Chapter 8: The Handyman

Hartley-Voss had made it plain, on the way past his office, that he would be very glad indeed to hear what Voss had to say for himself, and would be gladder still if it were said somewhere he could not hear it.

“He wants it to be Voss,” said Elliot, when they were out of earshot.

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

Albion thought about it, which Elliot had not expected.

“I want it to be someone,” he said.

The way into the service passage was a knot in the wood.

That was what Elliot had taken it for: a dark oval in the panelling of the corridor, at about the height of his belt, a few yards aft of the storeroom door. Albion put two fingers into it and pulled, and a section of the wall the size of a narrow door swung towards them on hinges nobody had been meant to see.

Behind it was the back of everything.

The corridor side of Carriage 12 was walnut and brass and lamplight. This side was lath and plaster and the bare backs of the same panels, with the joiners’ pencil marks still on them — L 4, this way up, a sum that had been got wrong and crossed out. A caged bulb hung every few yards. The floor was boards, scuffed pale down the middle, with a square iron hatch let into them here and there that rang when you stepped on it. The air smelled of starch and boot-blacking and, from somewhere aft, of onions. It was like walking round to the back of a picture and finding the nails and the string and the brown paper, and realising that every picture had them.

It was also narrow. Elliot went in first, because there was no way for Albion to go in first without Elliot then having to go in sideways, and found that his shoulders brushed plaster on both sides at once.

He had gone perhaps ten yards when a maid came round the bend ahead with a tray of cups held high.

They looked at each other. There was nowhere for either of them to go. The maid did not say anything. Maids in the First Carriages, it appeared, did not say anything in passages; she simply stood, with the tray, and waited, with the patience of someone who had waited in that exact spot for a great many people and had never once been the one to move.

Elliot backed out. He backed the whole ten yards, past a little board of four brass bells on curled springs, past a shelf on which a boy was asleep under a coat at eleven in the morning, all the way out through the door in the wall. The maid came through after him, nodded — to Albion, not to him — and crossed the corridor into a door on the other side.

Albion had not come in at all. He was standing outside with the air of a man who had learned this lesson some years ago and saw no reason to learn it again.

“Too broad,” he said.

Elliot went back in. The second time, he met a porter with a crate on his shoulder, and backed into the recess by the bell-board, where there was just room for a man to stand flat against the wall and be stepped round, and was stepped round. By the time he reached the place where the passage ran behind the storeroom he had begun to understand something about it, though he could not yet have said what.

A man was lying on his back on the boards with his head and shoulders under a run of pipe, and a lamp beside him, and a great many tools.

“If that’s another one wanting hot water,” said the pipe, “they can have it when I’ve finished, or they can have it now and have it everywhere.”

“Voss,” said Albion, from the door, which was as far as he had come.

The man slid out. He was wiry and narrow-faced, somewhere past forty, in work clothes that had been patched by someone who cared and then worn by someone who didn’t. There was grease on his cheekbone and, Elliot suspected, had been for some time. He looked at Albion down the length of the passage, and then up at Elliot, and his face settled into an expression of deep, practised injury, like a man returning to a favourite chair.

“Here we are, then,” he said. “You’ll want to know where I was the three nights before the run-through. I was in Forty. My sister’s. I go aft every night and forward every morning like a good little cog and you can ask her, and you can ask her kids, because they kick.” He sat up against the wall. “I didn’t take your gramophone. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had. You can’t eat it, you can’t sell it, everybody upstairs knows what it looks like. Hartley-Voss — no relation, and I’d like that on record — has been looking at me since the run-through like I’ve got it down my trousers.”

“Have you?” said Elliot, before he could stop himself.

Voss stared at him. Then something happened at the corner of his mouth that he put away again at once, as if it had got out without a ticket.

“Who’s this?”

“With me,” said Albion.

“Course he is.” Voss wiped his hands on a rag, which made the rag worse and the hands no better. “Go on, then. Ask your questions. I’ve only got the whole of Twelve’s hot water in pieces on the floor, and a hall full of people at five o’clock who’ll want to wash their hands of each other.”

Elliot asked his questions. He asked what Voss did, rather than what Voss had, and Voss, who had clearly been braced for the other sort, answered more than he meant to. He did the lamps, the hot water, the vents in the hall, the hinges, the leaks. He did the passages. He had done the passages behind Twelve and Thirteen and Fourteen for nine years. Nobody upstairs knew the passages existed; that was the point of the passages. He kept the place running so that the people on the other side of the wall could have hot water and opinions, and he got the blame when the water was cold, and nobody came round to say anything when it wasn’t.

“The storeroom,” said Elliot. “There’s a door into it. From here.”

“Was,” said Voss. “There was a door. I painted it shut.”

He got up, and took his lamp, and went three paces along the passage, and held the light to the wall.

On this side it hardly counted as a door: a low panel, flush with the plaster, painted the same flat cream as everything else, without a handle or a keyhole or anything to say it opened at all. If Elliot had not seen the other side of it, he would have walked past it a hundred times.

“Six coats,” said Voss. “Years ago. Hartley-Voss wanted it gone, because a door was a door and anybody might use it. Couldn’t have it taken out, the wall’s load-bearing, so I painted it in. Bolt on the inside, painted over. Paint all round, this side.” He moved the lamp along the edge. “So it’s a wall. Nobody uses a wall.”

The lamp stopped moving.

Running round all four edges of the panel, where the cream paint met the cream paint, was a line. It was very fine. It was the line a blade makes when someone draws it carefully along a seam, once and then again, until the paint parts. In the lamplight the wood showed through it, pale and clean, the colour of a cut apple.

Voss said a word that Elliot had not heard on the train before but recognised from Bristol.

He put the lamp down. He took a putty knife off his belt — thin, flexible, its blade worn to a curve — and slid it into the line at the edge of the panel, about halfway up, and felt about with it. Elliot heard it find something. Voss worked the blade, gently, the way you might try to coax a key round in a stiff lock, and on the other side of the wall something slid, smooth and easy, with a small metal sound like a drawer closing.

Voss took the knife out and looked at it. The tip was dark and slick.

“Greased,” he said. He said it quietly, the way a man might say burgled. “That bolt hasn’t moved since I painted it.”

Albion had come along the passage after all. He did it sideways, with a good deal of plaster on his coat, and looked at the line round the door, and at the knife, and then at Voss, and Voss saw him look.

“Oh, lovely,” said Voss. “Yes. Course. Maintenance key. Knows the passage. Painted the door. Bring the rope.”

They went round to the other side. Albion had the Office’s key, and the storeroom opened on to its shelves and its dust and its clean, empty oblong, and Elliot went to the corner and moved the music stands again.

From this side the bolt was a thick iron bar in a painted keeper, and yesterday it had looked like the rest of the door: painted, part of the wall, finished with. Now it stood drawn back in its keeper, where Voss’s knife had left it, and with the lamp held close Elliot could see that the paint along the shank had cracked and flaked away in a neat band, and the iron beneath was bright and dark at once, bright where it had been rubbed, dark where it had been greased. Albion put out one finger and touched the door. It had not moved yesterday for his whole shoulder. It opened inwards now, an inch, with a small dry crack, like a knuckle.

Behind it was the passage, and the caged bulb, and the place where Voss’s pipes lay on the boards.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Elliot found he was looking not at the door but at the shelf — at the clean oblong in the dust with no smear at either end — and thinking about someone lifting a cased gramophone straight up off it in the dark, and turning, and carrying it four steps to this corner, and ducking through.

“That’s how,” he said.

“That’s how,” said Albion.

That was how. Who, and where, were still somewhere out of reach. What he had was a door, and a knife, and some grease, and a person who had known the door was there when the man who owned the room had forgotten it. He wanted to feel more pleased about it than he did.

“Three nights,” he said to Voss. “You go aft every night.”

“Every night. Evening bell.”

Albion looked at nothing for a moment, which Elliot was beginning to understand was what Albion did instead of consulting notes.

“The door book,” he said. “Aft at the evening bell. Forward at the morning. All three nights.”

Voss let out a breath. It was not relief, exactly. It had too much anger still in it for that, and too much tiredness. Elliot had watched people in meetings be accused of things — the server outage, the missed deadline, the budget nobody had approved — and he had learned that guilty anger and innocent anger did not sound the same. The guilty kind came with too many words, as if the words were sandbags. Voss’s anger had no sandbags. It was clean all the way through, and underneath it was a man who had expected nothing better and been proved right so often that being proved wrong, just this once, did not seem to help.

“He could have stayed forward,” said Albion, to Elliot. Not unkindly. Just being thorough.

“I could,” said Voss. “I could’ve slept on a shelf in my own passage and crept out and done the job and crept back and gone home at the bell and nobody the wiser.” He looked at the bright line round the door. “But I’d have done it neater than that. And I wouldn’t have greased it. You don’t grease a bolt you’re never going to use again. You grease a bolt you mean to shut after.”

Elliot looked at him.

“Say that again.”

“You don’t grease—” Voss stopped. “They shut it after,” he said slowly. “From my side. Through the crack. With a blade. Same as I just opened it.” He turned the putty knife over in his fingers and looked at it as if it had let him down personally. “So it’d look like it’d never been touched. So you’d stand in that room and lean on it and think it was a wall.”

They walked the passage once more, all three of them, single file, with Voss in front with the lamp. It ran behind the storeroom and the office and the green room, and at the aft end of the carriage it reached a narrow door into the next passage, behind the dining saloon and the kitchens, which smelled of onions and was even busier. A porter came the other way. All three of them backed into the recess by a bell-board, Albion last and least willingly.

“Every day,” said Voss. “All day. Trays, crates, boots, coal, laundry. Nobody’s ever on their own in here before the night shift goes off.”

And that was what Elliot had half understood the first time he backed out. Nobody had carried a gramophone down this passage in daylight. You could not get a cased gramophone ten yards along it without meeting someone, and one of you would have had to back out, and whoever backed out would have looked at what you were carrying. It had been done at night. And at night, the oak door at the back of the First Carriages was shut, and every crossing was written in a book.

“So whoever it was,” he said, “sleeps forward of the door.”

“Hundreds do,” said Albion.

“Fewer than sleep behind it.”

Albion considered that for the length of a carriage, and did not disagree.

At the door into the corridor, Voss stopped, and turned the lamp down, and looked at them both with his old injured expression, which seemed to have lost some of its conviction.

“You’ll tell Hartley-Voss,” he said. “That it wasn’t me.”

“Yes,” said Elliot.

“He won’t believe you.”

“Probably not.”

Voss nodded, as if this was at least an honest answer, and Elliot thought that was the end of it, until he remembered how the conversation had started.

“The three nights,” he said. “Before the run-through. You knew that was what we’d ask.”

“Everyone knows.”

“Who told you?”

“Nobody told me. It was on a—” Voss stopped. He looked, for a moment, like a man who had put his hand into a familiar pocket and found something in it he did not remember putting there. “It’s going round,” he said. “Everyone’s got it. Ask anyone.” And he went back along the passage with his lamp, to his pipes, and did not look round.

In the corridor the carpet took the silence and kept it.

“The window,” said Elliot. “The three nights. Who knew that? Before today?”

Albion did not need to think.

“The Conductor. Me. Hartley-Voss. Courcier. Fen.” A pause. “You.”

“Six,” said Elliot.

“Six,” said Albion.

The tea car was half empty when he reached it, and Birdie was sitting down, which he had never seen. She had a stool behind the counter for the purpose and a look that dared anybody to mention it. She got up when he came in, which was a kindness, and poured, which was another.

“Voss,” she said.

“He didn’t do it.”

“I told you.”

“You told me he steals apples.” Elliot sat. “You didn’t tell me he was—” He looked for the word. “Decent. Angry, but decent.”

“Those aren’t different things. Most angry people are decent. That’s what they’re angry about.” She put the pot down. “It’s what makes him easy to suspect, too. From outside, anger looks a lot like motive. You have to get up close to see it’s just pain with its fists up.”

He drank his tea, and let that sit, and then he told her about the three nights, because she was going to know by morning anyway and he would rather she had it straight.

“Six people,” he said. “That’s all who knew. And a handyman in a service passage had it word for word before we’d asked him anything. So one of the six talked. Which means I’ve got to work out which of them—”

“No,” said Birdie.

He stopped.

“Six people knowing a thing is never six. It’s six, and everybody they told, and everybody who was standing near when they told it.” She took his cup, though it was not empty, and filled it again. “And that’s down here, where people talk. That’s not how it goes up there.”

“How does it go up there?”

Birdie looked at him over the urn, with the expression of a woman who had spent forty years listening to the front of the train across a counter, and had heard it say a great deal without once raising its voice.

“First Carriages don’t gossip, young man,” she said. “They circulate.”