Nobody Weighs the Way Out

Passengers were weighed twice, and it was the second weighing that counted.

Thomas Avery had been stepping onto that steel plate for four years and it still irritated him. It stood at the end of the embarkation corridor, before the door, and it was the last thing belonging to the firm that a man touched before going off to another century. At eye height it had a green screen, and beside it a technician who looked at nobody. On the way out you weighed whatever you liked. On the way back you weighed the same or you explained it.

"Eighty-one four hundred," said the technician. "Next."

Avery moved aside with the folder under his arm and put himself against the wall, beside the coat trolley, in that September room that smelled of reheated coffee and of the mothballs in the period clothing. They had dressed the nine of them in English wool of the thirties, cut by a tailor in Bermondsey who charged by the season and asked no questions. They all walked in an odd way, as though the coats were borrowed. That was exactly what was happening.

"Doctor Harcourt, the foot behind the line."

"The foot does not obey me," said Harcourt. "It has not obeyed me for two years and I do not think it will start today on your account."

Whitmore laughed from the queue. He was last, with his hands in his pockets. He had spent half an hour with Arthur Bellamy glued to his shoulder, talking to him low and fast. Avery could not hear the words. He heard the tone, and it was that of a man asking for something for the third time.

"Edmund, listen to me a moment and we are done."

"I have listened to you twice this week and both times you have said the same thing to me."

"Not here," Bellamy replied, and his voice went up. "That is the only thing I am asking you. Not in front of all these people."

Sir Malcolm Ashcroft turned to the journalist. His courtesy served him chiefly as a way of not looking at what was going on at the far end.

"Do you not weigh yourself, Miss Fenn?"

"Finch," she said. "Fenn is how I sign. In the register I am Finch."

"I beg your pardon, my dear."

"There is no need, really. It happens to me everywhere and I have given up correcting it."

Her name was Clara and she was the only one of the party who had brought a paper notebook. She was thirty or so and spoke little. She listened in that attentive way that makes people say more than they meant to. Avery had seen her three times in the archive that spring, always in the same seat and always in the same jacket.

Reeves lined them up against the wall and took out the laminated card he knew by heart. He always read the same thing and he read it literally, because the firm had made him sign a paper stating that he would read it.

"Gentlemen, two minutes and I leave you in peace. Forty-five minutes exactly. The window opens at three and closes at three forty-five, London time, the twelfth of October of nineteen thirty-four. There is no extension, there is no courtesy warning and there is not one minute more."

"We know all that, Reeves. You have told us in writing twice."

"I tell you all the same, madam, because I am paid to say it and because every year there is somebody who knows it and forgets it. Second item: the window is spent. Once used it never opens again. If somebody is left outside, we are not going to fetch him, because there is no door to go in by."

"What a cheerful way to begin an afternoon."

"Third. Nobody goes through the same window twice. The machine does not allow it and neither does the regulation."

Ashcroft raised a finger with the slowness of his seventy years.

"Let me see if I understand you, Reeves. Does that mean that a man who has been in thirty-four cannot go back to thirty-four?"

"No, sir. It means he cannot go back through this window. The year has nothing to do with it. There are two windows in October of thirty-four, and they are two different doors, and anybody may go through both if his money runs to it."

"Then it is badly explained in the brochure, because I had understood something else."

"The brochure was written by the commercial department," Reeves replied. "And now the fourth, which is the only one that sends a man to prison. On the way out you may carry whatever you declare: cameras, coats, water, whatever you like. On the way back you are weighed. Bringing something back from there is a crime, and not a small crime. Leaving something there is an offence, and it is paid for with a fine. That is all. Have a good journey."

"Very pretty," said Eleanor Pembroke. "Two hours in a car, eight signatures and a lesson in arithmetic, to see a street that no longer exists."

"To see a street you have never stood in," said Whitmore. "And which nobody alive today has seen. Eleanor, do me the kindness of enjoying it. We are ten years old."

Avery opened the folder because Clara had put her notebook in front of him.

"Will you give me the London list, Mr Avery? For the article."

"Eight windows in ten years. Eighteen ninety-five, which was the first of all of them and lasted about as long as an argument. Nineteen twelve. Two in twenty-eight, in June. May of thirty-one. February of thirty-three. And the two this October."

"The two in October? Are there two?"

"The ninth and the twelfth. The one on the ninth we sold three weeks ago, commercial, fourteen places, and it filled in two days. Pure tourism, ladies in hats looking in at the shops."

"And this one today?"

"This one belongs to the firm, which for once has not sold the ticket. Anniversary."

Clara wrote it all down in her notebook in a small, very upright hand. Then she asked whether the ninth of October of nineteen thirty-four had been a Tuesday, and Avery told her that it had, a Tuesday, and that it had rained in the morning.

At three o'clock exactly they went out into the yard.

It was a loading yard belonging to a furniture warehouse, in Whitfield Street, and the window opened in the far corner, where the warehouse kept its broken carts and its rimless wheels. It had a cobbled floor and a brick wall black with soot. The first thing was not the view: it was the smell. Coal, damp sawdust, horse dung and something frying. The second thing was the noise. It came from everywhere and it did not resemble any noise of 2049, because it was made of iron and of voices and not of engines.

"Forty-five minutes," said Reeves. "Three forty-five in this yard. Whoever is not here stays here."

They came out into Charlotte Street two by two and Avery went in front, which was what they paid him for.

"We are in Fitzrovia and this is a district of workshops," he said. "Cabinetmakers, upholsterers, two small foundries and cheap Italian restaurants. The people you see going past work in wood. Look at the hands before the faces."

"And that over there?" asked Pembroke.

"That is what is left of the Colville Place block. Three empty houses and one boarded up. The council bought it in thirty-two and pulled the whole thing down in thirty-five. Of everything you are looking at, in a year's time there will be nothing left. That is why it is half cleared. Hardly anybody lives here now, and whoever does will be gone by spring."

Margaret looked at the side street with little interest.

"Very cheerful, Mr Avery. First Reeves's prison and now a demolition."

"I can tell you something a good deal worse, if you care for it."

"Tell me, since that is what we have paid for."

"Next autumn, in one of those houses, they are going to find a man dead in the cellar. At the end of October, when they open it to show it to a buyer. Sixty years old, no papers, good clothes and of a cut that nobody there recognised. He was never identified. He was in the newspapers for two days as the Colville Place unknown man and after that he was in them no more."

"And what did he die of, if one may ask?"

"Of being shut in. The coroner put down nothing else and nobody asked any further."

"Did nobody miss him?" said Clara.

"Somebody would have missed him somewhere, miss. But not in this district, and this district is where he was."

Whitmore had stopped two paces further back. He was looking at the side street with the face of a man measuring a distance. Then he took out his watch, looked at it and shut it.

"Twenty minutes," he said.

Reeves spun round.

"Mr Whitmore, no."

"Twenty minutes, Daniel. I have until three thirty-five and I shall be here at three thirty-five."

"This is the third time you have done this. The third. In thirty-one you went off for twenty minutes, in thirty-three you went off for twenty minutes, and I sign a report each time and each time it comes back to me unread."

"Then you will sign another and there is an end of it."

"And if something happens to you in there, what do I put in the report?"

"Put down that the chairman paid no attention, which is what you have put the other two times," said Whitmore. "Nobody has ever complained and it has not cost you your post. Three thirty-five, Daniel. Keep the time for me if you like."

He went off down the side street with his hands in his pockets and did not turn his head. Ashcroft let out a short laugh. Bellamy was the only one who made the movement of following him. He stopped halfway, with one foot forward, and then set about looking into a chair-shop front.

"It is his firm and it is his afternoon," said Pembroke. "If he wants to get lost, let him get lost."

The next thirty minutes were the ones Avery had sold in the catalogue, and he sold them well. He took them methodically along the same route as on every trip, which began with the pretty things and ended with what was going to be pulled down. He showed them a red double-decker bus with the stairs on the outside. He showed them a coal cart drawn by a Shire horse and the door of a restaurant where one dined for a shilling. Margaret wanted to know how much a shilling was in real money and nobody could tell her quickly. Harcourt sat down on the step of a workshop and said that he had seen London already.

"Are you all right, Doctor? If you like, I will go back to the yard with you."

"I am all right with the foot I have, which is the same one I had this morning. Go along and look at whatever it is and leave me sitting here, for I am not going to evaporate in half an hour."

At half past three Clara gathered them all in front of the foundry and made them stand in two rows.

"One only and I shall not trouble you again all afternoon. Mr Ashcroft, would you mind taking off your hat? It puts a shadow across your eyes that there is no doing anything with."

"At my age the hat is part of the face, miss, and the part that has aged best."

"Then push it back two fingers and have done."

"And do you develop that afterwards in a dark room?" said Ashcroft.

"I develop this at the hotel, Mr Ashcroft, and without a stamp."

"In nineteen thirty-four they would have put a stamp on it," said Avery. "Every print of a portrait came out of the studio with the photographer's name printed on the back. It was how they got you to order again."

Seven of them came out, because Harcourt was still sitting on his step twenty yards off and Whitmore was not there. Avery would remember afterwards that the photograph took a long minute. Bellamy shut his eyes in the first one and it had to be taken again. And Clara checked them both, one after the other, before she put the camera away.

At three thirty-eight Reeves said that was far enough.

"Avery, with me. The rest to the yard, and nobody moves from the yard."

Colville Place was a short street, more of an alley between two blocks, and it had the kind of silence that is not peace but absence of people. Low brick houses on one side and the blind wall of a warehouse on the other. It was empty, and three of the houses had their ground-floor windows boarded over. One had a to-let board hanging from the railing, crooked, the lettering run by the morning's rain. Reeves knocked at two doors. At the first nobody opened. At the second a woman in an apron opened, and looked them up and down very calmly.

"No gentleman has come in here all afternoon, and be so good as not to shout in the street."

"Have you heard us shouting, madam?"

"I have heard you hammering at my door, which is not the same thing and is worse."

They came back the same way and quickly, and Avery passed in front of number fourteen, which was the one with the crooked board and the only one in the street with freshly painted railings. Beside it there was a side passage, narrow and in shadow, that gave a man no wish at all to go down it. He looked at it for two seconds and naturally took it for a service yard, because in that district every house had one. Then he looked at his watch and quickened his step, because there were five minutes left.

In the yard the seven of them stood in a ring and nobody was talking.

"Three forty-four," said Reeves. "Mr Whitmore!"

He shouted it three times towards the mouth of the yard. The third time his voice broke a little.

At three forty-five the yard in Whitfield Street closed and the embarkation room was around them again, with its light and its coffee and its technician who looked at nobody. The eight of them stood still where they had appeared. Nobody said anything for a fairly long while.

It was the weighing machine that spoke first, because it was a machine and did not know how to do anything else.

It passed them through one by one, calling out the numbers on the green screen. At the end of the corridor it did the subtraction it always did between what had gone out and what had come back.

Seventy-eight point four kilograms.

The inspector arrived at seven in the evening and the first thing she did was to pick up a glass from the table and weigh it in her hand.

"Constance Quayle, Office of Temporal Transit. I want the eight of them in this room and I want the embarkation register. Nobody leaves the building tonight."

"The eight are upstairs, in the directors' room," said Reeves. "And the building has been shut since ten past four this afternoon, with every departure logged."

"Who gave the order to shut it?"

"I gave it, and I gave it before I called you people."

"Then you have done one thing right this afternoon."

She was a tall, ungainly woman, in working clothes, with a measuring tape in her breast pocket. She greeted nobody and did not ask how they were, because she had spent twenty years walking into places where something had just happened and she knew that courtesy is charged for at the end. Avery was in the doorway with the folder under his arm, waiting to be told to go home. He was the only one she kept.

"You are the historian."

"Thomas Avery. They hire me by the trip and I am not on the staff, if that is any use to you."

"You stay. I need somebody who can read papers from nineteen thirty-four and there is nobody here who can."

"I am a suspect, I suppose. I was inside like the rest."

"All of you are suspects, Mr Avery, and all of you are going to be useful to me for something different. Sit down there and draw me the street."

They were at the plan until eleven at night, with the room empty and with the coffee from the machine, which was the only thing still open in the whole building. Avery drew it in pencil on a large sheet. He put in Charlotte Street lengthways, the foundry, the chair-shop front, the mouth of Colville Place and the warehouse yard. Quayle went on writing the times of each of them over the top in a small, ugly hand.

"At twelve minutes past three Mr Whitmore goes off down there. Who sees him?"

"Everybody," said Avery. "The nine of us were together and he argued with Reeves in front of us."

"And from twelve past three to three thirty-eight?"

"From half past three we have the photograph. Seven of us came out."

"There are two missing from that photograph."

"Doctor Harcourt, who was sitting on his step twenty yards off and in full view of everybody. And Mr Whitmore, who had already gone."

Quayle marked the two gaps with a cross and went on asking, always the same things and always in the same order, which was how she had been taught to work up a claim. By half past ten she had three quarters of that half hour covered by two people or more. What was left loose was so little that it would not have done for crossing the street. Bellamy had been with Margaret for eight minutes, according to Bellamy. Pembroke and Ashcroft had not been a yard apart, according to both of them. Clara Finch had been following them all about with the camera and could say who was where in every minute. She said it, and it tallied, and Avery took it as sound automatically, because she was the only one of the nine who had spent the half hour looking at the others.

"It all fits," said Quayle. "I have been twenty years at this and I do not like it when everything fits."

"And what does that mean, Inspector?"

"That either the eight of you are saints, or what I am looking for is not inside that half hour."

Next morning she began with the only thing that seemed urgent to everybody and did not seem urgent to her.

"Let us settle this business of the rescue," she said. "Doctor Harcourt, explain to me why you are not going to fetch him."

Harcourt was slow to answer. He was sitting at the far end, with the stick between his knees, and he had spent the whole meeting looking at the table.

"Because there is no door. We do not choose the dates, Inspector, we come upon them. The calculation detects a window when it feels like it and with months of warning. It cannot be forced, not even in theory. And a window once used never opens again. The two in October of thirty-four are spent."

"And which is the next London window you have?"

"Eighteen ninety-five, and it is not even confirmed."

"And after that one?"

"After that one, there is nothing of London in the whole calculation."

"How many are left altogether?" asked Quayle.

Harcourt raised his head for half a second and lowered it again.

"I cannot give you that figure without the board's authorisation, and I do not have the authorisation."

"I shall ask you for it in writing this very afternoon, Doctor."

"Ask me in writing and you will have an answer in writing."

Pembroke dropped her pen on the table and said aloud what she had been not saying since the day before.

"The question one has to ask is a different one. If he stayed there at three forty-five, that man lived in nineteen thirty-four. A day, a month or twenty years. And if he lived, he is on some piece of paper."

"He is, if he lived long enough," said Quayle. "Mr Avery, that is your job and I want it for this afternoon."

The archive gave them the name at two in the afternoon, and it was not a name.

The record came from a file of the Tottenham Court Road police station, which was the one that covered Fitzrovia and the one that kept everything that happened in those streets. A council had digitised it in twenty eleven along with another eighty thousand pages. Avery put it up on the big screen in the room. It was typewritten, with the ink dropped out of the o's.

Male of about sixty years, no papers, found on Monday the twenty-ninth of October nineteen thirty-four in the cellar of an untenanted house at number fourteen Colville Place, on the managing agent opening the property to show it to a buyer. Clothing of good cloth and of a cut that was not recognised. Death by deprivation, no marks of violence. Not identified.

Nobody spoke for a while. Margaret Whitmore put a hand to her mouth and left it there.

"You told us that," said Ashcroft. "Yesterday. In the street. Before it happened."

"I told it yesterday," said Avery, "and it happened a hundred and fifteen years ago."

"Did you know?"

"I know what anybody knows who has worked that archive. That in the autumn of thirty-four an unknown man turned up in a cellar on that block and that nobody identified him. I tell it on every trip to Fitzrovia, and have done for four years. It is the only story that district has."

Clara Finch had been in the third chair on the left since Friday night and had not got up from it except for coffee. Avery had looked at her several times that afternoon, because she was the only thing in that room that was working. While the record was up on the screen she wrote nothing. She had the pencil in her hand and her hand still on the notebook, and it seemed right to Avery: of the nine on the trip she was the only one with a professional reason to take notes and the only one with the delicacy not to take them.

"May I ask something?" she said.

"Ask," said Quayle.

"That sheet does not say how the door was. It says where they found him, it says what he died of and it says he had no papers, but it does not say whether the cellar door was locked, bolted or simply jammed." She turned to Avery. "Is that put down anywhere?"

"Not on the summary sheet," said Avery. "It usually comes in the full file, and so do the effects that were collected, the neighbours' statements and the beat constables' reports for those days."

"And can it be asked for?"

"It can be asked for from London. It takes two days."

"Ask for it this very afternoon, Mr Avery," said Quayle. "And thank you, miss. Since yesterday I have been hearing questions about people and that is the first one I have heard about a thing."

Clara wrote those two lines and no others, and put the pencil back down on the notebook.

The dental record came at five, and the comparison was made by a doctor who had never heard of Chronos45 in his life. It was Edmund Whitmore. They said it in two sentences and without ceremony, and the room went quiet again.

"Then it was written," said Pembroke. "From the beginning. It was in an archive before any of us was born, and we have gone this afternoon and put him into it."

"That I do not know, madam, and I am not the person to ask about it," said Quayle.

"What do you mean, you do not know? It is the question. It is the only question on this table."

"It is a question, and it is not mine. I am paid to know who put that man in that cellar. And I assure you that somebody put him there."

That night they searched the dead man's office, and Avery was present because Quayle would not let anybody leave the room while she was opening drawers.

In the top one there was a passport, three boxes of pills and a charger. In the bottom one, underneath a box of cigars, there was a blue card folder with an elastic band. Inside were cuttings from English newspapers of nineteen thirty, photocopied onto modern paper. Classified advertisements. One was marked in red pencil: piano lessons, moderate terms, respectable lady, Fitzrovia.

Under the cuttings there were two trip reports on the firm's headed paper. One was for the May window of thirty-one and the other for the February one of thirty-three. Both carried a note in the corner in Whitmore's large hand.

The one for thirty-one said I saw her.

The one for thirty-three said again.

Quayle read the two sheets, put them back in the folder and set the folder on the table, to one side, saying nothing of what was written on them.

"Is that for the article?" asked Reeves from the doorway.

"I do not know yet. What article?"

"The anniversary one. The chairman opened the entire archive to the journalist in March. Trip reports included. I objected in writing and I was answered in writing that transparency was the value of this firm."

"Do you object to everything that is done in this firm, Mr Reeves?"

"I object in writing, which is a different thing and is the only thing that lets me sleep."

On the Sunday morning the secrets began to fall, and not one of them was the one that was needed.

Bellamy came into the room with the face of a man who has slept three hours and confessed before anybody asked him.

"I was asking him for money. In the embarkation room, in front of you all. Forty thousand, and it was not the first time I had asked him for it this year. That is what they heard and that is why I did not tell it yesterday."

"Did he give it to you?" said Quayle.

"He told me we would talk about it on the way back, and that it was neither the place nor the day. See what a good joke that has turned into, on the way back."

"And what did you need it for?"

"Because I have spent six years living on a pension they fixed themselves and on the sale of a flat I no longer have. You may look into it. It is ugly, but it can be looked into in ten minutes."

They looked into it in less, and Pembroke lasted even less than he did. The sale of her shares on the first of September had been authorised in writing since March, and the money had gone whole to a nursing home in Hampstead. Her father had been there two years without recognising her.

"Do you want the invoice?" she said, and laid it on the table without waiting for an answer. "I will bring it to you every month if it is needed."

Avery's turn came after lunch, and it was shorter and more uncomfortable.

"You were carrying the land registry plan of that block."

"I carry the registry of every block on the route, and I carry four routes prepared. It is my job, Inspector. I carry it printed because in nineteen thirty-four there is no way of looking anything up."

"And what you sell to collectors?"

Avery felt the heat in his face before he found the answer.

"Archive copies. Things that are in the public domain and that people do not know how to look for. It is not illegal."

"No, it is not. It is what you do to the firm you charge by the hour. Thank you."

At six in the evening she asked for the customs incidents for the quarter, and Reeves brought her a wad of sheets two fingers thick with a look of annoyance.

"You will find nothing here, Inspector. This is the dullest thing in the whole business and I will sign that for you."

There were fourteen in three months, and they all said very nearly the same thing, in the same formula and in the same order, and all fourteen had been filed routinely without any of them ever giving trouble. Abandonment of material at destination. Fine set, fine paid, file closed. An umbrella in the Vienna of eighteen ninety. An overcoat in New York. A passenger who came back from Rome two hundred grams lighter and declared that he had dropped a camera in a fountain.

Quayle went through them one by one and without quite reading them. She was looking only at the right-hand column.

"This one," she said.

It was the one for the trip of the fourteenth of August. London, ninth of October nineteen thirty-four, fourteen places.

Passenger no. 11. Difference on exit: minus 1,974 grams. Photographic material. Fine set, fine paid.

"Two kilos," said Quayle. "Here is a lady who left two kilos behind in nineteen thirty-four and paid the fine without a murmur. Bring me the complete file for that trip."

Reeves looked at the sheet a moment longer than he needed to.

"I will find it for you tonight."

At ten at night he had still not brought it.

Reeves brought the file on the Monday at eight in the morning and put it down on the table without quite letting go of it.

"Here it is. And before you open it, Inspector, I am going to tell you myself why it has taken two days to appear."

"Tell me," said Quayle.

"Because I signed it, as I sign all of them. And because the one I signed before this one, four years ago, is the one that is going to cost me my post. I would rather tell it myself, in my own words, than have the paper tell it."

"Sit down."

Reeves did not sit down. He stayed on his feet beside the table, with his hands behind his back and his chin slightly raised, giving evidence the way evidence used to be given in the courts of the old days, when a man still went to the courts in his good coat.

"In May of twenty forty-five we made a scientific trip to London, June of nineteen twenty-eight. Twelve passengers. Eleven came back."

Avery raised his head from his notebook. He had prepared that trip with the firm's archive open in front of him for three weeks, and that was not in the firm's archive.

"That has never come out."

Reeves did not lower his chin.

"It came out at the time and it was buried at the time. The passenger's name was Sylvia Finch. Fifty-two years old, a physicist, she worked with Doctor Harcourt on the calculation of windows. She left the party after fifteen minutes and did not come back to the point. I signed the loss report that same afternoon."

"In how long?" asked Quayle.

"In forty minutes, by the clock. I did not go down to the archive, I did not ask for the plan of the area and I did not ask the eleven who came back anything beyond the bare minimum. I signed it the way one signs an industrial accident report, and I went home to my dinner. That is what I did."

Quayle opened the folder, turned four sheets without reading them, stopped at the fifth and laid it the right way up on the table so that everybody sitting round it could see.

"There is another thing here," she said. "There is one more window here."

"There is one more window."

"Read it out to me."

"Chronos Twenty-eight B. London, Wednesday the twentieth of June nineteen twenty-eight. Three days after the other one, within the same year, two hundred yards from the same yard."

"And what was done with it?"

"It was sold. Fourteen tickets, a commercial launch trip, with the press, with photographers and with two ministers. It was in every newspaper and it was the one that put us on the map. The authorisation to sell it was signed by the chairman on the morning of the fifteenth, which is to say forty-eight hours after that woman was left there."

Nobody said anything. Ashcroft took off his spectacles and set about cleaning them with his handkerchief. He always did that when something struck him as wrong and he did not mean to say so.

"Could she have been brought back?" asked Quayle.

"Nobody knows. It has never been done. There is an internal report from that month which says that it is not established that it is possible."

"Who wrote that sentence?"

"It carries no signature. It only carries a stamp."

Clara Finch put her notebook down on the table, closed, with the pencil inside it, and spoke at last with the calm of somebody who has been sitting two days in a room waiting for her turn.

"She was my mother," she said.

The whole room turned towards her. She did not raise her voice. She said it with the same calm with which she had asked Ashcroft to push his hat back.

"My name is Clara Finch. I sign Fenn because there was another Finch at the paper and because it suited me not to be connected. In twenty forty-seven I published the business of my mother's loss over four columns. This firm sued, the paper retracted after nine days and I signed an agreement under which I cannot go back to the subject. That is why I am writing the tenth anniversary article instead of something else."

Avery remembered the spring, the three times, the same seat and the same jacket. That woman had not gone to the archive to research any anniversary.

"And did Mr Whitmore know?" asked Quayle.

"Mr Whitmore opened the whole archive to me in March and shook my hand, in front of two photographers and half the staff. He knew perfectly well who I am. We have never spoken of it and he has never stopped me."

Margaret Whitmore was looking at her with a new face.

"And you have sat here for four days saying nothing about that?"

"I have said nothing because the moment I say it my article is finished and this other thing begins. Which is exactly what is happening in this room at this moment, madam."

Quayle did not move from where she was.

"Miss Finch, have you travelled to nineteen thirty-four before?"

"Yes. On the commercial trip of the fourteenth of August, to the ninth of October. I paid for the ticket myself and it is in the register under my name. I went to see the district with time to spare, in peace and in daylight, because on this one we were coming for forty-five minutes and I did not want to arrive without knowing my way about."

"You left material there."

"I dropped my photographic equipment in the yard and I had no time to pick it all up properly. I paid the fine the same day. It was three hundred pounds and that is in the register too."

"And on the Friday, at half past three?"

"On the Friday at half past three I was taking a photograph of you all in Charlotte Street. Seven come out in it. You have had it on your desk since Saturday."

"I have," said Quayle, and moved on to something else.

That morning the rest of them fell, one after another, and not one of them fell where Avery had expected.

Margaret Whitmore acknowledged the eight minutes and said who she had been with. Bellamy confirmed it from his chair, looking at the table. It had been fourteen months. They had not said so on account of the board and on account of the divorce lawyers. And also because at their age it embarrassed them both a little.

"We went off as far as the chair-shop front, which is thirty paces from the foundry," said Margaret. "You may measure it if you care to."

"I measured it on Saturday morning," said Quayle. "It is thirty-one."

Ashcroft took longer. When he made up his mind he told it straight through, like a man paying a bill.

"There is a preliminary sale agreement, signed in July, with a consortium which manufactures, among other things, defence materials. I signed it alone, in my office, on a Tuesday. Edmund was against it and was going to go on being against it, and the board does not know. Now it knows."

"Did you tell him?"

"Never. I meant to tell him this autumn, when he could no longer stop it."

"Then it suited you to have him alive until the autumn."

"It suited me to have him alive until November, not a day less. And there you are."

In the afternoon the full nineteen thirty-four file came from London, the one the journalist had asked for on Saturday, and what was missing was in three of its documents.

The first was the property book for number fourteen, kept by a managing agent named Deakin with a cramped hand, an ink that had gone brown and the habit of never spending more than one line on anything.

20 July. House untenanted on the death of the first-floor tenant. Water cut off. Two keys withdrawn. 10 October. Cellar door shut and no key. Send for the carpenter. 29 October. House shown to Mr Lomax. Discovery in the cellar. Police notified.

The second was the report of the constable on the beat that Friday.

17.40. Voices at number 14 Colville Place. House untenanted. Ground floor inspected and nobody found. Nothing to report. PC Willis.

Willis had gone into the ground floor, had found it empty and had treated the call as settled, no doubt without going out to the back yard and without putting his head down the cellar stairs.

With the report came two sheets of statements from the neighbours, taken a week after the discovery, and they did not say a great deal. The one from number sixteen was the longest, because the woman was talkative and complained about callers. In October she had been asked about the house twice: a young married couple who wanted to rent it, and a foreign young lady who asked after the piano lady and went away without saying anything when they told her she had died in July.

The third was the inventory of the effects found in the cellar on the twenty-ninth of October. Quayle made Avery read it aloud in front of the eight of them, whole and without comment.

One wool blanket, folded over a crate. One white china jug, empty. One oil lamp with a box of matches, burned right down. One portrait of a young lady, on unknown paper, with no photographer's mark on the back. One screwdriver with a wooden handle, new. One wooden wedge, on the floor, beside the door.

"Read it again," said Quayle.

Avery read it again, more slowly, and the second time round the list stopped seeming to him like a list. Somebody had carried all of that down a flight of stairs.

Pembroke tapped twice with her pen on the edge of the table.

"And what is it that we are supposed to be hearing? Because what I hear is the list of a man who died in a cellar."

"I do not quite know yet," said Quayle. "That is why I have made him read it twice."

"A man shut in a cellar," said Margaret. "With a blanket and a lamp. Where does one get a blanket in an empty house?"

"From the house itself," said Reeves. "It was untenanted, but untenanted houses have things in the corners."

"The house was emptied in July and two keys were withdrawn," said Avery. "The book does not say that anything else was taken out."

Quayle said neither yes nor no. She folded the inventory sheet in four and put it in her breast pocket, next to the measuring tape.

The business with Harcourt came at the end of the afternoon and came quickly.

The board met without him in the room next door and took forty minutes. It was the same time Reeves had taken to sign the report on Sylvia Finch. When they opened the door, Ashcroft was carrying the paper in his hand and was looking at nobody.

"Doctor Harcourt, you are suspended from your duties with immediate effect. Your credentials are withdrawn and the board will place the facts before the authorities this very night."

"What facts?" asked Harcourt.

"Twelve minutes without a witness in the place where the chairman died. And a grave and sustained concealment of technical information from this board."

"Which?"

"Tell us how many windows are left."

Harcourt leaned on his stick with both hands. He was silent for exactly long enough for Avery to understand it before he heard it.

"Nineteen," he said. "In the whole calculation, in the whole world and for ever. Nineteen, and after that it is over. I have known it for two years and Edmund had known it since July, and the two of us decided that this firm could not say so in the year it goes to the market. If you want to call that a motive, call it one. I did not go to that street."

"You sat down on a step."

"I sat down on a step because I cannot walk two hundred yards together, Mr Ashcroft. You have been watching me do it at every meeting for four years."

They took him away at nine. He went down the embarkation corridor, which was the shortest way to the street, and as he passed the weighing machine, leaning on his stick, the technician on duty looked away and set about staring at the green screen.

Quayle stayed in the room with the inventory sheet unfolded again on the table. In the margin she had started a list, the right way up and in that ugly hand. There were five things.

"Mr Avery, tomorrow at ten I need these five things on this table. One folded wool blanket. One china jug. One oil lamp with its box of matches. One small screwdriver, the old sort."

"That is four things, Inspector."

"And the fifth is the customs weighing machine. The real one, the one in the corridor, and not a kitchen scale."

"The weighing machine?" said Avery. "Inspector, that thing is bedded into the floor."

"Then have them unbed it tonight, Mr Avery, since that is what we have three maintenance men drawing wages for."

They brought the weighing machine up on a maintenance trolley and left it on the floor of the board room, crooked, with the four anchor bolts still in it and the green screen lit. Beside it, on the long table, there was a cloth, and under the cloth there were four things.

Quayle had Harcourt brought in as well, and he arrived at ten past ten with a solicitor who took notes continuously and did not open his mouth once.

"Gentlemen, this is not a trial and I am arresting nobody. I am going to tell you what happened and afterwards I am going to show it to you, which is a different thing."

Ashcroft had his hat on the table and turned it half round with one finger.

"Show us and let us be done."

"First the facts, Mr Ashcroft, and there are three. Nine people went into London on the twelfth of October nineteen thirty-four and eight came back. Mr Whitmore left the party at twelve minutes past three, on his own account and for the third time in his life. And he turned up dead in the cellar of number fourteen Colville Place, shut in, with no marks of violence and with nobody to identify him."

Pembroke did not raise her eyes from the table.

"We know that already."

"Now come the anomalies, and there are five of them and not one of them is a person. They are all things. I do not know how to look at people."

She placed herself beside the long table and began counting on the fingers of her left hand.

"One. In that cellar there was a china jug. The property book says the water to that house was cut off on the twentieth of July. Two. There was a portrait of a woman on paper with no photographer's mark, and in nineteen thirty-four every print carried the studio's stamp on the back, because the studio wanted you to come again. Three. There was a wooden wedge on the floor, beside the door."

Reeves got up from his chair without anybody asking him to.

"Inspector, with all respect. You have been five days in this firm and you have spent three of them weighing glasses. I have put on that table nine names, a register of entry, a register of exit and half an hour accounted for minute by minute and corroborated independently by seven witnesses. And you answer me with a portrait without a stamp."

"I answer you with a portrait without a stamp."

"That is not an investigation."

"It is the only one I know how to do, Mr Reeves. Sit down, there are still three to come."

"And what is odd about a wedge?" asked Margaret.

"Nothing, madam. Wooden wedges are for keeping a door from shutting. What is odd is that it was on the floor and not pushed underneath, and that a handspan away from it there was a new screwdriver in a house where nobody lived. Four. On the tenth of October the managing agent wrote in his book that the cellar door was shut and there was no key, and he sent for a carpenter who never came. That door had not shut for six years, because that was what the wedge was for."

Nobody said anything. Reeves had sat up very straight in his chair.

"And five. On the fourteenth of August this year, a passenger on a commercial trip to that same district came back one thousand nine hundred and seventy-four grams lighter, declared photographic material, paid the fine and the file was closed."

"That is explained," said Ashcroft.

"It is explained. The wedge was explained too. Let me go on."

Quayle took two steps and stood still in front of the dead screen.

"Now the person, and I am not going to give a name yet. Look at what was done. Nothing was broken. No lock was forced, no door was burst, no glass was smashed. The opposite: something was mended. A bolt that had been jammed for six years was oiled and left better than it was. That first."

Bellamy had both hands open on the table and did not move them.

"Go on."

"Second. A blanket was taken down there, and a lamp with matches. And water, in a jug, because there had been no water in that house since July. How much would be needed was worked out beforehand, and what two hands could hold was what went down. And third, which is what tells me who it is. A portrait was left propped on the cellar step. A portrait kills nobody, gentlemen. It is no use for anything we are talking about."

"Then what is it there for?"

"So that the man who went down to pick it up should know why he was staying down there," said Quayle. "The person I am looking for did not only want Mr Whitmore to die. That person wanted him to understand the account. And nobody does that for money, or for a post, or for a parcel of shares."

Avery wrote the three things down in his notebook without looking up and his hand came out crooked. He was not writing them down for anybody. He was writing them down so as not to have to look at the table while they were being said.

"Now the times," said Quayle. "And this is where you have all gone wrong and where I went wrong myself until Sunday night. There are two calendars in this firm and we have spent five days looking at only one."

She put two sheets up on the screen, side by side.

"On ours, Mr Whitmore died last Friday at three forty-five in the afternoon, and every one of you was in somebody's sight. On London's, Mr Whitmore was shut in on the twelfth of October nineteen thirty-four and died four or five days later, when the water ran out."

"We have said that already," said Pembroke.

"We have said it, but we have not used it. If the crime happens in nineteen thirty-four, the question is not where you were on Friday. The question is who was in that street before the twelfth of October nineteen thirty-four."

"Nobody," said Reeves. "I checked it on Saturday, one by one. None of the eight had ever gone through that window. That is checked and I stand by it."

"You checked it properly, Mr Reeves, and it is properly signed. Read me article four of your own regulation."

Reeves looked for it, took a little while, and read it aloud.

No passenger may enter the same window twice.

"Again, slowly."

"The same window."

"Window," said Quayle. "It does not say year. It does not say city. It does not say month. There were two windows to the London of October nineteen thirty-four, the ninth and the twelfth, and they are two different doors, and your regulation allows a person through both. You explained it yourself to Sir Malcolm in the embarkation room, in front of everybody, and four days later you had forgotten it. And so had I."

There was a fairly long silence. Ashcroft was the first to speak and he did it very slowly.

"The ninth of October is three days before the twelfth."

"Three days before, in London," said Quayle. "And three weeks before, here. And this is the only difficult thing I am going to say all morning, gentlemen, so I am going to say it slowly and once. The fourteenth of August twenty forty-nine and the ninth of October nineteen thirty-four are not two dates. They are the same date. It is one trip, one only, told in the two calendars of this firm. Somebody left this building on a Saturday morning in August, spent forty-five minutes in London and was back here for dinner. Those forty-five minutes, over there, were a Tuesday in October. And from that Tuesday to the day Mr Whitmore went down to the cellar, three days passed."

Ashcroft was looking at the two sheets on the screen and had not touched the hat again.

"So by the time we embarked, it was already set."

"It had been set for three days, Sir Malcolm. Nothing happened on the twelfth of October that had not been prepared since the Tuesday. The only thing Mr Whitmore did that afternoon was go down a flight of stairs. There are two calendars in this firm and one has to choose, and I have chosen the one on the door."

Margaret Whitmore spoke without taking her hand away from her mouth.

"And at three forty-five?"

"At three forty-five your husband was alive, madam."

Nobody at the table moved. Quayle let the question finish falling and then answered it whole.

"He was round the corner from where you had your photograph taken, under the street, with a blanket, a jug of water and a lamp. That door carries the bolt on the outside and has no handle on the inside. He had been shut in for half an hour and he knew it."

"And could he not force it?" said Ashcroft.

"He tried, I should think. There was a new screwdriver down there and a door with the bolt on the other side. Nothing opens with that."

Quayle took a step towards the table and put her hand on the two sheets, as though they needed holding down.

"At three forty-five it was not the cellar door that closed. It was the window. And a window once used never opens again, so from that minute on there was no way of going to fetch him. Not that afternoon, not the next day, not in a year. The nearest door to that cellar is eighteen ninety-five."

"Did he shout?" said Margaret.

"He shouted. At twenty to six that afternoon a beat constable came past, heard voices at number fourteen, went into the ground floor, found nobody and treated the call as settled. It is in the report we read on Monday. It is the last time anybody heard him."

She went through them one by one and did not take long, because she had it written down.

"Mr Bellamy, you were asking him for money and you did not get it. Mrs Pembroke, you sold some shares to pay for a nursing home in Hampstead. Mrs Whitmore, you spent eight minutes thirty-one paces away with Mr Bellamy and you have been with him fourteen months. Sir Malcolm, you signed a sale behind this board's back and you needed the chairman alive until November. Mr Reeves, you signed in forty minutes a report that should have cost you a week, and you have known it for four years. Mr Avery, you sell archive copies. Not one of the seven is a saint and not one of the seven travelled to London on the ninth of October."

"And I?" asked Harcourt from the far end.

"You concealed from this board that there are nineteen windows left in the whole calculation, Doctor, and the board has reported you for that and for twelve minutes sitting on a step. I cannot report you for anything, and I am going to tell you why."

Quayle went over to the weighing machine and took the cloth off the table.

Underneath there was a folded wool blanket, a white china jug filled with water to the brim, an oil lamp with its box of matches and a small screwdriver with a wooden handle.

"I bought this yesterday in a shop in Camden. It is what the nineteen thirty-four police inventory says was in that cellar, and it has been weighed on the only weighing machine that is any use to me, which is yours."

She put the four things up on the platform one by one, without hurrying. The blanket, the jug, the lamp with the matches, the screwdriver. The green screen went on changing its number and stopped.

One thousand nine hundred and seventy grams.

"Four short," said Quayle.

She took a sheet of paper out of her breast pocket and laid it on top of the blanket. It was the copy of a portrait of a young woman, taken from the loss file of twenty forty-five.

The screen went up to one thousand nine hundred and seventy-four.

Nobody moved for a while. Then Clara Finch reached a hand across the table and straightened the jug, which had ended up crooked on the edge of the platform and was dripping a little.

That was the only thing she did.

"Miss Finch," said Quayle.

"Yes."

"On the ninth of October nineteen thirty-four you went down into that cellar with two kilos of things. You took out the wedge that was holding the bolt, you oiled it and you tried it twice. You left the blanket, the lamp and the water. You propped your mother's portrait on the step, where it could be seen from the yard. And you were back at the point with four minutes to spare, because you always arrive early everywhere."

"Yes."

"You could not take the wedge away, because bringing something back from there is a crime and on the way back they weighed you. You left it on the floor."

"I left it on the floor. She was the one who put it there."

Margaret Whitmore made a small noise in her throat and covered her mouth with her hand again.

"Your mother lived six years in that house," said Quayle. "She gave piano lessons and she put wooden wedges in every door that shut badly. She died on the fourteenth of July nineteen thirty-four, three months before you could get there. And in that drawer there are two trip reports in which Mr Whitmore wrote in his own hand that he had seen her."

"Twice," said Clara. "In thirty-one and in thirty-three. He would stay in the back yard for twenty minutes, listening to her play, and then he would go back out to the street and come home to his dinner. Nobody knows whether he could have brought her back. Nobody tried. That is the only thing I wanted him to know while he was down there."

"You might not have gone down," said Quayle. "You might have looked at the yard from the passage, as you did the other two times, and gone back to the point with fifteen minutes to spare. What you set up there was not certain. It was cheap."

"It was not certain, no. If he does not go down, I lose a blanket and an afternoon."

"And did he know?"

"He went down for the portrait, Inspector. Of course he knew."

She stood up and put on her coat herself, without anybody telling her to and without looking at any of the seven.

"He was fifty-eight when he died," she said. "I am thirty-four. It is the only thing in the whole of this that will not go into my head."

Quayle did not stop her, because legally she could not stop her. The crime had been committed in London in nineteen thirty-four, the victim had died in London in nineteen thirty-four, and there was no article in the code that knew what to do with that. They took her away all the same, at half past twelve, down the embarkation corridor, which was still the shortest way to the street. As she passed the hollow where the weighing machine had been she had to walk round the hole of the four bolts.

Avery went down to the archive in the afternoon, when everybody else had gone.

He looked up the record of the Colville Place unknown man, which he knew by heart and which he had spent four years telling in that street to gentlemen in borrowed coats. It was typewritten, with the ink dropped out of the o's, and it said the same as it had always said. Male of about sixty years. No papers. Clothing of good cloth and of a cut that was not recognised. Not identified.

He read it twice and closed it. That record was going to say the same thing next year and in a hundred years, because there was no way of writing anything on it. The only thing that had changed in the whole week was that now he knew the name.

Then he went up for his folder and out into the street, which at that hour smelled of rain and did not smell of coal.