Chapter 148: The List

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 148: The List

Walt Brennan called at six on the Friday morning and did not say hello.

"Agnes isn't answering."

Cole was out of bed before the sentence finished.

"Since when?"

"Since about nine last night. She rings me Thursdays after the programme she watches, every Thursday for eleven years, and she didn't, and I told myself she'd gone to bed." The line had road noise on it. "I'm about four minutes out. I'll call you back."

He called back in six.

"She's fine."

She was fine.

She was in her kitchen at half six in the morning with the radio on, entirely herself, and she had not rung Walt because she had been writing.

There were nine pages on the table.

"I've been up since two," she said, when they got there. "Sit down. There's no cake, I've done nothing but this."

Here is what she had written.

Not memories. She was very clear about that and said it four times over the morning, in case anybody got excited.

Names.

"Forty-one of them," Agnes said. "People who were in that town when I was. I've had them all along — I've never not known who my neighbours were, that's not the thing that was taken. But I have never once sat down and listed them, in forty years, and I sat down on Wednesday night to see whether I could and it took four hours and I have forty-one."

Dana read the list twice.

"Agnes, this is—"

"It's a list of names with no surnames on about half of them and no addresses on any." Agnes poured tea nobody had asked for. "I know what it is. I'd like you to notice what it isn't."

"Go on."

"There's no me on it." She sat down. "Forty-one people and I couldn't put my own maiden name at the bottom, and I tried for about twenty minutes at four in the morning and I've stopped being upset about that and started being interested in it."

The useful thing was not the list.

The useful thing was three names near the bottom, written smaller, with a line drawn under them.

"Those three came later," Agnes said. "That's what I want to tell you and it's the only new thing in nine pages. Everybody else on that list lived there. Those three arrived."

"When?"

"1984. The autumn." She tapped the page. "They took the empty house on the row behind the chapel, the one that had been empty since the Corrigans left, and they were there about six months and they were perfectly pleasant, and I have not thought about them once in forty years until Wednesday."

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Dana had her pen moving.

"Names?"

"Two I've got. One I haven't." Agnes turned the page round. "A woman called Marguerite, and I'd remember that anywhere, because we'd none of us met a Marguerite. And a man who gave his name as Bell, which I never believed even at the time, because he said it like he'd just thought of it."

The kitchen went quiet.

"And the third?"

"A girl," Agnes said.

She did not have a name for the girl.

She had eleven other things and she gave them in order, in the flat unhurried way of a woman who had spent two days organising them.

That the girl was about nineteen. That she was not from anywhere Agnes could place, because she had no accent at all, which Agnes said was the strangest thing about her and which took her forty years to identify as strange. That she was quiet and polite and helped a woman called Mrs. Pell with her shopping twice a week for six months without being asked.

That she was clearly not with the other two.

"Explain that."

"She lived in the same house and she was not with them." Agnes was certain about it. "I've kept a boarding house. I know what people in the same building look like when they're together and when they're not. They didn't eat together. She came and went on her own. And once, in about the January, I saw the man Bell speak to her in the street and she went into the house afterwards and didn't come out for two days."

Vesper had not said anything for twenty minutes.

"What did she look like?"

"Dark hair. Small. Pretty, in the way that girls are when they don't know they are yet." Agnes was looking at her own handwriting. "I'd know her if I saw her tomorrow. That's not a figure of speech. I have got her face and no name and I have had both for forty years."

"Agnes—"

"I know what you're all thinking and I'd like to say it myself so nobody has to be delicate." She put her hand flat on the page. "You're thinking it's her. The one sitting at my table who understood me on Tuesday."

Nobody said anything.

"It isn't," Agnes said.

That landed harder than the alternative would have.

"You're sure."

"I'm ninety-one and my eyes are going and I've been wrong about a great many things." Agnes looked at Vesper properly, for a long moment. "But I have been looking at you for two hours and you are not her, and I'd have told you inside four minutes on Tuesday if you were, because that face has been in my head since 1984."

Vesper did not move.

"She looked like you," Agnes said. "That's the whole of what I can give you. She looked like you the way a sister does."

Vesper said, after a while: "How old would she be now?"

"Sixty. Sixty-one." Agnes did not have to work it out. "I've done that sum. I did it in 2009 when Walter came and I did it again on Wednesday night, and I'd like to tell you both times I did it for a nice reason and I didn't. I did it to find out whether she'd be old enough to have died of something ordinary."

"And?"

"And she'd be sixty," Agnes said. "Which is nothing. Which is a woman who goes to work."

Cole got up and went to the window, which was four steps away in a flat that size, and stood there.

"Agnes. The man who gave his name as Bell."

"Yes."

"Describe him."

"Fifties. Ordinary. Very good coat and never wore it properly." Agnes shrugged. "I couldn't pick him out of a photograph and I've tried. That's the other thing about him — everybody in that town could describe Marguerite and nobody could describe him, and we used to say so, and then we'd forget we'd said it."

Walt Brennan spoke for the first time in an hour, from the doorway, where he had been standing with his car keys still in his hand since six.

"Agnes."

"Walter."

"You've had a list of forty-one names in your head for forty years."

"Yes."

"And nobody's ever asked you to write it down."

Agnes Duross considered that.

"Four people have come," she said. "You in 2009. A woman from a university in 1998. Two men in the nineties who I didn't like and didn't let past the door." She folded her hands. "And every single one of them asked me what I couldn't say, and not one of them ever asked me what I could."

They left at noon and Agnes made them take the nine pages.

At the door she caught Vesper's sleeve, which she had not done with any of the others.

"If you find her," she said, "don't tell me."

"Agnes—"

"I'm ninety-one, love. I've got a question I've just found after forty years and I don't want a second one." She let go. "But I'd like you to know that I looked after her a bit. In the January, after the thing in the street. I took her some soup and she said thank you and she didn't eat it, and I sat with her for about an hour and she didn't say a word the whole time, and I have never told a living soul that until now."

[End of Chapter 148]