, and he had been, he knew, very good at it, because there had never been anything in him that the job did not have first.

Now there would be. From this morning, by his own choice, for sixteen days, there would be a thing he knew that his inspector did not; and when he told it, on the morning Esther Mayhew came out of that court, it would end him. Not the feeling. The waiting. He would be the officer who knew and did not say, and there was a word for that in the conduct regulations, and it would be his.

He knew that. He could see it from here, the whole road of it, the way he could see a corridor to its end.

He picked up the phone. He turned it over, and closed the number, and put the phone in his shirt pocket.

“Agreed,” he said.

She let her breath go. He heard it, and she heard him hear it, and they both looked somewhere else.

“The kettle’s boiled,” she said.

“It has.”

“I’ll make it.”

She made it. He stood at the counter. At seven o’clock, by the clock on the cooker, he was drinking it, milk after, no sugar, and he did not ring anybody, and the minute went past him like a car that did not stop.

· · ·Scene break

Jas came off nights at eight.

She came through from the front room with her coat on and the log under her arm, and stopped in the kitchen doorway. She looked at Esther, dressed at the table with her second mug. She looked at Aled, at the counter, in yesterday’s shirt. She looked, for longer, at the blanket on the sofa through the door behind her, still folded where she had put it for him at one o’clock.

“Quiet night,” Jas said.

“Thanks, Jas.”

She held his eyes a moment longer than a handover needed. Then she put the log on the counter by his hand, squared its edge to the edge of the counter with one finger, which was not a thing Jas did, and went down the outside stair to her car without another word.

Rashid came up it five minutes later with a bag of rolls and a newspaper and said the town was very pretty and had four charity shops and no parking, and Aled was more grateful to him than he could have explained.

· · ·Scene break

It was the first day of the wait, and they were very careful, and they were very bad at it.

He gave her the new rules in the kitchen at nine, formally, each with its reason, as if they were strangers who had agreed a contract. The front rooms were the officers’ and she was not to go in them in daylight, because they looked on the street. She could use the yard, but not the gate into the lane, because of the lane. She could have the blind in the kitchen up as far as the second slat. She said noted to each of them, and understood, and once that’s reasonable, as though he were a supplier, and Rashid, eating a roll, looked from one of them to the other and said nothing.

At eleven she brought out her statement and he left the room. At the door he looked back, which he never did, and she was not reading it; she was looking at the door, and at him, and she looked down at once, and so did he, and he was in the passage before he remembered why he had gone.

At lunch he ate standing at the counter and she ate at the table and neither of them said anything about the chair. At two he did the round of the yard and came up the outside stair and she was at the kitchen window, at the second slat, looking down at where he had been. At four she laughed at something in Rashid’s newspaper and looked up to see whether he had heard, and he had, and he had been looking at her already, and it was nobody’s fault, and it was both of theirs.

“Are you two all right?” said Rashid, at half past four, to the kettle. “Only you’re like a pair of cats in a small house.”

“We’re fine,” they said, at the same time, and did not look at each other with enormous discipline, and Rashid took his tea into the front room and shut the door.

The officers’ phone went at ten past five. He answered it, and it was Kofi Asante, and he held it out.

She took it at the table. “Kofi.”

He was already moving to the door. He heard her say, “Thursday? All of it?” and then, sharper, “The schedules too?” and he was in the passage with the door pulled to behind him and her voice going on low and quick on the other side of it.

He stood by the outside door where the cold came under, and did not listen, and counted. The sixteenth, today. The eighteenth, Thursday, when Kofi would come up the outside stair with three hundred and eighty pages of her own work in a carton. The fourth of March, when she would stand in the box in Court Three, a few yards from a pane of glass.

When he came back in she had put the phone down on the table and was looking at it. She had her hands flat, one each side of it, the way she put them either side of a mug when she was about to lay something out.

“He’s bringing the report,” she said. “Thursday. My copy. He wants me to read the whole thing before I go in.” She looked up. “Every page.”

She said it lightly, and her face was not light at all; and it was not his to ask why, and he did not.