Chapter 7: The Clock

Carriage 9 was three carriages forward of where they had been. They walked at Petris’s pace. Petris’s pace, Elliot was learning, did not adjust for urgency; the warden’s pace was the warden’s pace, and the carriages would arrive when they arrived.

Elliot, despite this, walked with the small cold pressure of a clock running in his head. He had checked the timepiece against the corridor lanterns twice in the past five minutes — a calibration he had, in the past hour, learned to do without taking the timepiece out of its pocket. Two hours and twelve minutes left. Two hours and ten. Two hours and eight.

The archive carriage was quieter than the administrative carriage had been. It was not dead-quiet, the way rooms in libraries went dead-quiet on the Meridian’s brief stops at station towns; it was the quiet of a place where work was being done at a different speed, where sound was a thing you brought in with you and disposed of carefully when you noticed you had brought it.

Petris pushed open the door.

The room beyond was long. It was perhaps three carriages’ worth of length opened into a single space — a scale beat for the thing, since archive carriages on The Meridian did not, to Elliot’s knowledge, exist at this size — and the walls on both sides were given over to shelving, floor to ceiling, with rolling ladders set on rails that ran the length of the room. The shelves held boxes. The boxes were uniform, oilcloth-wrapped, labelled by year and quarter and category in the same plain hand. The smell was the smell of paper and the very faint, dry sweetness of old binding glue.

A single desk stood at the carriage’s centre point, set across the long axis like a bridge. At it sat a woman, perhaps thirty-five, writing in a ledger. She did not look up when they entered. She had the particular stillness of a person who had heard the door open and was choosing, on the basis of the person who had opened it, whether or not to acknowledge them.

Petris stopped at her desk.

“Asha,” he said.

She looked up. She had a precise face — high cheekbones, dark eyes, the sort of face Plum’s hands would have wanted to draw if Plum had drawn faces. She did not smile. She did not, Elliot noted, do anything that wasn’t stillness.

“Warden.”

“Maren Toll. He has been working in this room. I would like to see what he has been working on.”

She did not, immediately, react. She looked at Petris. She looked at Elliot — a brief, complete, evaluating look that was the same look Mistress Caro had given him in the corridor and that Sable had given him in court, and that Asha was, evidently, also good at. She looked back at Petris.

“You will have heard,” she said.

“I have. As have you, by the look of it.”

“At first bell.”

“How did you know?”

A pause. She was, for a moment, deciding what to tell him.

“I learned by observation,” she said. “He has been here on three rest days in the past three weeks. He had been planning to come on a fourth. The ledger he was working with had been left at his usual place in this room, with a note, in his hand, indicating which volumes he intended to consult next. The note was on the table this morning, as he had left it, except that two of the volumes he had named had been removed from their shelves. They were not on the table. They were not, when I checked, on his usual cart. They are not, after a more careful search, in this carriage. They are gone, Warden.”

Petris was very still.

“When were they removed?”

“Between the time I locked this carriage at sixth bell yesterday evening and the time I unlocked it this morning at first bell.”

“Who has the keys?”

“I have the keys. The Conductor’s office has a master.”

“The personal staff.”

“On the personal staff keyring, yes.”

Petris breathed in. He breathed out. It was, in his case, the same calibrated, almost-undetectable thing it had been in the inner office — the small private adjustment of a man who had hoped, against the available evidence, to find a piece of his investigation that had not yet been touched.

“What was the ledger he was working on,” he said.

“I will show you.”

She rose. She walked, with the same careful economy she gave her stillness, to a section of the shelving on the far wall. She climbed a small step and removed a single oilcloth-wrapped box from a middle shelf. She returned. She set it on the desk.

The label read: YEAR ONE, QUARTER FOUR. ARRIVALS LEDGER. C.M.A. INDEX.

She unwrapped the oilcloth. She lifted the lid. Inside was a ledger — bound in dark leather, perhaps an inch and a half thick, edge-marked with a long string of numbered tabs.

She opened it.

Two of the tabs had been cut.

The cuts were neat. They had been made with a thin blade, very recently — the leather around them was paler where the older patina had not yet had time to settle into the new edge. The pages corresponding to the two cut tabs were missing. The ledger had been sliced of two sections of its index.

“Which pages,” Elliot said.

She did not need to look. “The arrivals records for the period nineteen days before this date in his arrival year, and twenty-one days after. Two excisions, two full sections. Approximately forty pages each.”

“And what would those pages have shown.”

“The arrivals on this train. Names, ages, points of arrival, initial assignments. The administrative log of every passenger who came aboard in the period. Including, I should note, Mr Toll himself, whose arrival fell within the second of the two excised sections.”

The room was very still.

“His own arrival,” Petris said. “His own arrival has been removed.”

“Yes.”

“By someone who knew where to find it.”

“By someone who knew the shelving system, the cataloguing system, and which volumes Mr Toll was working with. Yes, Warden. By, at minimum, someone who has access to my keys and the time to read my notes.”

“Is anything else missing?”

“I have not, yet, completed my check. I will finish it, if you wish.”

“Please.”

She rose again. She went back to the shelves.

Petris turned to Elliot. He did not, Elliot noticed, look frustrated. He looked, instead, the way a man looks who has accepted that the morning is going to require him to operate at a tempo he had not anticipated.

“A step ahead,” Elliot said.

“More than one step. They have been to the inner office. They have been to the archive. They have, presumably, been to the berth.”

“We were in the berth when we left it.”

“We were in the berth, with a screen in front of it, in a carriage where every passing passenger now knows that the warden’s branch is on this case. The screen is a sign. It is a sign that says the warden is interested in this berth. And because the warden is interested in this berth, anybody who wants to be away from anything that is in the berth will, in the next hour, find a reason to go past it. And the screen, Mr Marsh, is opaque from outside.”

“You think the berth has been opened again.”

“I think we should go back to the berth.”

He said it without alarm. The not-alarm was, in itself, a piece of information. Petris was the kind of man who, when he believed his investigation had been compromised, kept his pace at the warden’s pace and reported the compromise without raising his voice. The warden’s pace, Elliot understood now, was not a habit. It was a position. I will not be hurried, even by the man who is hurrying me.

But he did, this once, walk a half-pace faster on the way out.

In Carriage 74, Mr Fixer was sitting on his crate.

The crate was Fixer’s place of business, the way the desk was the Conductor’s place of business and the workstation was Plum’s; and Fixer had been on the crate for the past twenty minutes, occupying it with the posture of a man pretending to do nothing in particular while doing, in fact, nothing in particular, which was — for Fixer — an unusual condition. His knife was in his hand. His not-apple was not. He had, on the small scale of his repertoire of nervous tells, run out of distractions.

Plum was at his workstation. Plum was, on the surface, working. Plum had been on the surface working for the past twenty minutes, in the sense that Plum’s hands were moving on a small mechanism with the slow, attentive precision that was Plum’s working register. The mechanism was a clock he was assembling for a girl two carriages over whose grandmother had owned it and who had, in the process of inheriting it, dropped it. The work required a particular kind of concentration, and Plum was — Fixer had observed — concentrating on it with the slightly excessive evenness of a man whose mind was not on the work but who was using the work as a way of not letting his mind go where it would otherwise want to go.

“He’s still on the gangway,” Fixer said.

“He is not still on the gangway. The gangway is not a place a person is for two hours. He is on The Calloway.”

“He’s still — figuratively — on the gangway.”

“That is a more defensible statement.”

“Two hours.”

“Two hours and ten minutes,” Plum said, without looking up.

“You’re counting.”

“I am counting.”

Fixer was, briefly, quiet. The carriage continued its morning sounds — the dog asleep on someone’s coat, the kettle on the stove plate, Doss arranging baskets at the territorial frequency that was her contribution to the carriage’s audio profile, Old Satterly breathing in the long, slow tide that was, this morning as every morning, the carriage’s sustained note. The pipe hummed. The pipe was, at this hour, the half-tone wrong it had been at dawn — still in parallel, still matched.

“He should have been back across by now if it were simple,” Fixer said.

“He should have been back across by now if it were simple.”

“It’s not simple.”

“It is not simple.”

“And we are sitting here. Doing nothing.”

“We are not doing nothing. We are doing, between us, the work of letting him be where he is without making the work he is doing harder by doing other work in his absence. The arrangement, in the language of arrangements, is waiting. It is the same word for two different verbs. The verb you mean is the bad one. The verb I mean is the better one. I am committed to my verb.”

Fixer looked at him. Fixer’s grin came up, briefly, despite itself.

“You make it sound restful.”

“It is not restful.”

“No.”

The pipe hummed. The clock on Plum’s workstation, which was not a clock the girl owned but a clock Plum had got out as a working second hand, ticked.

Two carriages forward, in an office whose lamp was lit despite the hour and whose desk was empty of paper, the Conductor of The Meridian stood at a small high window from which, by craning very slightly to the left, the parallel deck and the gangways were just visible across the half-mile of intervening carriages. The Conductor did not crane. The Conductor stood at the window with both hands folded behind their back and watched, instead, a fixed point in the middle distance — the place where the gangways would, in the fullness of time, retract. Albion was at the door. Albion did not, also, crane. There were, on this morning, a great many things in the Conductor’s office that were being deliberately not done.

The Conductor said, without turning: “The liaison.”

“On board.”

“Where.”

“Settled in the small reception two carriages aft, taking tea. He was offered a place at the inner office. He declined. He has not made any further requests.”

“Has he asked after Mr Marsh?”

“No, sir.”

A pause. The Conductor’s hands, behind their back, did not move.

“Watch him.”

“I am, sir.”

The Conductor watched the middle distance.

The berth was as they had left it.

That was the first thing. The screen was where it had been. The corridor around it was the corridor it had been — the curtained line of berths, the wooden plaques, the soft pad of carriage life going on. Yann, the warden’s clerk, was where Petris had stationed him. The junior clerk who had brought the screen was nowhere to be seen, but the screen itself had not been moved.

Petris stopped at Yann.

“Has anyone entered.”

“No, Warden.”

“Are you certain.”

“I have been here since you left. I have not moved. The screen has not moved. I have not, however —” Yann hesitated, with the small, careful precision of a man giving an honest answer that he suspected was about to become inadequate — “I have not been behind the screen.”

“You did not check the berth.”

“I did not. The instruction was to ensure no one entered. The screen was sufficient evidence that no one had.”

“Yes, it was. Wait here.”

Yann waited. Petris drew the screen aside. He stepped through. Elliot followed.

The body was there. The body had not moved. The blanket was where the blanket had been; the head was where the head had been; the hand from which Elliot had taken the folded paper was where the hand had been. The body was, on first inspection, exactly as they had left it.

But the room was not.

The shelf above the bunk had been cleared. The books — the three novels, the two manuals, the leather-cased journal — were gone. The tin had been taken. The space on the shelf where the tin had been was visible only by its dust pattern, and the dust pattern had been smudged, recently, by a sleeve.

The chest had been opened. The empty rectangular outline at its base — the missing book or case Elliot had noted earlier — was now joined by the empty outlines of the clothes that had been folded above it. The clothes were not, however, gone; they were piled on the bunk near the body’s feet, in the messy stack of a person who had been searching beneath them with insufficient time to refold.

The coat was gone from the hook.

The lamp had been switched on. It was the only thing in the room that was new.

Petris stood in the middle of the small space and did not, for a long moment, move. Elliot, beside him, also did not move.

“They came through the body’s side of the screen,” Elliot said.

“Yann is a careful boy. He was watching the corridor. The corridor side of the screen has not been entered. The other side opens into Berth Seven, by the layout. Berth Seven is, I happen to know, currently vacant — the previous occupant was reassigned three weeks ago. The wall between Seven and Eight is shared. Whoever did this came in through the empty berth and worked the wall.”

“The wall isn’t a door.”

“The wall, in carriages of this kind, has a maintenance hatch. The hatch is roughly four feet from the floor. It connects the berths for plumbing access. It is not, normally, a route for human beings. It is, however, large enough.”

“Large enough for the journal.”

“And the tin. And the books. And the contents of the chest.”

Elliot looked at the bunk.

He looked at the pile of clothes. He looked at the dust pattern on the shelf — the small scuff where, two hours earlier, his own fingers had set the tin back down with care, and where, in the past two hours, somebody else’s sleeve had smudged the same dust without taking the same care.

He thought of the tuning fork. The small, plain, brass tuning fork in a tin in a berth on a foreign train, recognised by him with a pull he had not been able to ignore. The tuning fork was now somewhere on The Calloway, in someone else’s hand, and the recognition that he had not, when he had had the chance, taken it — that he had returned it to the tin and closed the tin and put it back exactly where it had been — was, he realised, the second moral arithmetic of the morning. The first had been the lie to the warden about the paper. The second was the not-taking of the fork. Both had been, at the moment, defensible. Both were now, in retrospect, the kind of decision a man made when he had been operating from inside a system with confidence in the system’s competence to retrieve what had been left in place.

The system had been faster than him. The system had been faster than the warden. The system had, in fact, been a step ahead of every move they had made.

He did not, this time, log it. He sat with it.

Petris was, by the bunk, lifting the clothes one by one with the methodical attention of a man who knew, before he started, that the searcher had searched first. He set them aside. The space beneath them was empty. Whatever had been there — and there had been something there, by the indentations in the folded fabric — was no longer there.

He turned to Elliot.

“How much did you tell me about that tin.”

“I told you nothing about that tin.”

“What was in it.”

Elliot told him. He told him without omission and without softening, because the moment for omissions and softenings had, on Petris’s clock and on his own, passed. A button. A folded paper, browned. A Meridian chit. A small key on a piece of red string. And a tuning fork.

Petris looked at him. The look was new. It was not the working look. It was, briefly, the look of a man recalibrating his investigation against information that should have been provided to him an hour ago and was being provided to him only now.

“A tuning fork.”

“Yes.”

“You did not mention this.”

“I did not.”

“Why.”

“Because the last time I held a tuning fork in my hand, six months ago and on a different train, it sang to me in a way that the people around me could not hear. The Conductor of my train regards this — and I regard this, on my better days — as a significant fact about me. I did not mention it to you because I did not yet know whether you needed to know, and because the moment for mentioning it had not, in my judgement, arrived.”

“It has now arrived.”

“It has now arrived.”

“And it is gone.”

“It is gone.”

Petris was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the bunk. He looked at the body. He looked at the dust pattern on the shelf where the tin had been.

“Mr Marsh,” he said. “You will, in the time we have remaining on this clock, tell me everything you have not yet told me. You will do this in the corridor, walking, while I send for a carriage warden to seal Berth Seven and the maintenance hatch and to begin the search of the carriage’s adjacent passages. You will not — I trust this is clear — leave anything else out.”

“Clear.”

“And the tuning fork. What did it do, in your hand, six months ago?”

“It rang.”

“Without being struck.”

“Without being struck.”

“And the gramophone. The Meridian’s. The one in your reputation.”

“Yes.”

“It also rang. Without being struck.”

“Not exactly. It played. With a question in the playing that no one else heard.”

Petris drew the screen closed behind them. He stood with his hand on it for a moment, the way a man stands at a threshold when he has decided that the next step requires him to mean it.

“Mr Marsh,” he said. “There are aspects of this investigation that I had been assuming were Calloway aspects. I am, on the basis of what you have just told me, no longer certain that the assumption is correct.”

“No.”

“Two hours.”

Elliot took the timepiece out of his pocket. He looked at it. He returned it to his pocket.

“Two hours flat,” he said.

They walked. The clock kept running.