‘Good morning,’ he said.
One black hand detached itself from the shaft and rose mechanically to the peak of his hat. Turner strode to the corner where the cartons of whisky were stacked. He ripped open the top carton, pulled out a bottle, tore off the lid. The old man was mumbling, shaking his head, still staring at the books.
‘Here,’ said Turner softly, ‘have a drink,’ and held the bottle forward into the old man’s line of sight.
Listlessly he let the iron fall, took the bottle and held it to his thin lips while Turner charged past him to the kitchen. Opening the door, he shouted at the top of his voice.
‘De Lisle!’
The echo carried wildly into the deserted street and outwards to the river.
‘De Lisle!’
Even before he had returned to the study, the lights were going on in the windows of neighbouring houses.
Turner had pulled open the wood shutters to let in the new daylight, and now the three of them stood in a baffled group, the old man blinking at the broken books and clutching the whisky in his shaking hand.
‘Who is he?’
‘The boilerman. We all have them.’
‘Ask him when he last saw Harting.’
The old man did not immediately reply, but instead, waking again to the whisky, drank a little more, then passed it to de Lisle, whom he appeared instinctively to trust. De Lisle set it on the desk beside the silk handkerchief and quietly repeated his question, while the old man stared from one to the other, and then at the books.
‘Ask him when he last saw Harting.’
At last he spoke. His voice was timeless: a slow peasant drawl, the murmur of the confessional, querulous yet subjugate, the voice of an underdog in the hopeless quest for consideration. Once he reached out his black fingers to touch the smashed beading of the bookcase; once he nodded towards the river, as if the river was where he lived; but the murmur continued through his gestures as if it came from someone else.
‘He sells tickets for a pleasure cruise,’ de Lisle whispered. ‘He comes at five in the evening on the way home, and first thing in the morning on the way to work. He stokes the boilers, does the dustbins and the empties. In summer he cleans the boats before the charabancs arrive.’
‘Ask him again. When did he last see Harting? Here’ – he produced a fifty mark note – ‘show him this – say I’ll give it him if he tells me what I want to know.’
Seeing the money, the old man examined Turner carefully with his dry, red eyes. His face was lined and hollow, starved at some time and held up by the long cords of his shrivelled skin, and the soot was worked into it like pigment into canvas. Folding the banknote carefully down the centre he added it to the wad from his hip pocket.
‘When?’ Turner demanded. ‘Wann?’
Cautiously the old man began putting his words together, picking them one by one, articles in the bargain. He had taken off his hat; a sooty stubble covered his brown skull. ‘Friday,’ de Lisle quietly interpreted. His eye was on the window and he seemed distracted. ‘Leo paid him on Friday afternoon. He went round to his house and paid him on the doorstep. He said he was going on a long journey.’
‘Where to?’
‘He didn’t say where.’
‘When will he come back? Ask him that.’
Once more, as de Lisle translated and Turner caught the half-familiar words: kommen… zurück.
‘Leo gave him two months’ pay. He says he has something to show us. Something that is worth another fifty marks.’
The old man was glancing quickly from one to the other of them, fearful but expectant, while his long hand nervously explored the canvas tunic. It was a sailor’s tunic, shapeless and bleached, and it hung without relation to his narrow frame. Finding what he was looking for, he cautiously rolled back the lower hem, reached upward and detached something from his neck. As he did so he began murmuring again, but faster than before, nervous and voluble.