Chapter 7: The Clock

“Pairs,” said Petris, two carriages down the gold.

“I know.”

“You knew in there. Your face did.”

“I’m told it does that.”

Petris let a haulier with a crate go between them and came back level. “The strip from his hand.”

“Three pairs. A number and a stroke and a number.” Elliot kept his eyes on the corridor, three paces ahead, as he had been told to by a girl who had then robbed him. “I don’t know what they are yet.”

“But you have them.”

“I had them before I gave it up.”

Petris walked a whole alcove without answering. It was a cheese alcove, and it smelled like a cheese alcove, and the woman in it was explaining to a Meridian man in a jersey why a cheese that was mostly holes cost more than one that was mostly cheese.

“Good,” said Petris.

Carriage 27 had gone back to itself. The whistle in the middle row had moved on to a new five notes, and somebody had taken the washing in from the upper cords, and halfway down the far side, outside a green curtain, Yann was standing with his back to it and a book shut on his finger, exactly where he had been left the best part of two hours before.

Caro was on her stool outside nine. She had the shirt across her knee again. She was not sewing it.

“Nobody in,” said Yann, before he was asked. “Nobody out. Nobody’s touched the curtain but me, and I’ve not been in.” He considered his own sentence, as he seemed to consider most things, and added: “Two people asked if they could. I lost the key.”

“Good,” said Petris, and put the curtain back.

The berth was as it had been. The lamp turned down. The six books leaning the wrong way. The coat lining out on its hook. Toll on his side with his face to the wall, the blanket smooth, the eye still open on its four inches of nothing.

And the hand.

Elliot had left it half open. He remembered leaving it; he remembered trying to close it, and not being able to, and drawing the blanket up over it instead because there was nothing decent left to do. The blanket had been folded back. The hand lay on top of it, open. Not half open. Open flat, palm up, the fingers laid out straight and a little apart, as a man lays his hand on a table to show he has nothing in it.

Somebody had looked.

He did not say anything. Petris had seen it already. Elliot watched him see it: the warden’s eyes went to the hand, and stayed there, and then went to the curtain at his back, where Yann had stood all that time with nobody passing him.

“Not through here,” said Petris.

“No.”

They both turned, at the same moment, and looked at the wall at the bunk’s foot. On the other side of it was Berth 7.

“Seven’s empty,” said Caro, from her stool, without looking up. “Three weeks. It was Bettany Rusk’s — she’d a cough, nothing catching. A paper came and moved her up into the gold. Better air.” She drew the needle through, at last, as if she had decided the shirt had waited long enough. “She was pleased. You don’t argue with a paper from forward.”

“Who signed it?” said Elliot.

“I didn’t see it. Bettany read it out to the carriage. She said it had the seal.” Caro looked at him then. “They all have the seal.”

Seven’s curtain was drawn. The plaque beside it had been painted over in the green of the frame, recently, and not quite well enough; under the new paint, if you stood at an angle, the ghost of a name still showed. Petris drew the curtain back.

A bunk with nothing on it, bare boards. A shelf with nothing on it. A hook. The floor was swept, mostly, and at the foot of the bunk, where on Toll’s side the chest stood, there was a square of planking a little different from the rest, two feet on a side, with a flush iron ring let into one edge and beside it a square socket the size of a fingertip.

Petris took a key from his ring. It was not a key so much as an iron rod with a square end, and he fitted it to the socket and turned it a quarter, and something under the floor let go. He took the ring and lifted.

Cold air came up. The noise came up with it, the great iron rolling that lived under every carriage, so much louder with a hole in the floor that Elliot felt it in his teeth. Below the hatch there was a space between the floor of the berths and whatever the floor stood on. A cable ran along it with a bulb in a wire cage, swinging. The floor of the space was a mesh grating, and through the mesh, a foot or two down and very fast, the ground went by.

It was four feet high, if that. He had been in one before. He had woken in one.

On the lip of the hatch, on the underside of the planking where an arm would go as somebody lowered himself through, the dust had been wiped in a long curved smear. Not by a hand. A hand left fingers. By a sleeve.

“I’m going down,” said Elliot.

Petris looked at him, and at the hole, and at the size of Elliot, and seemed to arrive at the conclusion that it would go faster than an argument.

“Tell me what you see,” he said. “Before you do anything about it.”

The crawl smelled of grease and old dust and, very faintly, of somebody’s onions, coming down through the boards. He went on hands and knees, because that was the only shape it allowed. The mesh bit his palms. The bulb swung, and the light went back and forth across everything, and in the back and forth he could see the grime on the mesh, grey and thick and soft as felt, the grime of a place nobody went.

Somebody went. There was a track through it. A broad, scuffed lane, the width of a person’s shoulders, made by knees and hands and the drag of a body moving low and carefully, and it ran from under the hatch of Seven, past him, under the wall between the berths. In places it was doubled — two passes, overlapping, the second scuffing the edges of the first.

He followed it under the wall. Three feet on, it stopped beneath another square of planking, overhead this time, with another socket and another ring. He was, he worked out, directly under Berth 8. Directly under the narrow strip of floor between the bunk and the chest, where a man coming up out of the hatch would stand with the bunk at his knee and a dead man’s back at the height of his hand, and a clerk with a book three feet away on the other side of a curtain.

“Same again,” he called up. “Another hatch. Under Eight. Beside the bunk.” He looked at the lane in the grime. “Somebody’s been along here twice.”

There was a pause above him.

“Come up,” said Petris.

He came up. He was filthy to the elbows, and his knees had already begun to tell him what they thought, and he stood in Berth 7 brushing grey off his sleeves and found that he was shaking, very slightly, for the second time that morning. He waited for it to stop. It did not entirely.

“Tell me,” said Petris.

“Once to kill him. Once to look in his hand.” Elliot heard his own voice come out flat, and let it. “They didn’t open it the first time. Whoever it was. They searched the chest and the shelf and the coat and took a box, and they didn’t think about the hand. And then I stood in front of thirty people on a gallery and said there’d been a paper in it.”

“And they came to see if there was another.”

“There wasn’t. I’d had it.” He looked at the hatch, still open, with the ground going past in the bottom of it. “They came up beside him with Yann on the other side of the curtain. They opened his fingers one at a time and laid them out flat. And they went back the way they came, and Yann never heard a thing.”

Petris was silent for a moment.

“Nobody hears the floor,” he said. “On this train. The floor’s always making a noise.”

Caro was standing in the aisle outside Seven when they came out, with the shirt in one hand and the needle still in it. She looked past them at the open hatch, and the square of moving ground at the bottom of it, and at the berth she had lived three feet from for seven years, and the empty one beyond it.

“From there,” she said.

“Yes,” said Petris.

She did not ask anything else. She went back to her stool and sat down on it, and after a moment she moved the stool, a foot, so that it stood squarely in front of the curtain of Seven instead of Eight, and picked up the shirt again, and began, at last, to sew.

In Carriage 74, on the Meridian, Mr Plum had put the watch away.

He had not finished it. The movement lay under its square of cloth on the bench with the cover on, and his tools lay beside it in their roll, and the jointed lamp had been turned off, which at this hour of the morning it never was. He sat on the edge of his bunk with his hands on his knees and looked at nothing in the aisle.

In the middle tier above him, Mr Fixer had been watching him do this for twenty minutes, and had run out of reasons to pretend he wasn’t.

“You’ll wear it through,” said Mr Fixer. “Whatever it is. Sitting on it.”

“Two hours and forty-eight,” said Mr Plum.

“I didn’t ask.”

“You were going to.”

Mr Fixer opened his mouth, and closed it, and took his hat off and looked into it. “Man goes across for a morning,” he said, to the hat. “A morning’s a morning. He’ll walk back over at the bell with his hands in his pockets and his boots full of their straw and say nothing much. Jem’s been up the tea car twice and there’s no word come down, and Birdie’d have word if there was word, because Birdie has word before it’s been said. So.” He put the hat back on. “So that’s all right.”

Mr Plum did not answer that. After a while he reached round behind him to the shelf, without looking, and took down the jam jar with nothing written on it, and held it in both hands in his lap. He did not open it.

Across the aisle Old Satterly lay with his eyes shut, breathing slowly, and if he was listening, he gave no sign.

Back in Berth 8, Elliot looked at the shelf.

The tin was where he had left it, very nearly. It no longer sat in its own clean square. It sat a quarter of an inch to the left, so that a thin pale line of clean shelf showed down one side of it, and on the other side, across the dust where the books ended, there was a soft curved smudge. The same smudge as on the lip of the hatch. Somebody had leaned across the shelf, and a sleeve had dragged, and a hand had picked the tin up and put it down again almost where it had been.

He lifted the lid an inch.

The fork lay on its faded felt. Plain brass, two tines, a stem worn dull. Nobody had taken it.

And the berth leaned. Not much, and not in any way he could have pointed at. His right palm went warm, from the heel of the hand outward, as it had at the first look, and as it had once at a counter in a shop full of clocks, a second before everything began. He let the lid down. He set the tin back in its square, exactly, and took his hand away.

“Whoever came back,” he said, “had a look at this, and left it.”

“Perhaps they didn’t think it mattered.”

“Perhaps.” He turned round. “Warden. The pages in the Hall.”

Petris waited.

“Every page Toll copied from is gone, and not one he didn’t. The only list of which pages he copied is Asha’s day-book. The day-book goes forward every night with her keys. The Hall’s two doors were locked, and nobody forced them.” He said it slowly, so that he could hear it as it went, and nothing in it fell over. “Whoever cut those pages had Asha’s keys. And had read her notes. Last night, with time to do it carefully. And knew this morning that Seven was empty, and where its hatch came up.”

“Seven was emptied three weeks ago.”

“The week he first went to the Hall.”

Petris did not say anything. He looked at the open hand on the blanket, and then he bent and took the edge of the blanket, and drew it up over the hand, and over the shoulder, and smoothed it once, flat, with his palm. It was the first thing Elliot had seen him do all morning that was not strictly necessary.

“You looked at that tin,” said Petris, without turning round, “twice.”

“Yes.”

“The first time, your hand went into your pocket after. As if it had been somewhere it shouldn’t.” He straightened. “Tell me about the tin.”

There was a version of this, Elliot knew, that went on for a long time, and he had not got a long time, and Petris was not a man who would thank him for it.

“There’s a shop on my train,” he said. “Forward. Clocks, mostly, and things nobody wants. There was a tuning fork on a tray. I picked it up, and it rang in my hand. Nobody had struck it. I felt it in my hand first, and then up into the wrist.” He made himself go on. “And the shop stirred. A clock struck out of turn. Something on the counter moved that shouldn’t have. The woman who owned it said it had been on that tray nineteen years and it had never once done that for her.”

Petris’s face did nothing at all.

“And there was a gramophone,” said Elliot. “At a concert. It played, and in the middle of the music there was a question. No words. It asked why I was there. Three hundred people, and it only asked me. Nobody else turned round.” He stopped. “That one I can’t explain any better than that. I’ve tried.”

“And the tin.”

“My hand goes warm. When I open it. Before I’ve touched anything.” He looked at the tin on its shelf. “It doesn’t ring. It just — notices.”

Outside the curtain the whistle went up its five new notes and down again. Somewhere along the carriage a pan was being scraped.

“Without being struck,” said Petris.

“Without being struck.”

Petris considered him for a long moment from under the patient grey brows.

“She asked you when you were born,” he said. “In the court.”

“She did.”

“You had the answer out before she’d finished asking.” He said it mildly, as one might mention a man had a thread on his collar. “It was a good joke. The gallery liked it.” He let that sit, and did not pick it up again, and took out his watch instead.

“An hour and ten,” he said. “To the bell.”

On the Meridian, in a small warm room at the forward end of the administrative carriage, the Conductor sat at a desk with one thing on it.

It was a note. It had come across at the first bell, in the inside pocket of a man in Calloway red, with brass buttons, who had stepped off the forward gangway, given his name as Vell, bowed to Albion as if they were old acquaintances, which they were not, and asked to be shown to the Conductor’s office, which he was. It was folded in three and had been sealed with red wax, and the wax had been broken, and the note had been read once and not again, and had not been put away.

Albion stood inside the door.

“The liaison,” said the Conductor.

“Outer office. Third cup.”

“Has he asked for anything?”

“Clerk’s name. Ivy’s.” A pause. “She told him. Then stamped something.”

The lamp burned without moving. Down the carriage, faintly, thump.

“And from the Calloway?”

“Nothing.”

There were, that morning, a great many things in the office that were being deliberately not done. The note was not being read again. The window, from which by leaning a long way a person might have seen a sliver of red banner and the end of a gangway, was not being leaned towards. Nobody had asked what time it was, though both of them knew to the minute. The Conductor’s hands lay on the desk on either side of the note, one over the other, and did not move towards it.

“Watch him,” said the Conductor.

Albion’s hand went into his pocket, out of habit, and found nothing there to turn.