CHAPTER NINETEEN
Wren
On day fifteen I go back to my own flat in daylight, and it turns out to be the worst hour of the thirty days.
Mari drives. It's eleven in the morning, bright and cold, and Pell Street looks like Pell Street — the laundromat open, Bogdan on the corner having his fourth cigarette, a woman I've never spoken to in three years shaking out a mat on the step next door.
The stairwell smells of tumble dryer sheets and it is the most comforting smell in the world.
And there are footprints on my landing.
They're not muddy; that would be easier. They're dust. There's a fine grey film on the boards outside my door, which is what happens on an unswept landing in a building above a laundromat, and in it there are two feet, side by side, facing my door.
Not walking past. Standing.
I crouch down with my phone torch. Mari doesn't say anything; she just gets her own phone out and starts photographing, because we have between us photographed nine hundred rooms and this is what our hands do.
"Size ten," she says. "Maybe eleven."
"Smooth sole. No tread."
"Dress shoe."
"Yeah." I sit back on my heels. "Mari, look at the dust round them."
Because that's the thing. The prints are clean. Two crisp impressions and no scuff, no smear, no partials leading in or out. Nobody walks up two flights of stairs and lands both feet on a dusty landing without dragging something.
"They didn't walk here," Mari says slowly.
"They walked here and then they cleaned up after themselves," I say, "and then they made two on purpose."
◆ ◆ ◆
We open my door.
Nothing's been taken. That's what I keep saying, on the landing, in the van, at Ilana Street that night, in a voice getting steadily further away from my own body: nothing's been taken.
The telly's there. The laptop's on the kitchen table where I left it, open, dead. My mother's christening spoon is in the drawer. The forty-one dollars in the tin is in the tin.
But somebody has been in my flat.
I know it the way you know a room's been in.
The chair at the kitchen table is at ninety degrees to the table, and I have never in my life pushed a chair in square.
The bathroom cabinet is shut, and the bathroom cabinet does not shut, it has never shut, the hinge has been bent since 2019 and it sits at about four degrees open forever.
It's shut.
"Wren."
"Yeah."
"Come away from there."
"Somebody stood in my bathroom and shut my cabinet," I say. "That's — Mari, that's not a break-in, that's a tidy—"
And then I open the bedroom door, and on my pillow, dead centre, squared to the corners, there's a photograph.
It's of me. From about four months ago. I'm on the step outside the office on Corvin Street with a cup of coffee and my hair scraped up, laughing at something out of frame, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday in July.
Taken from across the road. Long lens. Nothing sinister in the picture at all, which is what makes it unbearable.
On the back, in a small neat copperplate hand, somebody has written:
You've a very good laugh. I'm sorry about all this.
Mari is sick in my kitchen sink.
I stand in my own bedroom doorway and do not move for about ninety seconds.
Then I get out my phone and photograph the pillow, the photograph, both sides, the landing, the chair, the cabinet, and the window latches, because that is what we do, because that is the only thing I know how to do with a room.
◆ ◆ ◆
Bogdan is outside the deli on the corner having what is probably his ninth cigarette, and he sees me come out of my own front door with a face on and he says, "Hey. Hey. You okay?"
"Bogdan, has anybody been asking about me?"
He goes still in a way I do not like.
"Why do you ask this?"
"Because somebody's been in my flat."
"Police, you call—"
"I'm not calling the police." I come over. "Bogdan. Has somebody been asking."
He drops the cigarette and stands on it, and for a second I see a man about thirty years older than the one who gives me a free bun every morning.
"July," he says. "Maybe August. A man comes in, buys a paper, very polite, older sort of gentleman. Asks me, this is a nice street, is it a good street. Ordinary talk. And then he says, the girl who parks the white van, does she live above the laundry."
"What did you say?"
"I say I don't discuss my customers." Bogdan's jaw sets.
"And he says, of course not, quite right, and he buys the paper and he goes.
And I stand here after and I think — I did the right thing, yes?
I said nothing." He looks at me. "And then I think: he did not ask me if she lives there.
He asked me does she live above the laundry.
He already knew where. He wanted to hear me say it. "
"What did he look like?"
And Bogdan opens his mouth, and nothing comes out.
He stands on the pavement outside his own shop for about eleven seconds with his hands out, and I watch a man who has described a shoplifter to a police officer in perfect detail fail to describe a person he spoke to for two minutes.
"Wren," he says at last, and he sounds frightened. "I don't know. I don't — I stood here after he was gone and I could not have told you if he was tall."
◆ ◆ ◆
Cassius arrives eleven minutes after the sun's off the front of the building, which is not possible, and I don't ask.
He stands on the landing and looks at two footprints in the dust for a very long time.
"It's not one of us," he says.
"How do you know?"
"Because whoever stood here couldn't come through your door, and they wanted you to know they'd been, and they were apologising.
" He crouches down. "And because of where the weight is.
Look. Both heels deep, both toes light. That's a man standing still for a long time. Twenty minutes. Half an hour."
"So he stood there."
"He stood there and didn't try the handle, because he knew he couldn't." Cassius stands up. "And then, somehow, your flat got tidied anyway."
"How?"
"He didn't do it. Somebody with a pulse and a key did it, who was paid, and who was handed a photograph and told exactly where to put it.
" He's looking at the door frame, not me.
"Wren, I need you to hear the thing I'm not saying well.
He came here to look at your door. Not to get in.
He knew he couldn't get in before he climbed the stairs, which means he already knew where you lived, which means he has known for longer than the fledgling has been in this city. "
The dryers thump downstairs.
"How much longer?"
"The photograph's from July," he says.
◆ ◆ ◆
And here's the part I don't say to either of them, and can barely stand to say to myself in a box room at three in the morning with a boy band on the ceiling.
You've a very good laugh.
Somebody stood across the road from my office in July and watched me laugh on a step with a coffee, and thought that.
He wasn't casing a building. He was fond.