Chapter 6: What He Was Running From

“What did he do?” said Elliot. “Here. For work.”

“Tally clerk.” Petris did not slow down. “Freight office. Sixteen.”

It was the question he had asked the Conductor across a bare desk at twenty to eight that morning, and he had got the same answer and nothing after it. He was a freight clerk, and a good one. He was beginning to think it was the only answer anybody ever got about Maren Toll, and that Toll had seen to it.

They went back into the gold. Nine carriages forward, against the grain of everybody who had finished their buying and was carrying it aft. Somewhere along the bakers’ row the air went warm and yeasty and floury underfoot, and a girl in an apron came out of a half-door with a board of loaves on her head and went down the corridor at a trot, calling, and the crowd parted for the bread as it had not parted for the warden. Then cloth again. Then brass. Then the deck shutters, and the light off the gap, and at Seventeen, up its ladder, the chalk board, where the boy in the cap had just written T + 2:20 and was blowing the dust off his fingers.

An hour and forty to the bell. Elliot did not do the rest of the sum. He was starting to dislike the rest of the sum.

Carriage 16 had no alcoves. It had no floor either, as far as he could tell at first; it had a crowd standing on crates.

The whole of the ground level was a loading bay, open along the deck side, and the crossing was coming in through it. Crates came off the gangway at Sixteen on a roller-ramp and went on to a weighing-plate and off it into the arms of hauliers who shouted a number and a destination and were gone up the train with it. A hoist creaked overhead with a net of sacks swinging under it. A woman stood on an upturned barrel with a slate in each hand, reading weights aloud off one and writing them on the other, and nobody was listening to her and everybody heard. It smelled of tar and hemp and hot axle grease and, faintly, of the Vesper, which smelled of nothing Elliot could name and had got into the sacks.

“Up,” said Petris, and went up a stair at the forward end that was nearly a ladder.

The Tally ran the length of the carriage above the loading bay, under the roof, like a long attic somebody had put desks in. There were windows along the deck side, low and wide, and the light came through them clean and late-morning — on the Calloway they were calling it the end of the afternoon — and lay across a row of high desks and the backs of the clerks working at them. Down here the bay roared. Up here it came through the floor as a long grumble, and over it there was another sound, thin and constant, that Elliot did not place until he passed close to a window. It was the wind. The walls up here were planking and not much else, and the whole length of the gap was going past outside at the speed of the train, and it found every seam.

You paid for being upstairs, apparently, by hearing the outside all day.

A man was coming down the row towards them. He was in his fifties, narrow, in a grey waistcoat buttoned to the top, with a pen behind each ear and a face that had been scrubbed of opinions before it left for work.

“Warden,” he said.

“Stell,” said Petris. “Toll.”

There was a pause. It went on long enough that Elliot thought Stell had not heard, and opened his mouth, and then it ended exactly as he had decided it wasn’t going to, and he shut his mouth again.

“I heard,” said Stell. “Yes. Forty minutes ago.”

“This is Mr Marsh. From the Meridian. He has the Conductor’s leave.”

Stell looked at Elliot. Again the pause. Elliot counted it this time, because he could not help counting things. One. Two. Three. Then: “Mr Marsh.”

It was not slowness. Stell was not slow; his eyes were going all the time. It was a man who had learned, at some point long ago and probably at some cost, never to say anything in front of anyone that he would not be prepared to sign, and who had worked out that three seconds was how long it took him to read a sentence back before he let it out.

“I’d like to know what he did,” said Elliot. “Every day.”

One, two, three. “Second hour, at his desk.” Stell indicated a high desk by the third window, empty, its stool pushed in. “Manifests. Station stops, crossings. Weights against counts, counts against chits. If the hauliers say forty sacks and the plate says thirty-eight, it’s a tally clerk who finds out which of them is lying, and it’s usually neither. Seventh hour, home.” He thought. “Best tally clerk I’ve had. He’d find you a missing sack in a manifest the length of your arm and tell you which haulier had sat on it.”

“Can I see his desk?”

One, two, three. Stell turned and walked him to it.

It stood by the third window, high, with a sloped top and a rail for the feet and a stool pushed in square. The window beside it looked straight out on the gap, and across the gap at the brown and cream flank of the Meridian running alongside three feet off, close enough to read the numbers on its vestibule doors. Elliot had not thought, until he stood there, that Toll would have sat for seven years looking at the train he had left every time there was a crossing, and at the inside of nothing in particular the rest of the time, and that he had chosen the desk.

There was an inkwell, capped. A pen laid in the groove. A ready-reckoner for freight weights, the twin of the one on the shelf in Berth 8, its spine cracked at the same page. A tray of manifests, squared. And on the sloped top, where a man’s forearms would rest, a rectangle of darker wood a little bigger than a sheet of foolscap, with clean edges, and nothing in it.

“His blotter,” said Elliot.

One, two, three. Stell looked at the empty rectangle and something in his scrubbed face very nearly happened.

“Blotters are changed on the first of the month,” he said. “I sign for them. It’s the twentieth.” He looked along the row of desks, at every other clerk’s blotter in its place, and back. “I have not signed for that.”

“When did you last see it?”

“Last night. At the seventh hour. I walk the row.” He paused, much longer than three. “It was there. It had his hand all over it, the last few days. He’d been pressing hard.”

Petris, at Elliot’s shoulder, said nothing at all, and looked at the empty rectangle for a long time, as a man looks at a door he has just heard close somewhere else in the house.

“And what changed?” said Elliot. “Before last night.”

The pause, this time, was longer than three.

Stell went to a shelf by the stair and took down a ledger, black-bound, and opened it at a ribbon. The Tally’s attendance. Every clerk’s name down the side and every day across, and every day for seven years against M. Toll the same small stroke, except for a handful of sick days, each with a note in the margin in Toll’s own hand: chest, chest, fever (Shen has the Ferrow manifest). A man who even took ill tidily.

And then, at the right-hand edge of the page, where the days ran up to today, three blank squares in the last four. No stroke. No note. Under each, in Stell’s hand, very small: no word.

“Three of the last four mornings,” said Stell. “Not here, no word. Seven years, that had not happened.” He closed the ledger. “I meant to speak to him after the crossing.”

“Did anyone else?”

One, two, three. “You’d want Shen,” said Stell. “He’s not at his desk. He’s at Tarn’s.” He paused again, briefly, as if checking the sentence for anything he would not sign, and found something, and let it go anyway. “He couldn’t sit by the empty one.”

Tarn’s was through the vestibule, at the aft end of Fifteen, behind the loading bay’s back wall, where the noise of the bay came through as a long dull rumble and a man could hear himself drink.

It was a proper bar, which nothing on the Meridian quite was. Birdie’s tea car served tea and a weak beer and an education. This had a counter of dark wood, polished by elbows into dips, and a row of bottles behind it with handwritten labels, and stools, and four small tables, and a broad, bald, pink man behind the counter in an apron who looked up as they came in and took in the warden’s coat, and the stranger’s, and what was in the warden’s face, all in the time it took him to put down a glass.

“Warden,” he said. “You’ll be wanting the corner.”

In the corner, at a table by himself, a round-shouldered man of about forty-five sat with a glass in front of him and a letter in his hand. The letter was open. He was not reading it.

“Pale, half, with water,” said Tarn, low, as if naming him. “He’s had that in front of him an hour and not drunk an inch. And the letter. Came over from the Vesper this morning, from his sister. He’s not read more than two consecutive minutes of it since he sat down.” He picked up the glass again. “I’d not normally tell the warden a man’s business. But I’ve been watching him not read it, and I’m tired.”

“And Toll?” said Elliot.

Tarn looked at him properly for the first time.

“Small dark. One. Rest-day eve, every one, seven years. Paid on the nail, sat where Shen’s sitting, read a novel he’d read before. You could have set a clock by him, if the clock drank.” He set the glass on the shelf, very precisely, among others exactly like it. “Last three rest-day eves, no. Went past the door, twice, I saw him. Walking quick, with a face on him like a man doing sums in his head and not liking the answer.” He shrugged one shoulder. “I thought, he’s found a woman, or he’s found a debt. I’d have put money on the woman.”

“Would you put it on either now?”

“No,” said Tarn. “Not now.”

Shen looked up when they reached him, and folded the letter in half, and then in half again, as if it were the letter’s fault.

“Warden.”

“Shen. This is Mr Marsh. From the Meridian.”

“I know who he is. The whole bay knows who he is.” Shen looked at Elliot without hostility, and without much of anything. His eyes were red at the rims and perfectly dry. “You came for Maren.”

“I came for a debt he owed,” said Elliot. “I found Mr Toll. I’m sorry.”

“Have a stool, then,” said Shen, “if you’re sorry.”

They sat. Petris had the stool against the wall where he could see the door, which Elliot suspected he did in every room he had ever been in, including his own.

“I don’t want to know about the debt,” said Elliot. “I want to know what he did. Every day. Not the work. Him.”

Shen looked at the folded letter, and put it down on the table, and squared it with the edge.

“He came in at the second hour,” he said, “with a loaf under his arm. Every morning. Brown, mostly; dark, if the brown was gone. He’d come up the stair and go past my desk and tear the heel off the loaf and put it down by my inkwell without looking, and go on to his own desk and hang up his coat. Seven years. I never once bought my own breakfast.” He breathed in. “He came aboard at Fourteen, you know. Seven years back. Walked two carriages with his bag still on his shoulder and came up that stair and asked Stell for work, the same afternoon. Didn’t stop for a bed first. Stell gave him the Ferrow manifests to see if he could do them, which nobody can, and he did them by the seventh hour.” He shook his head. “I asked him once what I owed him for the bread. He said Paid tomorrow. That was his joke. He said that was what he said to the baker, every morning. He’d take a loaf and say paid tomorrow, and the next morning he’d pay her for yesterday’s and take another. Seven years he was a day behind on bread. He said it kept him honest. He said a man who owes a baker for one loaf has to come back.”

Elliot said nothing. He found he did not want to write it down; he wanted to remember it the way the Hall remembered things.

“He had eight pairs of socks,” said Shen. “Grey. Nearly the same. I know because on slow days he darned them at his desk, with his feet up on the rail, and counted them back into the drawer, and if one was missing he’d go and look for it. He had a coat he’d come across in, and he’d had it re-lined twice and the collar turned, sooner than buy another. He’d read the same six books. He had a tin on his shelf he never opened when anybody was there.” He looked up. “He’d ordered boots. From Ammel, in the blue. To be made over the next month. Paid half down. Ammel will have the half and no feet to put in them.”

“He was settled,” said Elliot.

“He was the most settled man on this train.” Shen touched the folded letter again, and took his hand away. “He didn’t own a fast pair of shoes.”

“Did he ever talk about the Meridian?”

“Twice. Both times in here, on the only two nights he ever had a second small dark.” Shen looked at the stool Toll had sat on. “He said the tea was better over there and the people asked fewer questions, and he didn’t know which he missed. And he said the best man he’d ever known sat at the back of a carriage over there mending other people’s things, and never once asked him a single question, and that was how he knew.” Shen frowned. “I said, knew what? He said, never mind. He bought me a drink so I’d never mind.”

Elliot thought of a flowered curtain and a jointed lamp, and did not say anything. There were a great many men on the Meridian who mended things. He told himself that twice.

“Three weeks ago,” said Elliot. “What changed?”

Shen was quiet long enough that Tarn, behind the counter, stopped polishing.

“He went to the Hall,” Shen said. “On his rest day. He’d never been, not since he came over. He came back to the Tally the next morning and gave me the bread as usual, and I said where were you, and he laughed and said he’d been looking himself up. Looking himself up. As if he’d been in the paper.” Shen’s mouth moved. “He said they’d got him right. Said very little. He thought that was very funny.”

“And after?”

“After, he went back. Rest days, then evenings. Then he started missing mornings. Three out of the last four, no word, no bread, and I bought my own, and it was terrible.” The corner of his mouth went up, briefly, and came down. “The one morning he did come, he had the loaf. He tore the end off and put it down and didn’t say a word to me all day, and he didn’t do one manifest. He sat at his desk and wrote.”

“What did he write?”

“Not tallies.” Shen frowned. “Numbers, in twos. A number and a stroke and a number. Down a page. Then he’d sit and look at them, and cross one out, and write it again in the same place. I thought it was a game. Patience, or something like it. I thought, he’s tired. He’ll tell me.” He turned the letter over. “That was the day before yesterday.”

Elliot felt the three lines in his head without having to reach for them. Seventeen, fifty-two. He kept his face as still as he could and was fairly sure it was not still enough. Petris, against the wall, did not look at him, which was its own kind of looking.

“Was he afraid?” said Petris.

It was the first thing the warden had said since he sat down. Shen turned to him slowly.

“You want him running,” he said. “Your people will. I’ve been sitting here all afternoon knowing that’s what they’ll want. He crossed owing a debt, and he hid here, and today his debt came over the gap and caught him. That’s a story. That’s a story with a shape, and it explains why today.” He shook his head. “It’s wrong. He wasn’t hiding, Warden. Not for years. He wasn’t looking over his shoulder. He’d paid half on boots. He owed a baker for a loaf. He was in the middle of darning a sock — it’s in his drawer at the Tally now, with the needle in it.”

He picked up the glass of pale-half-with-water for the first time, and looked at it, and put it down untouched.

“He wasn’t running from anything,” said Shen. “He was simply here.”