Chapter 9: The List

Casper Noll sat at a desk on which everything had been squared to the edges, as if he had been told years ago that the desk would be inspected and had been waiting for the inspection ever since.

He was perhaps twenty-five, thin, ink to the second knuckle, and he looked up when Albion stopped in front of him with the expression of a man who has heard a floorboard creak in an empty house. Behind him, the administrative carriage was only beginning its day: drawers rattling in their runners, a clerk at the far end sharpening pencils with the slow care of somebody who intended to do nothing else for as long as he could get away with it, and somewhere halfway down, a steady thump, and a voice saying “A thousand and six.”

“The corridor log,” said Albion. “Carriage 12. The concert rooms. Two weeks.”

Casper’s eyes went from Albion to Elliot and back.

“The log is — that is, the copies of the log — are held by the Office. Yes. The hall porter in Twelve keeps the book, and a fair copy comes to us at the end of every day, as a courtesy, because the First Carriages—” He stopped, and appeared to decide that the end of that sentence was not his to say. “They’ve only just been received,” he said instead. “They’d been in a crate. With everything else. Miss Gell has been very thorough.”

He went to a cabinet without needing to look for it and came back with a buff folder, and put it on the desk between them, and then kept one hand on it a moment longer, as if it might need reassuring.

“I should say,” he said. “Before you rely on it. The log records the people who sign it. If a person goes down that corridor and signs, they’re there. If they go down it and don’t, they aren’t.” He took his spectacles off, cleaned them on his cuff, and put them back, which seemed to be how he got himself over a fence. “The log is not a camera. It is a record of compliance, and compliance is voluntary.”

Elliot looked at him with something close to love.

Casper seemed to feel it, and to find it alarming. He looked at Elliot properly for the first time — at the open-carriage boots, the shirt dried stiff from yesterday’s laundry steam — and something in his face changed.

“You’re the — Seventy-four,” he said. “The stamp.”

“I just asked where it had been.”

“Everybody in this carriage asked where it had been. For three months.” Casper glanced down the carriage towards the steady thump of Ivy Gell’s desk. “Nobody asked her. I mean — nobody asked her to look.” He moved the folder an inch closer, which in Casper seemed to be the equivalent of throwing open a gate. “My lodging transfer was in that pile. Four hundred and nine.”

“Can I have some paper?” said Elliot. “And somewhere to sit?”

He built a grid.

It was the oldest trick he had. Names down the side; days across the top; one square for every person on every day, and in the square, when and for how long and why. It did nothing clever. It just put everything where you could see it at once, so that the gaps showed up as gaps instead of hiding in among the things people had told you.

The days gave him trouble at first. The log was dated in the forward reckoning, which meant nothing to him. He headed the columns with its dates anyway, and kept his own numbers beside them in his head, where they lived: six days back, five, four, and on, through one, which was the day he had climbed out from under a pig, to six, the morning of the run-through. It was, he reflected, the sort of thing that happened when you started counting from your own death.

Then he filled the squares.

Madame Courcier came on −4, −1 and 3, for her rehearsals, an hour and a half each, signed in a bold upright hand that leaned on the pen. Fen came on 6, at seven in the morning, stands, and that was the end of the column, because that was when the shelf had been found empty. Lotz’s people came every single day, between ten and noon, and signed kitchen, sometimes with a name and sometimes without, which Elliot let go, because he had stood in that kitchen and seen thirty people who were all, in a sense, kitchen. Voss signed in every morning and out every afternoon, maint., in a hand that seemed to resent the pen. A piano tuner called Ambrose came on day 1. On day 5 the handwriting of the whole book changed to capitals, and stayed in capitals for a day, and then changed back; Casper, consulted, said that the hall porter, Gedge, had had a cold, and his nephew had kept the book, and that his nephew was known to write everything in capitals because he felt it was more official. Nobody at all had signed on day 5 between noon and four, which might have meant that nobody went down the corridor, or might have meant that Gedge’s nephew went for his dinner. Elliot wrote both down. Hartley-Voss came every day, often three or four times, and wrote his purpose out in full each time — Inspection of storeroom (routine), Inspection of storeroom (following inspection) — so that the grid began to fill with him the way a margin fills with one anxious person’s notes.

On day −3, in Hartley-Voss’s square handwriting, was a line that said Hartley-Voss + 1 (catering). In at ten past three. Out at twenty to four.

Elliot sat back.

There were very few things in his old working life he had truly hated. He had disliked a great many — people who replied to all, meetings that could have been a paragraph, the word synergy — but hatred he had reserved for a small number of deserving targets, and high among them, very nearly at the top, was the unnamed attendee. And guest. Plus one. He had once spent an entire afternoon on a construction site in Avonmouth establishing who Dave +1 on the site-access list had been, and it had turned out to be Dave’s brother, who was not insured, and who had been standing on the scaffolding. He thought, too, of the oak door, and an enforcer’s pen, and Albion + 1, and found he still minded.

He drew a ring round the square. Then he made himself go on, because one interesting square was how you stopped seeing the rest of the grid.

On day 4 — inside the window, the day after Madame Courcier’s last rehearsal — a single entry in a small, very correct hand: Drummond. C.9 / No. 4. Enquiry. In at two o’clock. Out at twenty to three.

Forty minutes. On an enquiry. In a corridor with nothing in it but three doors and a carpet.

He turned the grid round so that Albion could see it, and put his finger on the name.

Albion looked at it for a moment.

“Collector,” he said.

“Of?”

“Instruments. Things.” A pause. “Upstairs. Carriage 9.”

“He was on the committee,” said Casper unexpectedly, and then looked as if he wished he had not. “The concert committee. Until last loop. There was a — he and Mr Hartley-Voss disagreed about the programme. I only know because the minutes came through here. He was—”

“Removed,” said Albion.

“Removed how?”

“Not gently.”

Elliot wrote Drummond at the bottom of the third of Hartley-Voss’s sheets, under a gentleman from upstairs, and drew a line from one to the other, and then, because he had been doing this long enough to distrust a line he wanted to draw, put a question mark on it.

He asked for the gramophone next. Not where it was: what it was. Where it had come from. Who had held it before, and when, and how long. Things had pasts, and the past was where the people who had wanted them were kept.

Casper looked at Albion. Albion looked at nothing.

“The loan itself isn’t with the Office,” said Casper. “The Conductor holds it. Personally.” He hesitated. “But there are inventories. Older ones. If it was ever aboard before, it might — I’d have to go back.”

He went back. It took him most of an hour, and he returned from the far end of the carriage, where the cabinets became a door and the door became somewhere Elliot was not invited, carrying two ledgers against his chest, one very old and one only fairly old, and set them down side by side as if introducing two relatives who had not spoken in years.

The very old one was bound in cracked green leather, and the hand inside it was one Elliot had not seen anywhere in the Office. It was headed Inventory of the Conductor’s Household, and the dates in its margins were in a count he did not recognise.

“That’s the old reckoning,” said Casper, when Elliot asked. He said it carefully. “The Office’s count starts again. From the — from when the present Conductor. Everything before that is in the old one.”

“How long ago?”

“Twenty-six loops.”

Thirty years, near enough. Elliot turned the pages. Furniture, silver, linen, a clock, one telescope (brass, damaged), pictures by the dozen. And halfway down a page, in the same old hand: Gramophone, brass horn, walnut cabinet, with case and records.

The line had been struck through, once, neatly, with a ruler. Beside it in the margin, in different ink and a different hand, someone had written two words. Dispersed. The transition.

“What was the transition?”

Casper’s face did something complicated and quick, the face of a man who has been asked to step over a line on the floor that only he can see.

“It’s — what it’s called. In the ledgers. When things changed over.” He touched the edge of the page and took his hand away again. “It was before my time. Before most people’s.”

“But what happened—”

“Leave it,” said Albion.

It was said quietly, and it was not said to Casper. Elliot left it.

The second ledger was a works book: Loans, Repairs & Commissions, in the Office’s own count, columns ruled in red. Casper had already found the page and slid a strip of paper into it. Eleven loops back. Elliot read the line twice, and then a third time, slowly.

Item: Gramophone — horn, brass; cabinet, walnut; with travelling case. Wt. 12 lb. Owner: —. Purpose: On loan for repair — skilled work — authorised by the Conductor. Workshop: Restoration (First). In: 3rd of the month. Out: 22nd.

Nineteen days aboard. Then off again.

The owner column held only a dash, as if whoever had written the line had known the name perfectly well and decided the page did not need it. Elliot looked at the dash for longer than he looked at anything else, and then at the last column, which was headed Work done by.

Every other line on the page had initials in that column. J.H. T.C. R.R. A scrawl that might have been Wm. This one did not. This one had a mark: a small spiral, three turns, drawn tight, closed off at the tail with a short straight stroke, like a watch-spring lying on its side.

“Thirteen years,” Elliot said.

“Eleven loops,” said Casper, who had evidently never heard a loop measured in anything else.

“Do you have a—” Elliot patted the pockets he did not have. “Something I could copy this into. I keep using Hartley-Voss’s clipboard, and I think he wants it back.”

Casper opened a drawer, took out a small notebook bound in grey card, looked at it, looked at Albion, and handed it over.

“There’ll be a requisition,” he said, faintly.

Elliot copied the line into it, every word, with the dash where the owner should have been. Then he copied the mark. It took him three tries to get the spiral as tight as the one on the page and the stroke at the right angle across its tail, and when he had it, he looked at it for a moment, and closed the notebook, and put it inside his shirt.

Hartley-Voss was in the anteroom when they came out, on the hard chair by the Conductor’s door, with a fat folder on his knees. He had plainly been there some time, and expected to be there some time more.

“I have an appointment,” he told Albion, before anyone had asked. “I’ve had it since Tuesday.” He patted the folder. “There are a number of things. For the Conductor’s attention. I’ve made copies.”

Elliot sat down on the other hard chair.

“Can I ask you something about your log?”

“My—” Hartley-Voss’s arms went round the folder. “It’s perfectly in order.”

“It’s really well kept. Honestly. It’s the best-kept thing I’ve seen.” This was true, and Hartley-Voss heard that it was true, and something in his shoulders came down half an inch. “There’s one line. Day—” Elliot stopped himself before he said minus three. “About a fortnight ago. You signed in with a plus one. Catering.”

“Oh,” said Hartley-Voss. “Yes. The girl from the patisserie. Measuring, for the centrepiece. Madame Courcier insisted on exactness and the girl couldn’t very well do it from the back of the hall.” He sniffed. “I let her in myself. I held the lamp. I was there the entire time.” He looked at Elliot with a faint, offended puzzlement. “Why ever would I put her name? She was with me.”

Elliot opened his mouth, and thought about Dave’s brother on the scaffolding at Avonmouth, and shut it again.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s—that’s what I needed.”

And it was, more or less. It answered the question Marisa had not quite answered, and it answered it the dull way, which was usually the true way: she had got her sixteenths of an inch because the organiser had let her in and held the lamp. Then she had gone back to her cool room and drawn it all out beautifully and pinned it on her wall, where Lotz and the kitchen children and a gentleman from upstairs could stand and look at it for as long as they liked.

He took out the grey notebook and wrote, on its second page, +1 = Marisa. Measuring. Supervised (H-V). Then, underneath, because it was what the line made him think: Exact drawings. On the wall. Who copied them?

Carriage 74 at night was loud in a way he had stopped hearing, and then, coming back into it from the forward end, heard all at once: the stoves, the cards, the dog, a baby somewhere beyond the laundry that had opinions about the evening and was sharing them with three blocks of bunks, and over all of it the long iron rolling of the wheels. He walked down the Strand with his notebook against his ribs and felt the noise close over him, and found he was glad of it.

Mr Fixer was on his crate by the rear wall with a knife and something that was nearly an apple. He took one look at Elliot and moved over, which, on a crate, was a considerable concession.

“You look,” he said, “like someone’s been reading you the small print.”

“Someone has.”

“Who?”

“A clerk. A ledger.” Elliot sat on the end of Mr Plum’s bunk instead, because the crate was not wide enough for the two of them and Mr Fixer’s generosity. “A name in a book.”

“What name?”

“Drummond.”

Behind the flowered curtain, the small tap and click of tools stopped.

It did not stop as it did when Mr Plum was only choosing a different tool. Elliot had lived above it for ten nights and knew the difference. It stopped the way a conversation stops when somebody walks in who was being talked about.

Mr Fixer’s knife stopped too.

“Plum?”

The curtain did not move. After a while, from behind it, Mr Plum said, “I know Drummond.”

Nobody said anything. Mr Fixer, who had a sentence for everything, very carefully did not have one for this.

“He sent me a clarinet,” said Mr Plum. “Years ago. To rebuild.”

“Sent it down?” said Mr Fixer. “Here?”

“By a man in gloves.” A pause. “People send things down.”

Elliot waited. He had learned, over ten nights, that with Mr Plum you waited.

“It was old,” said Mr Plum. “Dropped. The wood had gone at the joint.”

The curtain shifted slightly, as if someone large behind it had put something down.

“Could it be done?” said Mr Fixer, who knew perfectly well that it could.

“It took me a season.” A pause. “It was good work.”

“And?”

“He came down himself, to collect it. He played a scale on it. He said it was adequate.” Another pause, shorter. “He paid half.”

Mr Fixer put the knife down on the crate, and the nearly-apple beside it, and sat looking at the curtain with a face Elliot had not seen on him before. It had no grin in it anywhere. It looked older, and it looked like it was keeping a very long account.

“Adequate,” said Mr Fixer.

“It was a long time ago,” said Mr Plum. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” said Mr Fixer.