Chapter 10: The Chase

At the oak door the enforcer looked up, saw who it was, and wrote Marsh, E. without asking, and Elliot walked through on to the carpet feeling, for no reason he could defend, slightly taller.

Albion was waiting on the far side.

“Drummond,” he said.

“Now?”

“Now.”

They walked forward. Carriage 9 was three past the concert carriage, and quieter even than the rest; the carpet here was green instead of red, and the lamps were turned a little lower, as if the carriage had asked them to be. Halfway along the ground floor a door was lettered THE MERIDIAN GAZETTE in gold, and behind it a bored voice was reading something aloud, slowly, to someone who was presumably checking it: “…an evening of rare distinction, comma, at which the Conductor…”

The stair was just beyond. It was narrow — narrower than any staircase Elliot had climbed since leaving Bristol, where his flat had been reached by one that a removal man had once described, without admiration, as a ladder with ambitions — and it went up steeply and turned once, halfway, out of sight. At its foot, on a high stool, sat a stout woman with a lamp and an open book.

“Mrs Hebble,” said Albion.

“Albion,” she agreed, and wrote. She looked at Elliot. “And?”

Elliot waited for with me.

“Name?” said the woman, when it did not come.

“Elliot Marsh.”

She wrote it down. All of it. Then the hour. She did not ask his carriage. He had the distinct impression that she had a fair idea of his carriage, and had decided it was none of the stair’s business.

“Mr Drummond’s in,” she said. “He doesn’t go out before luncheon.”

They went up single file, Albion first. The stair was exactly as wide as Albion and not an inch wider, and the carpet on it was so thick that their feet made no sound at all, so that Elliot climbed behind a broad dark back in total silence, like a man following a wardrobe up to bed.

At the top the corridor ran the length of the carriage under a low ceiling. Doors on one side, small windows on the other, everything green and brass and still. The numbers went away from the stair: 1, 2, 3, and at the far end, as far from the stair as it was possible to be, 4.

“Wait,” said Albion.

So Elliot waited at the stair-head, with the turn of the stair behind him and the lamplight of the stair-keeper coming up it faintly from below, and watched Albion walk the length of the corridor and knock.

The door opened.

The man who opened it was not large. He was neat, with the kind of neatness that takes daily effort, in a dark waistcoat and an open-necked shirt, with grey hair brushed flat and a pair of reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and forgotten there. He was perhaps sixty. He held the door with one hand and a small cloth with the other, as if he had been polishing something and meant to go back to it.

“Albion,” he said. “Good morning. This is unexpected.”

“The gramophone,” said Albion.

Elliot saw it land. He saw it go into the neat man’s face and arrive somewhere behind the eyes, and he saw the man look past Albion’s shoulder, down the corridor, to the only stair.

Then Drummond was coming.

He did not push Albion. He simply stepped out of the doorway and round him, quick and practised, as if he had been stepping round other people in narrow places all his life, and came down the corridor at something just short of a run, the cloth still in his hand.

And Elliot, at the stair-head, did the thing he had learned in the service passage. He stepped back flat against the wall to let him by.

He did not decide to. His body did it on its own, out of two days’ training and thirty-six years of getting out of people’s way in corridors, and Drummond went past him so close that Elliot smelled metal polish and saw the reading glasses jump on his forehead, and then Drummond was on the stair, and gone round the turn.

Albion came down the corridor after him and gave Elliot one look as he passed. It was not a long look. It did not need to be.

“Sorry,” said Elliot, to the empty stair-head, and went down after them.

At the foot, the stair-keeper had her pen raised and her lamp still swinging. She had written down the hour Albion left. Mr Drummond, being resident, had not been recorded at all, and had gone aft along the ground floor at a speed the carriage had probably never seen.

Elliot ran.

He was not built for it, and had never pretended otherwise. He had been, in his first life, a man who walked briskly to meetings and described that as cardio. But the corridor was wide and the carpet was soft, and ahead of him, beyond the startled armchair-readers and a maid flattened against a wall, he could see Albion’s back, and beyond Albion, now and then, a flash of dark waistcoat.

Carriage 10. Carriage 11. The vestibule doors sighed open and shut and open. Carriage 12, and the long corridor beside the hall, where the cello stopped mid-phrase and somebody said “Well!” from behind the doors. Then Carriage 13, and the dining saloon.

It was laid for luncheon. Twenty tables, white cloths, white plates with a gold line round the rim, glasses that caught the window-light and threw it about, a silver stand of toast on every table and a single waiter at the far end with a tray of cups held high, who saw Drummond coming and froze: a man trained never to drop anything, about to find out whether the training held.

Drummond went down the aisle between the tables. He did not touch a single glass. Albion, behind him, did not touch one either, though he was wider and it was closer. The waiter held his tray higher, and higher still, and was passed, and stood there afterwards with it held at the full stretch of his arms like an offering.

At the far end of the saloon a swing door with a round window in it flapped once. Drummond had gone through it. Albion went through it after him. Elliot reached it a few seconds later, and pushed it, and the kitchens came out to meet him.

Heat. Noise. Thirty people in white. And Lotz, at his counter by the bell, turning slowly, with a ladle in one hand, towards the swing door through which, in the space of ten seconds, three men had come running into his kitchen in the middle of a sauce.

“OUT,” said Lotz, in a voice that came up from somewhere below the floor.

Two porters were crossing the kitchen with a block of ice slung between them on iron hooks, sawdust sifting off it on to the tiles. Drummond went round the near end of them and his feet found the sawdust and went in two different directions, and for a moment he was skating, arms out, with an expression of absolute astonishment, and then he caught the edge of the long table and was off again. Albion went round the far end of the ice. A copper lid hit the floor and rang. Somebody shouted the list. Somebody else, out of sheer habit, shouted it back.

At the aft end of the kitchen was a narrow door, half open, and through it Elliot could see bare lath and plaster and a caged bulb. Drummond went into it sideways. Albion reached it and went in after him, sideways, and stopped.

Coming the other way along the passage, holding a tray of clean glasses at shoulder height, was a maid.

Elliot could see all three of them through the half-open door. Drummond, small and quick, had already got by her somehow, or had got by her before she rounded the bend. Albion had not. He stood in the passage with his shoulders touching both walls and the maid in front of him, and the maid did not move, because maids in the First Carriages did not move for anybody in passages, and Albion, who was the Conductor’s man and could have moved almost anyone on the train, looked down at her, and at the glasses, and began, very slowly, to back out.

Elliot looked at the passage. He was the right shape for it. He could have been past the maid in a moment and after Drummond in another, a small man in a small space, where size did not help you and the person in front always had the advantage.

Instead he thought about a door.

Everything forward of here goes past this door. He had said it himself, on the first morning, standing on the sill admiring it. There was no upstairs at that end, and no rooms in that bare carriage for a passage to run behind, and a man running from the Conductor’s office did not run towards the engine, where there was nothing but more of the people he lived among. He ran towards the crowd. The crowd was aft. Everything aft went through the door.

You did not chase a thing round a building, Elliot thought. You went to the one place it had to come through, and you stood there.

He turned round, walked back past Lotz — “Sorry,” he said, and Lotz said something in reply that was not a word in any language Elliot knew but was perfectly clear — and out through the swing door into the saloon, where the waiter was still holding up his tray, and through the side door beside it into the corridor that ran aft along the kitchen wall.

Then he ran again.

He ran six carriages. He ran past the doors with brass numbers and the doors with no handles, past stairs and stools and keepers who looked up from their books with interest, past a woman walking a very small dog who picked the dog up as he went by, as if he might be catching. He ran until his chest was making a sound he associated with the old men in his gym who had been told by their doctors to take it easy and had chosen to interpret this as a challenge. The vestibules opened and closed. The carpet went on being soft. And at the end of it there was the oak door, folded back against the wall, and just through it, at the head of the short bare carriage, the two enforcers on their bench with the book on its stand between them.

Nobody had come through. He could tell from the enforcers’ faces, which were bored.

He sat down on the end of their bench, because his legs had decided that was what was going to happen, and put his head between his knees, and breathed.

“You all right?” said one of the enforcers.

“Fine,” said Elliot, to the floor. “Waiting for someone.”

He was, he knew, quite possibly wrong. Drummond might have come out of the passage and gone up a different stair, or into a friend’s rooms, or simply stopped running and gone home. In which case Elliot would sit here on a bench getting his breath back for the benefit of two enforcers, and then walk back, and explain. He had stood at the wrong door before, in his old life — the wrong meeting room, the wrong floor, once memorably the wrong building — and survived it.

It was a little over a minute before Mr Drummond came.

He came walking. Somewhere between the end of the service passage and the last carriage of the First, Drummond had stopped running and put himself back together: his waistcoat buttoned, his hair smoothed flat, the reading glasses folded and put away in a pocket, the polishing cloth gone. He was walking down the last carriage of the First towards the oak door at the unhurried pace of a resident with a lifetime ticket and somewhere to be, his face composed for the enforcers, ready to nod to them, ready to pass through and on into the noise and crowd of the working carriages where nobody knew him at all.

Then he saw who was sitting on the bench.

He stopped. He looked at Elliot for what felt like a long time. His face did not collapse, quite. It sat down, the way a man sits down who has been standing up for a long while for no good reason.

“Mr Drummond,” said Elliot, who still did not have quite enough breath for anything longer.

Drummond looked at the door, and at the enforcers, and at the crowded carriages beyond, which were very close. And then he came and sat down on the bench beside Elliot, quite near, and put his hands on his knees.

“I don’t know your name,” he said.

“Elliot.”

“Mr Elliot.” He nodded, as if putting it somewhere safe. “I am too old to do that twice in a morning.”

Albion arrived a minute later. He had plaster down one shoulder, sawdust on his boots, and a small damp patch on his lapel that might have been sauce. He was not breathing hard. He looked at Drummond on the bench, and at Elliot beside him, and at the door; and then at Elliot again, and kept looking.

He looked at the enforcers, and they found a reason to go and stand at the far end of the carriage.

“I didn’t take it,” said Drummond.

He said it to the floor, quietly, the way a man says a thing he has said to himself a great many times in the dark and has never yet said aloud.

“You ran,” said Albion.

“I ran because you said the word.” Drummond looked up. “Because I’ve been waiting a week for someone to knock on my door and say it. A collector. Removed from the committee. Who wanted it — who everybody knew wanted it. And there’s a case in my rooms. Glass. Lined.” He closed his eyes briefly. “Exactly the right size, and empty. I had it made a month ago, when they announced the programme. I don’t know why. You’ll see it when you search. Which you’ll do. And then you’ll look at me.”

“You were in the storeroom corridor,” said Elliot. “Two days before the run-through, at two in the afternoon. You signed the log.”

“Of course I signed. One signs.” A faint flicker of distaste, at the idea of a man who wouldn’t. “I went to look at the door. That’s all. I’d heard it — once, at a rehearsal, from the back of the hall, where I had no business being. Madame Courcier doesn’t permit an audience. I stood behind the curtain at the back and heard it play for perhaps two minutes.” He was quiet for a moment. “Afterwards I went and looked at the girl’s drawings in the patisserie. And then one afternoon I went and stood in the corridor outside the door it was behind. I didn’t try the handle. I didn’t have a key. I stood there for — ten minutes. Perhaps fifteen. And then I went home.”

Elliot had the grid in his head. He did not need to take the notebook out.

“The log says forty,” he said.

Drummond looked at him.

He did not deny it. He did not say anything for a while. What came into his face was not guilt but something worse to watch, the look of a man who has been told the exact size of a thing he had preferred to leave unmeasured.

“Forty,” he said. “I didn’t know it was forty. One doesn’t time it.” He looked down at his hands. “Ten minutes is a man who wanted to see something beautiful. Forty is—” He stopped. “Standing at a locked door wanting what’s behind it is — pathetic. I’m sixty-one years old. I have a lifetime ticket and a room full of instruments I can’t play. And I stood in a corridor for forty minutes, looking at a door.”

Nobody said anything. Through the open oak door came the noise of the carriages beyond — someone laughing, a trolley, the wheels.

“Did anybody ask you,” said Elliot, “about a copy? Did you ever think about having one made? From her drawings?”

Drummond turned his head and looked at him with such pure, uncomprehending offence that it was very nearly a relief.

“A copy?” he said. “Young man. I didn’t want a thing that looked like it. Anyone can have a thing that looks like it. I wanted it.”

They walked him back. Albion went in front and Drummond in the middle, and Elliot behind, and none of them hurried. People who had seen a man in open-carriage boots hurry aft past them twenty minutes earlier now watched the same man walk forward again between the Conductor’s aide and a stranger in open-carriage boots, and drew their own conclusions, and would be drawing them at dinner.

At the vestibule into Carriage 15, Albion slowed until Elliot was level with him.

“The junction,” Albion said. “Where you cut him off.” He looked straight ahead. “That was good thinking.”

Elliot did not say anything. He was afraid that if he did, Albion would take it back.

They went on past the kitchens, from which Lotz’s voice could be heard at some distance explaining something to someone at length, and through the dining saloon, where the tables were being relaid. In the corridor by the hall, Elliot looked at the back of Drummond’s neat grey head, and said, quietly enough that it was mostly to Albion, the thing that had been turning over in him since the bench.

“He wants it more than anybody on this train. And he couldn’t try the handle.”

“So.”

“So whoever’s got it doesn’t want it like that.” Elliot thought about the clean oblong in the dust, and the bolt greased so it could be shut again after, and a door painted to look like a wall. “Nobody’s sold it. Nobody’s showing it to anyone. It’s just gone, and it’s staying gone, very carefully.” He heard himself say it and was not sure he believed it yet. “Maybe nobody stole it. Maybe somebody’s hiding it.”

Albion was silent for half a carriage.

“From?”

“I don’t know,” said Elliot. “Yet.”

At the foot of the stair, Mrs Hebble wrote Albion up again, and wrote Elliot Marsh up again, in full, with the hour, and did not write Mr Drummond at all.

Albion searched the rooms. He did it thoroughly and without fuss, lifting things and putting them back exactly where they had been, while Drummond stood by the window with his arms folded and watched every one of his possessions be touched by somebody else’s hands. There were instruments everywhere — on stands, on the walls, in cases with their lids open: a viola, a set of small brass horns in graded sizes, a hurdy-gurdy, a clarinet in dark wood with silver keys that Elliot looked at for some time before he made himself look away. There was no gramophone. There was nowhere in the three small rooms a gramophone could have been, and Albion looked in all of them anyway.

The case stood on a table of its own, by the window, where the light fell on it.

It was glass on four sides and the top, with a brass frame, and inside it was lined in dark blue velvet, smoothed flat. It was the right size. Even Elliot, who had never seen the gramophone, could tell that it was the right size: the length and depth of the clean oblong on the shelf in the storeroom, near enough, and tall enough for a horn. Somebody had measured it by eye from the back of a hall, and got it nearly right.

There was nothing in it. The velvet had never been pressed by anything. It lay there in the window-light with its nap all going one way, waiting, very patiently, for a thing that was never going to come.

“Every collector has one,” said Drummond, from the window, without turning round. “An empty case. You keep it for the thing you haven’t found.” He was quiet for a moment. “It’s the most important case in the room.”