Chapter 7: The Concert Preparations

The hall took up the forward two-thirds of Carriage 12, and somebody, at some point, had decided that one floor was not enough for it. The upper storey had been taken out. What was left went up and up, past two tiers of balcony, to a ceiling painted the deep blue of a sky that had been told what to do, and from it hung three chandeliers on chains, each turning very slightly, in its own time, with the motion of the train.

The seats were upholstered.

Elliot stood in the doorway and looked at them. There were perhaps three hundred, in curved rows, in red plush that matched the corridor carpet exactly, which meant that a person had chosen it to match, and had been allowed to. Upholstered. He had been to the Old Vic once, on a date that had gone wrong for reasons that had nothing to do with the play and everything to do with his having described the play, in the interval, as “quite long”. The Old Vic had had seats like these. It had not been travelling at forty miles an hour through a country with the wrong-coloured sky, attached at the back, a very long way back, to a goat.

A thin young man in shirtsleeves was setting out chairs on the stage in a crescent, measuring the gap between each with a length of knotted string. He looked up when Albion came in, and then down again, and moved the nearest chair a quarter of an inch.

“Fen,” said Albion.

“Fen,” Elliot agreed, and wrote it on the back of Hartley-Voss’s sheet, under Staging.

In the middle of the crescent, alone, a woman was playing a violin.

She was not practising. Elliot did not know much about music, but he knew the difference between someone practising and someone playing, the way you know whether someone is reading a letter or writing one. She was tall, and grey at the temples, and stood with her feet apart as if the stage had once tried something and she had not forgiven it. The sound came off the instrument clean and bright and went straight up into the painted sky, and the hall held it, and Elliot found that he had stopped walking and did not want to start again.

He had not heard anything like it since the ceiling of the Tesco. He had heard humming, and the woman in Sixty-nine’s wind chime, and Mr Plum’s tools going tap and click behind the curtain, and he had not known until that moment that he had been missing anything.

She finished the phrase. She lowered the violin and looked down at them over it as if they were something that had been delivered to the wrong door.

“Albion,” she said. “And you are?”

“With me,” said Albion.

“Evidently.” Madame Courcier came to the edge of the stage. “You will want to know when I last saw it. I last saw it at the end of my rehearsal, three days before the run-through, at a quarter past five. I wound it down. I took the record off and put it in its sleeve and put the sleeve in the well. I closed the lid. I put it in its case and fastened both catches, and carried it to the shelf myself, because I do not let stagehands carry things that cannot be replaced. I locked the door with my own key.” A pause. “I tried the handle twice. I always try the handle twice.”

It was, Elliot thought, the best handover statement he had heard in either of his lives. He had sat through steering meetings with people who could not have told you what they had done that morning with half the precision she had just used on one afternoon a week ago.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s—really useful.”

She looked at him properly for the first time. Whatever she saw did not displease her as much as she had expected.

“It was to open the second half,” she said. “There is a recording. One piece. It has not been heard aboard this train in a generation, and it was to be heard on the night, at the start of the second half, in this room.” She looked at the place at the front of the stage where, presumably, it would have stood. “I have a centrepiece being made. A likeness. It was to stand beside the instrument — the thing and its portrait, side by side. Now, it seems, we shall have the portrait and a gap.”

“The patisserie’s making it?”

“The patisserie’s assistant. A girl with patience.” Madame Courcier lifted the violin again. “Lotz will tell you she works for him. Lotz is welcome to think so.”

Before they left, Elliot went up the steps at the side of the stage and asked Fen what he had done on the morning of the run-through, in order. Fen, who had evidently been asked by everybody what he had seen, stopped measuring and thought about it.

“Unlocked the door,” he said. “Took the stands. Eight. Carried them out, four and four, and stood them in the corridor. Went back to lock up.” He looked at his string. “That’s when I saw the shelf.”

“What did you do then?”

“Counted the stands,” said Fen. He went faintly pink. “I thought I must have got something wrong. So I counted them again. Eight. Then I went and told Mr Hartley-Voss, and he counted them as well.”

Elliot thanked him and wrote 8 stands (counted ×3), because it was true and because in his experience the things people did when they were frightened were usually more honest than the things they said afterwards.

The kitchens were in the next carriage aft, behind a dining saloon laid for nobody, and Elliot heard them a vestibule early.

He had seen the kitchens at Forty-seven and assumed the First Carriages, being fewer, would make do with something smaller. They did not. What opened in front of him was the back half of the carriage, and a good way into the next, given over to heat and steel: ranges down one side and a long scrubbed table down the middle, coppers on the boil, a wall of hanging pans, and thirty or forty people in white moving between all of it at speed without once touching each other. At the forward end was a counter with a brass bell on it, where plates came to be looked at before they were allowed to leave. Porters went in and out of a service door at the far end with crates on their shoulders. Someone was shouting a list. Someone else was shouting the same list back, slightly louder, to show that it had been heard.

Lotz stood at the counter by the bell. He was short and broad and dense, in an apron so clean that it seemed to be making a point about everyone else’s, and he watched them come up the kitchen with the face of a man who has been told visitors are coming and intends to outlast them.

“I have twenty minutes,” he said. “I have a sauce.”

“We won’t need twenty,” said Albion.

Lotz considered this as if it had been an offer and not a good one.

His key hung on a hook by the bell, on a loop of red string. Elliot looked at it.

“Anyone could take that,” he said.

“Anyone could,” Lotz agreed. “Nobody would. They would have to walk past me.” He put a spoon into something on the range, tasted it, and stared at the middle distance for a moment with an expression of profound disappointment in the world. “And they would have to put it back. Also past me.”

He answered everything else in the same fashion — fully, briefly and with his eyes on the sauce. His people did not go into the storeroom; the punch bowls went in once and came out on the night. He did not go there himself; he had no reason to and no time. Deliveries to the hall went by the service passage behind the rooms, single file, every day. Who? Whoever was free. Every day different. He made a small gesture that took in all thirty of them, and the porters at the far door, and the train in general.

“And the centrepiece,” said Elliot.

For the first time Lotz looked at him and not at the sauce.

“That,” he said, “is the patisserie.”

At the forward end of the kitchen, beside the bell, was a partition that did not quite reach the ceiling, and in it a narrow door. The door was shut. A card hung on its handle on a loop of string, and on the card, in pencil, someone had written SUGAR SETTING.

“She does not open that door while sugar sets,” said Lotz. “Steam gets in. Steam gets in, the sugar weeps, three days go in the bin.” He turned back to the range. “I do not open it either. I am not a fool. Come in the morning.”

It was dark when Elliot came back through the tea car, alone. Albion had seen him to the oak door and stopped there, as if the door were the edge of a map, and Elliot had walked the rest of it by himself, which had felt like being trusted and also like being left.

Birdie was wiping down. She put a cup in front of him without asking and leaned on the counter.

“Voss,” she said.

“How do you—”

“Everybody knows about Voss. The First Carriages have been saying his name since before anybody told them anything was missing.” She wrung out her cloth. “You’ll be seeing him.”

“Tomorrow, probably. He had a key. He does the maintenance. Everybody I talked to today mentioned him without my asking.” Elliot turned the cup round. “Lotz didn’t even say his name. He just did a face.”

“Lotz would.” Birdie poured herself a cup as well, which Elliot had not seen her do before. “Voss is a man people know about. Not because he matters. Because he’s handy. Something goes missing up there, you want someone to look at, and Voss has made a whole career out of being suspectable.”

“Suspectable.”

“It’s a word now. I’ve decided.” She drank. “He lifts things. Little things. A spanner. A bottle out of the kitchen stores at the end of a long week. He’s got a chip on his shoulder about the people he mends for and he wants them to know he’s a bit dangerous, because being a bit dangerous is the most interesting thing about him.” She set the cup down. “He didn’t take your gramophone. It isn’t his size. Voss is a man who steals apples, young man. He doesn’t steal paintings.”

In the morning the enforcer at the oak door wrote Marsh, E. — w. Albion, and Elliot, who had not slept especially well, found that this cheered him up more than it should have.

The patisserie door had no card on it. Albion knocked once, and a voice said “Come in, and shut it,” and they did both.

It was cool inside — properly cool, after the kitchen, as if they had stepped out of one season into another. The room was long and narrow, with a marble slab down its length and a window at the end, and slatted racks floor to ceiling down both walls. On the racks, on boards and plates and squares of waxed paper, stood the concert.

There must have been sixty pieces. Towers no taller than his hand, with stairs of pulled sugar winding round the outside. Roses with each petal turned back separately, so thin the window came through them pink. A swan. A small theatre with its curtain half up and three figures on the stage the size of his thumb. A cello. A harp with strings. A piano the size of a shoe, with the lid propped open. At the far end, on its own board on the end of the slab, stood a gramophone, life-size, its horn a flared bell of amber sugar with the window coming through it, its cabinet a grained brown you would have sworn was walnut. She had even painted the little door of the record well standing a fraction ajar, so that a sliver of the lining showed: a dark, soft, felted green, with a nap to it, as if you could have run a finger along it the wrong way and raised it. Baize.

Somebody had looked very closely at that, Elliot thought. She was good. They were all good — every piece on every rack — and his eye moved on along them and stopped at the height of his chest, where on a square of waxed paper lay a violin about four inches long.

He bent to it. It had four strings. He looked closer. They were sugar, pulled so fine they were finer than hair, and they ran from the tiny scroll over the tiny bridge to the tailpiece, and they were taut. The f-holes had been cut clean. There was a tiny crack in the varnish on the belly, near the bridge, exactly where a real violin might have one.

“How,” he said, “do you get sugar to do that?”

“You ask it nicely,” said the woman at the slab. “For a long time.”

She was young — early twenties — with dark hair pinned back hard, and white to the wrists. She did not stop working while she talked. She was laying a ribbon of something hot and gold across a cold steel bar, folding it, laying it again, and her hands moved without any hurry at all and never seemed to arrive late anywhere.

“Sugar wants to be one thing,” she said. “Glass, or syrup, or nothing. You have to persuade it to be something else, and keep persuading it until it forgets it ever wanted anything different.”

“Marisa,” said Albion.

“Yes.”

“Assistant.”

“Yes.” She glanced at him, then at Elliot, and appeared to decide that Elliot was the easier of the two to talk to, which was not difficult. “Lotz says I work for him. Madame Courcier says I work for her. The sugar doesn’t care.”

Elliot straightened up from the violin. On the wall above the slab, pinned in rows, were drawings. Not sketches, exactly; they were too careful for that. They were elevations — the gramophone from the front, from the side, from above, the horn in section, the crank, the tone arm in three positions — with fine lines running off them to numbers written small in the margin. Heights. Widths. The span of the horn’s mouth. The depth of the cabinet, to the sixteenth of an inch.

He stood in front of them and read them, slowly, for the place where something could go wrong.

“These are the real one,” he said.

“Yes.”

“They’re very exact.”

“Madame Courcier wanted it exact.” Marisa folded the gold ribbon once more and set it aside to cool. “She wants people to look at it and not be sure. For a moment. That’s the commission.”

It was not quite an answer to the question he had been about to ask, which was how she had come to be close enough to the real one to measure it to the sixteenth of an inch. He noticed it was not quite an answer, and noticed her go on working, and let it go. People who made things for a living did not, in his experience, enjoy being asked how they had made them; it was like asking a magician to do the trick slowly. And there was a more interesting thought arriving, and he did not want to drop it.

“Who else has seen these?” he said, coming back to the drawings.

Marisa considered. “Anyone who comes in. Lotz. Madame Courcier. Mr Hartley-Voss, to ask whether it will be ready, every day, twice. The kitchen children, when they think I’m not looking.” She turned her bar of sugar over. “A gentleman from upstairs, once. He said he had been on the committee. He wanted to see the proportions. He stood there for a long time.” She nodded at the drawings. “Where you’re standing.”

“Did he give a name?”

“Upstairs people don’t.”

They stood in the corridor outside the hall afterwards, where the carpet ate everything, and Elliot laid it out, which he would not have done a week ago, and which he was not completely sure he should be doing now.

“If I wanted to steal that gramophone,” he said, “the hard part isn’t taking it. It’s that people would know it was gone. The Lender’s people come aboard after the concert, they ask for it, it isn’t there. Everybody looks.” He heard himself slowing down, which meant he was arriving at something out loud before he knew what it was. “But if something went back on the shelf before then. Something that looked right. Something made by someone who had all the measurements, to the sixteenth of an inch—”

“A copy,” said Albion.

“A copy. Nobody would know the difference. It goes back in its case, it goes off the train, and the real one is—” he made a small gesture forward, towards the quiet upper floors and their staircases and their stools. “With somebody who wanted it very much and stood in front of the drawings for a long time.”

Albion said nothing for a while. Through the doors of the hall the violin had started again: the same phrase as yesterday, climbing, and then going back for it.

“She made those drawings,” said Albion. “For a cake.”

“I know.” Elliot looked aft, towards the kitchens and the patisserie door somewhere beyond them, which had shut behind them with a soft click and stayed shut. “I don’t think she’s the one. I think someone could have used her. Anybody who walked in and looked.” He turned the thought over, and it held. “That’s the trouble with doing a thing that well. Other people can see exactly how you did it.”

“Write it down,” said Albion.

So Elliot took out Hartley-Voss’s three sheets, which were getting soft at the folds, and on the back of the third one, under the triangle he had drawn the day before, he wrote Copy? Swap? Who has seen the drawings? and then, after a moment, A gentleman from upstairs, and underlined upstairs twice, because it was the only part of it that wasn’t a question.