Chapter 7
The car came up the drive at twenty past four on the first Tuesday in February, and Imogen knew it before it stopped, because there was only one person who parked at that angle.
Astrid Sable got out with a padded envelope in her hand.
"Mrs. Severin."
"Astrid."
"I've got keys. Four of them. The gate fob and three doors." She held the envelope out at arm's length across the roof of the car, like a woman who had rehearsed handing something over. "I should have done it in December. I kept not doing it."
Imogen took the envelope.
It was cold on the drive and getting dark. Astrid was in a jacket with the alarm company's name unpicked off the breast, a little rectangle of unfaded fabric where the patch had been, and she did not get back in the car.
"Do you want to come in," Imogen said.
"No."
"Astrid."
"No, ma'am."
They stood there.
"Is he here," Astrid said.
"Providence till seven."
"Right."
And then Astrid Sable, who had answered every question Imogen had ever asked her in the exact number of words the question required, put both hands on the roof of her own car and looked at the house.
"I've been out here twice," she said. "Since December. Drove up as far as the gate and turned around. I want you to know I did that, because I'm about to do a thing I've been not-doing for eleven weeks, and I'd like it on the record that I didn't come at it easy."
Imogen's hands went cold around the envelope.
"Say it."
"Not out here."
They sat at the island.
Astrid would not take a drink and would not take her jacket off. She put a phone on the counter between them, face down, and left her hand on it.
"When I was let go," she said, "I pulled my own files. That's standard. I keep my records because the day something goes wrong at a site I worked, the first thing that happens is somebody asks me a question I'd better be able to answer."
"All right."
"I pulled the event log for the fourteenth."
The refrigerator came on behind them. Imogen heard it very distinctly.
"I'd seen it before," Astrid said. "On the morning of the fifteenth.
I went in that room at seven twenty-two and I pulled it up on the panel and I read it standing up, and then I went out in the hall and stood there for four minutes and then I went home.
" She turned the phone over. "That's the part I'd like to apologize for and can't, so I'm not going to try. "
She opened it and slid it across.
It was a photograph of a screen. Gray on gray, a fixed-width font, a column of timestamps down the left.
Imogen read it three times before any of it went in.
02:06:58 ZONE 4 GLASS brEAK — MORNING RM
02:07:00 SYSTEM ALARM — INTRUSION — ALL ZONES
02:07:00 SAFE ROOM AUTO-SEAL ARMED — T-90
02:07:19 SAFE ROOM DOOR OPEN
02:07:31 MOTION — MASTER LANDING
02:07:38 OCCUPANCY 2
02:07:41 SAFE ROOM SEAL — MANUAL — INTERIOR PANEL
02:08:30 [AUTO-SEAL — NOT REACHED]
"What is this," Imogen said.
Her voice came out completely normal. That was the strangest part of the whole evening, and she would think about it afterward: that her voice did not change at all.
"That's the event log."
"What is that line."
"Which one."
"You know which one."
Astrid put her forearms on the counter.
"At two oh seven forty-one," she said, "somebody pressed the seal on the inside panel. It's a physical button. It's under a cover and the cover's spring-loaded so you can't knock it with your elbow. You have to lift it and push."
"And the automatic—"
"Would have gone at two oh eight thirty.
Forty-nine seconds later. The log records that it never got there, because the room was already shut.
" Astrid's voice was flat and level and she did not look away once.
"That's what the last line means. It means the timer didn't fire, because there was nothing left to fire. "
The refrigerator went off again.
"Anyone could have pressed it," Imogen said. "She was in there."
"Yes, ma'am."
"She could have pressed it."
"She could have," Astrid said. "I'm not going to tell you who pressed it, because the log doesn't say and I won't guess at it in your kitchen.
" A pause. "I'll tell you what the log does say, which is that at oh seven thirty-eight the room registered two occupants, and at oh seven forty-one somebody lifted a cover and pushed a button.
Three seconds. And the door takes about four seconds to come across. "
Imogen looked at the phone.
02:07:31 MOTION — MASTER LANDING.
She had been at the top of the stairs at thirty-one. She remembered coming around the corner. She remembered the white rectangle on the floor of the landing getting narrower.
"The motion at thirty-one," she said.
"That's you."
"And the panel inside the room—"
"Shows every sensor in the house. It's a plan view, it's four feet from the button, and it's lit.
" Astrid stopped. She took a breath that Imogen heard.
"That's the one I can't get past, and I've tried.
I'm not going to sit in your kitchen and tell you what a man did or didn't see on a screen at two in the morning with a siren going. I can't know that and neither can you."
"But."
"But it was on the wall," Astrid said, "and it was showing motion on the landing, and the button is a thing you have to want to press."
Here is what Imogen did next, which she would never be able to explain and never entirely forgave.
She said, "Thank you for bringing this."
She said, "Would you email it to me."
She walked Astrid Sable out to the car in the dark and thanked her again and said something about the road being icy at the bend, and she stood on her own drive and waved — waved — as the taillights went down toward the gate.
Then she went back in and put the kettle on.
Then she stood in her kitchen with her back to the sink for forty minutes while the kettle boiled and cooled and she did not make anything with it, and did the arithmetic.
Forty-one seconds.
Not ninety. She had been carrying ninety since the fifteenth of November.
She had said it to Siobhan on the fifteenth — it's automatic, ninety seconds and it goes — and to Nuala Reddington in December, and to a man at the Ingersoll dinner who had not asked.
She had defended it. She had been angry at Siobhan on his behalf about it.
Forty-nine seconds left.
That was the number. Not forty-one; forty-nine.
Forty-nine seconds is a long time. Forty-nine seconds is enough to put your head out a door and shout a name.
It is enough to look at a lit plan view four feet away.
It is enough to say wait, or hold on, or are you sure, or any one of nine hundred sentences in the English language.
He had said where's Imogen. He had said that first. He had told her that in the study on the fourteenth of December with the rain coming down, and she had thought at the time that it was the best thing about him.
And then he had been told, and then he had lifted a spring-loaded cover, and pushed.
That was the ninety seconds. That was the whole of it.
She turned it over on the counter of her own kitchen and found that it was not, in the end, very different from what she had already known — he took Fiona's word; she had known that since the landing.
The shape of the thing was identical. It was only that the version she had been living in had him standing helpless while a machine did it to both of them, and the true version had him doing it with his hand.
That was bad.
It was not the bad part.
The bad part arrived at about minute twenty-five, and it arrived the way those things do, sideways, dressed as something ordinary.
She thought: I'll ask him tonight.
And then she thought: ask him what, exactly?
Because he knew.
There was no world in which he did not know.
A man does not lift a cover and press a button at two in the morning and then fail to remember it.
And even if the night itself had come apart in his head — even if you granted him that, and she found she was still granting him things, at minute twenty-five, which told her something about herself she did not enjoy — he had been in that room for four hours and seven minutes afterward with that panel on the wall.
And on the fifteenth of November Astrid Sable had gone into that room at 7:22 and read the log and come out with her jaw set.
And in December Astrid Sable's contract had ended.
And Draycott's people had looked at it.
Imogen put both hands flat on the counter.
Do you want her back? Say the word and I'll call her tonight.
He had said that at this table. He had said it with a knife in his hand and his face doing the patient braced thing, and she had heard the shape of an offer made in the certain knowledge it would not be taken, and she had said no, it's fine, and she had lain awake that night telling herself she was taking a good winter apart because a woman's contract ended.
But that was not the bad part either.
The bad part was the fourteenth of December.
The rain on the study window. Both lamps on. Her with a catalog on her knees she was not reading.
I want to hear it. All of it. Start to finish.
And he had given it to her. Slowly, and badly, and looking at the floor between his shoes, and she had sat there and taken it like communion.
The door shuts at ninety seconds. It's on a timer off the trip.
Every word of that was true.
That was what she could not get out from under, standing in the kitchen at five past five in February with a cold kettle.
He had not lied to her. She went through it sentence by sentence, twice, and there was not one false statement in it anywhere.
He had told her a true thing about how the door worked, in a room where she had asked for everything, and he had let the true thing stand in the place where the other sentence went.
And then he had gone on being wonderful for seven weeks.