Chapter 6: The Enforcer

Mr Plum kept his word. He did not shake Elliot, or say his name. He put one hand flat on the frame of the top bunk and left it there, and the weight of it came up through the boards until Elliot opened his eyes.

The lamps were still low. Carriage 74 lay in the short grey interval it had between the last snorer and the first stove, when the whole hall of bunks was quiet under its laundry and you could hear the wheels again. At the end of the row, in the aisle, a man was standing with nothing to do and no sign that this troubled him.

From the middle bunk, without opening his eyes, Mr Fixer said, “Your shadow’s here.”

Elliot sat up carefully. He had learned the ceiling. “Five minutes,” he said to the aisle.

“You have three,” said Albion.

He used two and a half of them. Mr Plum handed up his boots, and then a heel of Doss’s bread, and then — after some thought — a second heel, which Elliot understood was for later and not to be mentioned. Mr Fixer had rolled on to his side by then and was watching Albion over the edge of his blanket with an expression of great friendliness, the way a man might watch a dog he had not been introduced to.

“Listen more than you talk,” he said, very low, as Elliot came down the ladder. “He won’t tell you anything. Watch what he looks at instead.” He paused. “And come back. Plum’s done the clarinet, and the woman in Fifty-two wants it played before she pays for it, and he won’t do it with only me listening. Says I clap in the wrong places.”

“You do,” said the flowered curtain.

They went forward.

It was no shorter the second time. He watched it less hard, that was all. The open carriages went by in their smoke and argument, and then the floor went solid under him and the vestibules began, and somewhere around the markets he found he could tell roughly where he was by his feet: boards, then lino, then the long pink spine of the red runner. Albion walked half a pace ahead and did not look round, and people moved out of his way without seeming to notice they had done it.

The tea car was open, though only just. Birdie was at the urn with her sleeves rolled. She saw Albion, and then Elliot, and filled a tin cup without being asked and set it at the very end of the counter, where a man going past could pick it up without stopping.

Elliot picked it up without stopping. The tea was hot and strong and slightly sweet, and he carried it through three carriages, drinking as he walked, and gave the cup back to a boy at the next vestibule who had evidently been sent to collect it.

“She makes good tea,” he said.

“I know,” said Albion.

Elliot looked at the back of his head for some time after that, but the back of his head had nothing further to add.

In the administrative carriage the clock said ten to eight. Ivy Gell was already at her desk. The tower of paper on her left was a hand shorter than it had been yesterday, and the tower on her right a hand taller, and she brought the stamp down without looking up and said “Six hundred and four” to nobody. They went past her, and past the dark door with no name on it, and through a vestibule into a short bare carriage that seemed to exist only so that something could be at the end of it.

The something was a door.

It was the first real door Elliot had seen on the train, as opposed to the many things that did the job of one. It was oak, banded with iron, hung on hinges as thick as his wrist, and it stood open, folded back against the wall in a way that made it plain it could be shut, and that when it was shut it would stay shut. On a bench beside it sat two enforcers in dark grey with the red band on the arm. Between them, on a sloped stand like a lectern in a church, lay a ledger.

Through the doorway Elliot could see carpet. Not a runner: carpet, from wall to wall, deep red, and light falling on it from lamps behind glass.

One of the enforcers stood. He looked at Albion, and wrote something in the book, and looked at Elliot.

“Name?”

“Elliot Marsh.”

“Carriage?”

“Seventy-four.”

The enforcer’s pen hovered. He looked at Albion.

“With me,” said Albion.

The pen came down. Elliot, who was nearer the book than anyone had perhaps intended, read the line as it dried. It said Albion + 1.

“I did give you my name,” he said.

“You did,” the enforcer agreed, and sat down.

Elliot stood in the doorway and looked back the way they had come, and then forward, and something in him that had nothing to do with the gramophone sat up and took notice.

“Is this the only way through?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no upstairs? At this end?”

“Not here.”

“So everything forward of here — everyone, everything that goes in or out — goes past this door.”

Albion looked at him for a moment longer than he needed to.

“Everything,” he said.

In his old life, Elliot thought, you would call that a gate. You would build your whole delivery plan around it, because a gate was the one place where you could stand still and let the work come to you. It was a comforting thing to find on a train, and he stood on the sill a second longer than was polite, admiring it, before he stepped over on to the carpet.

The carpet took his footsteps and did not give them back.

That was the first thing. The second was the height. The corridor ran down the side of the carriage, wide enough for three to walk abreast, and its ceiling was a long way up — high enough that the lamps along the walls lit only the lower half of it, and the upper half was a warm brown dimness of panelled wood. Halfway along, a narrow staircase went up through that dimness to a floor Elliot could not see. At the foot of it, on a high stool, sat a woman with a lamp and a book, whose whole job, as far as he could tell, was the staircase. She did not look up as they passed. They were not going up.

There were doors along the inner wall, numbered in brass. There were other doors too, the same colour as the panelling and with no handles on this side, and as Elliot watched, one of them opened and a maid with a tray of cups stepped out of the wall, crossed the corridor without a sound, and stepped into another, and it closed behind her as if she had never been. A man in a quilted dressing gown was reading a newspaper in an armchair set in a bay of the corridor for no other purpose than to be sat in. He turned a page. The page was the loudest thing for a carriage in either direction.

Nobody looked at them. Elliot was beginning to understand that the forward end of the train did its not-looking more thoroughly than the back did. At the back, people decided not to see you. Here, it had been decided for them some time ago.

They walked through seven carriages of it. Every vestibule shut behind them with a hush. Every carriage had its stair, and its stool at the foot of the stair, and its person on the stool with a book. The smell was furniture polish and something floral that someone had chosen on purpose, and under it, faint and persistent and rather comforting, the train’s own smell of hot iron and oil, which nobody had been able to choose away.

Carriage 12 was the concert carriage. Elliot knew it before Albion said so, because somewhere beyond the inner wall a cello was playing the same four bars over and over, stopping each time in the same place, like someone going back for a word they could not quite remember.

The corridor here ran past tall double doors into the hall, and then on past a row of smaller doors: GREEN ROOM, ORGANISER, and a third with no name at all. In front of the third stood a tall, narrow man holding a clipboard against his chest with both arms.

“Albion,” he said. “Good. Yes. I have the key. I have all the keys. I mean to say, I have my key, and the record of the others, which is—” He saw Elliot, and his face did a short, anxious sum. “And this is—?”

“With me,” said Albion.

The man looked visibly relieved that this was going to be all the explanation there was. He was perhaps fifty-five, in a dark coat buttoned to the throat, and his hair had been combed so often that morning it had given up having a parting and simply lay down. He held out the hand that was not holding the clipboard, then seemed to realise it was the wrong hand, and changed them over.

“Hartley-Voss,” he said. “Concert organiser. Eleven seasons.” He unlocked the door. “I did ask for it to be dusted. And then of course I couldn’t have it dusted, because — well.” He gestured at the room, and at the fact of the room, and stood aside.

It was a storeroom. Elliot had not been sure what he expected, but it had probably involved more atmosphere. It was a room about ten feet by eight, with shelves on three walls from floor to ceiling, and it smelled of dust and rosin and the inside of instrument cases. Violin cases were stacked on their sides. A cello case lay along the bottom shelf like a man asleep on a bench. Folded music stands leaned in the far corner, and boxes of sheet music filled the rest, each one labelled in a square, careful hand that Elliot guessed, correctly, was Hartley-Voss’s.

The label on the middle shelf of the left-hand wall said GRAMOPHONE (ON LOAN) — CONCERT USE ONLY — RETURN AFTER EACH REHEARSAL.

The shelf was empty. On it, in the thin grey dust of a room that was not cleaned often, lay a clean oblong about two feet by a foot and a half, where something had stood for long enough to keep the dust off. Its edges were sharp. There was no smear at either end of it.

Elliot looked at that for a while. Whoever had moved the case had lifted it straight up, not dragged it. He did not know yet what that told him, except that it had not been done by someone in a hurry.

“In its travelling case,” said Hartley-Voss, from the door. “Always in its case. Madame Courcier returned it after the rehearsal — on the afternoon of the—” He gave a date in the forward reckoning, which meant nothing to Elliot, and then, seeing his face, added, “Three days before the run-through.”

Elliot worked it out against his own count. The gramophone had last been seen on the afternoon he had first sat at Birdie’s counter. It had been found missing the morning after he gave Ivy Gell the stamp. He found he did not like knowing that. It felt like discovering that a stranger had been in the next room the whole time.

“And the run-through,” he said. “Who opened the door?”

“Fen. My staging manager. With his own key. He came for the stands.” Hartley-Voss’s arms tightened round the clipboard. “Nobody had been in. No rehearsals were scheduled. The door was locked. The lock is perfectly sound. I have had the lock looked at by — well, by the person who looks at locks, and it has not been touched.”

“How many keys?”

“Six.”

He read them off the clipboard, though Elliot suspected he could have recited them asleep and occasionally did: himself; Madame Courcier, programme director and first violin; Fen, staging; Lotz, catering, “because the punch bowls live on the bottom shelf, which I’ve never been happy about”; Voss, maintenance — “no relation,” said Hartley-Voss, with feeling — and a master held by the Office.

“And all six were accounted for. Every evening.” He turned the clipboard round so that Elliot could see. “I have a key parade. At the evening bell. Each holder signs that their key has been seen. Every name, every evening, the whole fortnight. Nobody missed. Not one night.”

The sheet was very neat. There were six columns and fourteen rows and a signature in every square.

Documentation, Elliot had once told a succession of junior project managers who did not want to hear it, tells you what should have happened. People tell you what did. He had said it so often that one of them had embroidered it on a cushion as a leaving present, and he had never been sure whether the cushion was a tribute or a complaint.

“When you check the keys,” he said. “Do you see them? Or do people sign?”

Hartley-Voss opened his mouth to say see them. Elliot watched him get there and stop.

“They sign,” he said. And then, because he was an honest man under the clipboard: “I see them sign.”

The office marked ORGANISER was even smaller than the storeroom, and every flat surface in it held a pile of paper, squared at the edges and weighted with something — an inkwell, a tuning fork, a cold cup of tea with a skin on it. Hartley-Voss cleared a chair for Elliot by moving its pile on to another pile, very carefully, as if the two piles might not get on.

Elliot asked for paper. Hartley-Voss looked at the stacks around him, all of which were paper, all of which were evidently spoken for, and then tore three clean sheets off the back of his own clipboard. It cost him something. Elliot saw it go.

“Thank you,” Elliot said, and meant it more than the man could have known.

Then he asked the question he had been wanting to ask since the door, which was not who had keys, but how the concert worked.

Nobody, it turned out, had asked Hartley-Voss this before. People had asked him whether the concert would work, frequently and with an edge, and whether the seating was settled, and whether it was really necessary to have the punch bowls. Nobody had asked him to start at the beginning and say who did what. He began cautiously, like a man testing a floorboard, and then the floorboard held and he talked for twenty minutes without stopping, and Elliot drew.

He did not draw the keys. He drew the work. Programme and music: Courcier. Staging, stands, chairs, the cloths on the stage: Fen. Food, drink, glass, the service on the night: Lotz. Hot water, lamps, the hall’s ventilation, which had views of its own: Voss. Invitations, seating, the order of arrival, which was apparently more delicate than anything that would happen on the stage: Hartley-Voss. Under each heading he put who did the work, and who checked it, and who signed it off, as he always had.

Most of the boxes filled. Courcier checked her own programme and Hartley-Voss signed it off, with what sounded like some difficulty. Fen’s staging was checked by Hartley-Voss. Lotz’s menu went to Hartley-Voss and then, alarmingly, to the Office.

“And the centrepiece?” Elliot said. Hartley-Voss had mentioned it twice in passing, in the tone people use for something that is going to be very nice and is not their responsibility.

“Madame Courcier’s commission. The patisserie does it. Lotz has — nominally—” Hartley-Voss waved a hand. “Well. Nobody signs off a cake.”

Elliot wrote Centrepiece — patisserie with one name under it and nothing in the next two boxes, and drew a small triangle in the margin beside it, which was how he had always marked a risk. In his experience, the item with one owner and no reviewer was always the one that turned up late.

Albion had been standing in the doorway, which was the only place in the room a person could stand. When Elliot looked up, he found Albion looking at the sheet, and not at Elliot, and still looking at it a little after Elliot had noticed.

“Is there a drawing?” Elliot asked. “Of the carriage. The rooms, the doors.”

There was. It hung on the back of the office door in a frame, and Hartley-Voss took it down with both hands. It was headed CARRIAGE 12 — GROUND FLOOR — PROCEDURE IN THE EVENT OF FIRE, and at the bottom, in a firm copperplate, it advised that in the event of fire residents should proceed calmly to the next carriage. Elliot read this twice. It seemed, on a train that did not stop for anything as small as a fire, to be the only advice available, and it had been given with great confidence.

The hall took up most of the drawing. The corridor ran down one side. The green room, the office and the storeroom were three neat oblongs at the aft end, and behind all three, along the back of them, ran a dotted line marked SERVICE.

The storeroom had a door to the corridor. It also had, in its back wall, near the corner, a second short gap in the line, opening on to the dotted one.

“What’s this?”

Hartley-Voss leaned over. “Oh,” he said. “That. Painted shut. Years.”

Elliot went back into the storeroom. He went to the corner where the shelves on the back wall ended against the shelves on the side, and moved two of the folded music stands, and there it was — a low door, not much more than four feet high, painted the same cream as the wall, so many times over that its edges had gone soft, like the edges of a bar of soap. There was a bolt on it, also painted. He had been standing in this room for a quarter of an hour, and he had looked straight at it.

Albion came past him, set his shoulder to the door, and leaned. Nothing moved. Not even the paint.

“Bolted,” he said. “Painted.”

“What’s on the other side?”

“The service passage.” A pause. “Flush, that side. No handle.”

Elliot wrote it down on Hartley-Voss’s paper — back door: painted shut (H-V), bolted (A.) — and put the music stands back where they had been, because they had been there first.

It was past noon when they came out. The cello had stopped going back for its word and found it. Hartley-Voss locked the storeroom door with his own key, and tried the handle, and then stood holding the key for a moment as if he did not know which pocket it lived in.

“May I ask,” he said. He said it to Elliot, which surprised them both. “Only — the programmes. They’re printed. They’ve been printed for a month. They say the gramophone. On the second page, at the top of the second half.” He looked at his clipboard, as though the programmes might be on it. “If it is not to be found, one would have them reprinted. It takes nine days to reprint. One would need to know.”

It was, Elliot realised, the only question anyone had asked him all morning that the man asking it actually needed answered. Everybody else had wanted to know who had done it. Hartley-Voss wanted to know whether to send for the printer.

It was the eighth day of Elliot’s count. Nine days to the concert, then, and nine to reprint.

“Don’t reprint them yet,” said Elliot.

Hartley-Voss let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since the run-through. Then he uncapped his pen, and found a small clear space at the bottom of his clipboard, and wrote down, in his square and careful hand, Programmes — do not reprint (yet).