CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Wren
Day eleven is a job on Cordell Heights, and I want to put the whole of it down, because it's the last ordinary day of my life and because nobody who hasn't done this work has any idea what it actually is.
Elderly gentleman. Eighty-four. Found by his daughter on the Sunday, dead since about the Wednesday. Ground-floor flat in a low-rise with a communal garden that somebody used to care about.
We get there at nine. Mari does the walk-through with me, which she doesn't have to and always does.
"Bedroom," she says.
"Bedroom."
"Carpet's coming up."
"Carpet's coming up and so's the underlay and I want to see the boards before I quote her." I put my torch on the skirting. "And that wall's plasterboard, so if it's gone through the paper we're cutting to the stud."
"She's not going to be able to pay for the wall."
"I know."
"Wren."
"I know, Mari."
The daughter's name is Bernadette and she's about fifty-five and she's standing in the hall in her coat because she cannot go into the room and cannot leave the flat, which is an extremely specific place to be and I have seen maybe two hundred people be in it.
"I should have come on the Thursday," she says.
"Okay."
"I usually come on the Thursday. I had a thing at work. I nearly came anyway and then I thought, no, I'll come Sunday and take him to the garden centre, he likes the—" She stops. Starts again. "I should have come on the Thursday."
Here's what you don't do. You don't say it wasn't your fault. You don't say he wouldn't have wanted you to feel bad. You don't say at least it was quick, because you don't know, and because at least is the worst two words in the English language.
"He'd have been on his own on the Thursday too," I say.
"He was on his own from about the Wednesday teatime.
There's nothing you'd have got to in time on the Thursday morning, and I'm telling you that because you're going to run it in your head for about two years and I'd rather you ran the true version. "
Bernadette looks at me.
"Are you allowed to say that?"
"There's nobody here who could stop me."
She makes a sound that's about forty per cent a laugh, and then she cries for a bit, standing in a hall in her coat, and Mari fetches her a chair from the kitchen and puts it behind her without saying anything so that when her legs go there's something there.
◆ ◆ ◆
Then we work, and it takes nine hours.
We take the photographs off the walls first. All of them, every room, and we put them in a box in the kitchen, because in about a month Bernadette is going to want them and she is not going to want to remember them coming off the wall in the middle of all this.
There are eleven. There's a wedding one from about 1968 and one of a boy in a school blazer who is presumably Bernadette's brother and who is not, I notice, at the flat today, and I don't ask.
We do the ceiling, then the walls, then the floor, then the trim.
The carpet comes up in strips and goes in bags.
The underlay goes in bags. The boards are stained through in an area about the size of a door and I get down with the enzyme and the brush and do it three times, and Mari does the skirting and the plasterboard and does not cut to the stud, because she's checked and it hasn't gone through the paper, and when she tells me she's grinning like she's won money.
At about one we eat sandwiches in the communal garden with our suits half off and hanging round our waists, sitting on a wall, and Mari says: "So when are you going to tell me about the club."
I choke on a sandwich.
"Mahal, you came back on Wednesday night at one in the morning smelling of somebody else's cologne and you have not said one word about it since, which is not a thing you can do to me."
So I tell her. All of it. The office, the pens, the five deaths, they wanted a cleaner to find it.
Mari puts her sandwich down.
"Okay," she says. "That's not — Wren, that's not a plot.
That's not somebody wanting a thing and going after it.
That's a man doing an experiment on a city.
" She's gone pale. "He set a fledgling loose to find you and he didn't care what it went through.
That's four people. That's a boy in a basement who didn't know his own name. "
"I know."
"And you went to a nightclub on your own to ask about it."
"I know."
"Don't do that again."
"Mari—"
"I'm not saying it as your friend, I'm saying it as the other name on the licence," she says. "If you get eaten I inherit an eight-year-old van and forty thousand dollars of insurance liability, and I will be so cross."
◆ ◆ ◆
We finish at six. We put the photographs back on the walls.
That is not in the contract, has never been in the contract, and adds forty minutes to every single job we do, and it is the reason I started this company.
Because when I came back to my mother's flat after the hospice, somebody had taken all her pictures down and stacked them in the hall, and I stood in a room that had been very thoroughly cleaned by professionals and I could not tell you which was worse.
Bernadette comes back at half six.
She stands in the doorway of the bedroom for a long time. Bare boards, sealed, dry. A window open. No smell at all, of anything.
"It smells like nothing," she says.
"That's the idea."
"I thought it would smell of — I don't know. Cleaning."
"That's a different trade," I say. "We're not making it clean, we're making it not-a-room-where-something-happened. Chemicals just tell you somebody was in here doing this."
She turns round and looks at me.
"How do you do this," she says. "How do you do this every day."
And I say what I always say, which is somebody has to and I'm good at it, and it is true, and it is not the actual answer.
The actual answer, which I have never once said out loud to a client, is that I am the only person in every one of these rooms who is still functioning.
That's the whole job. Everyone else in the building is falling over and I'm the one with the clipboard, and I have been doing it since I was twenty-two and my mother got her diagnosis and somebody in that family had to keep making phone calls.
I'm very good at it.
I've never once been on the other side of it.
◆ ◆ ◆
His car is at the end of Cordell Heights at half seven with the engine off.
Not at the flat. Not in the car park. At the end of the street, a hundred and forty feet from the door, which is exactly as close as a man can get while still being able to say he kept to a ruling.
Mari sees it before I do. She takes the van keys out of my hand.
"I'll do the transfer station," she says. "Go on."
"Mari—"
"Wren. I have watched you go through nine hours of somebody's worst week and then put eleven photographs back on a wall, and you are grey." She shoulders past me with a bag in each hand. "Go and be sad at the dead man. He's parked like a coward and it's the most romantic thing I've ever seen."
I walk up the street and he winds the window down and doesn't get out.
"You're not supposed to be here," I say.
"I'm a hundred and forty feet away in a public road."
"That is the most lawyer sentence—"
"I've had four hundred years and a lot of arrangements." He looks at me properly then. "You've been in there nine hours."
"Yeah."
"How was it?"
And I open my mouth to say fine, which is what I have said at the end of every single job for four years, to Mari, to my mother, to a boyfriend in 2019 who eventually left partly because of it.
And what comes out is: "He was on his own from the Wednesday and his daughter came on the Sunday and I had to tell her there was nothing she'd have got to in time, and she believed me, and I don't actually know if it's true."
Cassius is quiet.
"Is it likely?" he says.
"Probably. Yeah. Probably."
"Then you gave her the likeliest version and you did it in a hallway while she was standing up in her coat," he says. "That's not a lie, Wren. That's triage."
I stand on a pavement in Cordell Heights at half seven in the evening with my hands in my pockets and I cry, for about ninety seconds, about a man I never met.
He doesn't get out of the car. He doesn't say anything. He puts his hand out through the open window, palm up, on the sill, and leaves it there — not reaching, just available — and after a while I put mine in it, and his fingers are cold, and neither of us says a word until I've finished.
"Right," I say eventually. "That was mortifying."
"Yes."
"You're supposed to say it wasn't."
"You'd have known I was lying," Cassius says, "and I'd have wasted a lie."