Dominic's POV
I push Serena behind me and cross the kitchen in three strides.
The shoe is attached to a woman.
She's lying on her side on the linoleum, small as a bird, in a quilted dressing gown and one orthopedic shoe, with her white hair spread on the floor and a thin dark thread of blood running from her temple into a puddle of spilled tea. A blue china pot lies in pieces beside her. Her glasses are a few feet away, folded neatly, as if someone had set them down.
"Hazel."
I put two fingers against her throat.
Thin. Slow. Steady as a clock.
"She's alive."
"Thank God." Serena is beside me, white to the lips, with her hand pressed flat over her mouth. "Is she breathing?"
"Yes."
"Call an ambulance."
"The phones..."
"Dominic!"
Above us, in the ceiling, a board creaks.
It's a very small noise. A soft, deliberate, heavy tread, the sound of a man who knows he's been heard and is deciding what to do.
I put my finger to my lips.
I get to my feet.
There's a rolling pin on the counter, wooden, old-fashioned, heavy as a club. I pick it up. It's absurd. It's the most ridiculous weapon in the world, and it feels exactly right in my hand.
I mouth, Stay.
She mouths back, No.
I mouth, Please.
She rolls her eyes and drops down beside Hazel, and puts a folded tea towel under the old woman's head.
The staircase is steep and narrow. I climb it with my back to the wall, one step, then another, every tread complaining under my boot. At the top there's a landing with three doors. Two are shut. The third is half open.
A bedroom.
Through the gap I can see a wardrobe with its doors flung wide. A drawer, upside down on the quilt. A suitcase, spilled. And a pair of broad shoulders in a navy windbreaker, bent over a bureau, tossing papers aside with a gloved hand.
Drummond.
He doesn't hear.
I take two steps in.
"Looking for something?"
He spins.
For a heartbeat we stare at each other across the bed. He's a bigger man than I remember, thick-necked, flat-faced, with small close-set eyes and a mouth like a slot. He has a cut on his knuckle. He has a crowbar in his right hand.
He grins.
"Mr Hale," says Ellis Drummond. "What a pleasure."
"Put it down."
"I don't think I will."
"The police are on their way."
"No, they aren't." He hefts the crowbar. "Your phone's in a rest stop in Connecticut, and the old lady's on a floor, and you're a very long way from home."
"You hit her."
"She fell."
"You hit her."
"She was in my way."
I don't remember moving.
I remember a roar in my ears. I remember the rolling pin in my hand, and the sound it makes against bone, and a flash of white, and the crowbar clanging off the bedpost. I remember a hand like a ham closing on my collar and slamming me back against the wardrobe.
The room spins.
A fist hits my ribs.
I go down on one knee.
He's very strong. He's trained. He has twenty years of other people's bad days in his shoulders. He hits me again, hard, in the stomach, and I feel something crack, and the air goes out of me in a long, ugly whoop.
"Easy, easy," he says, almost kindly. "It's nothing personal."
He lifts the crowbar.
"Dominic!"
It's Serena.
She's in the doorway, with a cast-iron frying pan in both hands.
She swings it like a tennis racquet.
It hits Drummond's head with a sound like a church bell.
He staggers.
He turns.
He gapes at her with an expression of enormous, slow, outraged surprise. A thin trickle of red slides out of his hair, down his forehead, into one eye.
"You," he says.
"Me," says Serena.
She hits him again.
He goes down like a tree.
For a moment there is no sound in the house but the ticking of a clock and our two breaths.
Serena stands over him with the frying pan still raised. Her hair is wild. Her face is white. There's a streak of soot on her cheek and a look in her eyes I've never seen, a fierce, shining, magnificent ferocity, like a woman at the helm of a storm.
"Is he dead?" she says.
"No."
"Pity."
I laugh.
It hurts. It turns into a groan. I roll on to my back and lie on Hazel Greaves's floral carpet, holding my ribs, laughing like an idiot, while my wife stands over a man in a windbreaker with a frying pan and says, "I've wanted to do that for a month."
***
Hazel Greaves wakes forty minutes later, in her own armchair, with a cold compress on her temple and a mug of sugary tea in both hands.
The ambulance has been and gone.
I've told the paramedics she fell. They don't believe me. But Drummond is trussed like a turkey in the cellar with two of Hazel's own washing lines and a roll of duct tape, and Serena has called a man named Torres, and a woman named Cho, and the ambulance men have gone away with a promise of statements by noon.
"I'm perfectly well," says Hazel.
"You've got a concussion."
"I've had worse. I was a bookkeeper at Ironbridge for thirty-one years." She sips. "Do you know what that does to a person?"
"What?"
"Makes them immune to everything." She looks at Serena. She has bright, sharp, bird-black eyes, in a face like a walnut. "You're Walter's girl."
Serena goes still.
"How..."
"I'd know your chin anywhere." Hazel sets down the mug. "He used to carry your photograph in his pocket. You were nine. On a bicycle. You'd fallen off it and were apologising."
Serena makes a sound.
It's the smallest sound in the world.
"I thought you were dead," says Hazel. "They said you were dead. I put a lily on the memorial. I'm not sentimental. I just thought, somebody ought to."
"I wasn't."
"I can see that."
"I'm sorry I didn't write."
"You'd have been a fool if you had." Hazel's face softens. "Sit down, girl. You look like you're going to fall over."
Serena sits on the footstool.
I stand by the window with my arm clamped round my ribs.
"Mrs Greaves," I say. "Do you have something for us?"
She turns her head.
Her eyes rest on me, level and shrewd.
"You're Charles's boy."
"Yes."
"You have his shoulders."
"People say."
"Well, then." She nods, with a kind of grim satisfaction. "I suppose it's time."
She points a gnarled finger at the floor.
"Cellar. Behind the preserves. Third shelf from the bottom. Peaches, 1998. There's a tin box behind the jar. Don't drop it."
***
It takes me four minutes to find it.
The cellar is cold and dim and smells of earth. Drummond lies against the far wall, snoring, bound hand and foot. I step over him. The shelves run floor to ceiling, jars of pickles, jams, tomatoes in neat rows, each labelled in a spidery hand.
Peaches. 1998.
I move the jar.
Behind it, in the gap, is a dented black tin with a rusted hinge.
I carry it up the stairs and put it on the kitchen table.
Serena has come in. She stands beside Hazel's chair with a hand on the old woman's shoulder. They both watch me.
I lift the lid.
Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, is a ledger.
It's thick, leather-bound, bruised and stained, the corners worn to velvet. A label on the spine in faded gilt: IRONBRIDGE PENSION TRUST. OFFICE COPY. 2011 to 2013.
I open it.
Page after page of neat, dense columns. Numbers. Dates. Transfers. And down the margin, in a bold, slanting, black-ink hand, a running commentary: dates, questions, little crosses, in the way of a man who has gone through a book with a pen and a very troubled mind.
Why this account?
Who authorised?
No such trustee.
A.B.?
Ask W.
I read the first page.
I read the second.
I turn another, and another, and the room has gone silent, and the whole of the world has narrowed to a black line of ink on a white page, because I know it.
I know it.
I've known it since I was six years old, tracing the letters on the flyleaf of a toy boat.
I put my hand flat on the open book.
"Dom?" says Serena.
I can't speak.
"Dom. What is it?"
I turn the ledger round and slide it across the table so that she can see.
At the bottom of the page, in that black, slanting, unmistakable script, are three words, followed by a date eleven days before her father died.
God forgive me.
C. A. Hale.