Chapter 4: Say Something Nobody Knows

“Wait,” said Miss Lund.

The patrolman’s thumb stopped on the ring.

“Mr. Van Alst. One moment.” She came forward, and her skirt caught the corner of the crate and dragged it an inch along the tile. “She has not answered me once.”

“She’s answered every question you’ve put to her,” said Mr. Van Alst.

“She’s answered with things. Anybody may have things.” Lund’s chin came up. “Look at her. That ring is plated. You can see the copper where it’s rubbed through. Her gloves are split at the fingers. Her hair was done by her own hands in a public washroom, and I would put my name on that.” She turned so the corridor could see her face. “And every time she opens her mouth it is him, him, him, as if no other man in this city were worth naming. You take that for proof?”

Somebody at the back said, “Oh, now.”

“Mr. Lantry has known him since they were boys,” said Lund. “If there is a woman he keeps, Mr. Lantry has met her. Ask him and have done with it.”

It was a good move.

Mr. Lantry came out of the room at the end of the corridor with a cup of coffee in his hand. The cup was thick earthenware and did not match the hotel’s china; somebody had brought it up from the kitchens. His coat had been made for him. He wore no rings.

He stood in the doorway and drank, and looked at her over the rim.

“I’ve met a great many women in this city,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve met this one.”

“There,” said Lund. “You hear it.”

“That’s not to say she’s lying,” said Mr. Lantry. “Only that I’d know.”

Nell put the back of her right hand behind her.

“You’ve not met me, sir,” she said. “I’ve met you.”

“Have you.” He drank. “Where?”

“Nettlewood.”

“That’s his house. I’m at that house most weeks. So is half of Calderport.” He drank again. “Say something nobody knows.”

Nobody in the corridor moved. Every face in it had turned to her, and if she got one word wrong they would have her out of the hotel and into a cell and go home pleased with themselves.

Steady. Say it the way I give it to you.

“The twentieth of last month,” said Nell. “You were at Nettlewood, and you drank three bottles of Clover Hill by yourself, and near the end of it you went round the room taking every man in it by the hand and telling him he was the best friend you had. And you cried on the shoulder of an old fellow old enough to be your grandfather, and he patted your head.”

Mr. Lantry’s coffee went across the floor.

Somebody set a glass down on the crate.

“Not enough?” said Nell. Her voice came out higher than she wanted it. “Then there’s September. You came at two in the morning and sat in his kitchen with your hat in your hands and cried, because a girl who’d sung at the Blue Lantern for five years had gone off with the piano player, and you were the last man in the city to hear of it, and you couldn’t sleep, and you wanted him to tell you what to do.”

A woman laughed and turned it into a cough.

She had thought she knew what the voice could do. She had not known it could do this. She did not know where he had got it, and there was no time to ask, and she had one thing left to say.

“And a few days ago,” said Nell, “you came up to Nettlewood at eleven in the morning and asked him for three thousand dollars, and he asked you what for, and you said you had an account at the Blue Lantern wanted settling, and that the girls—“

Mr. Lantry’s hand came round the door frame and closed over her mouth.

“That’s enough,” he said, into her ear. Very low. “That’s enough.”

Nell stood still. His palm was warm and smelled of coffee, and her own breath came back off it.

He took his hand away and looked at it, and then at her.

“How do you know that?”

She did not answer him. She asked, in the place where she did her asking now, who he was.

Nothing came back to her.

Mr. Lantry wiped his palm on his handkerchief and put the handkerchief away, and looked down the corridor at Mr. Van Alst.

“Mr. Van Alst,” he said. “This is a hotel. It’s not a court and it’s not a newspaper office, and there is not a soul in this corridor who has heard a word of anything.”

“That’s what I said,” said Mr. Van Alst. “Take her out.”

“Gentlemen—“ said Lund.

“Out,” said Mr. Lantry, without turning his head, and the clerk was through the door and past her before she had the word out of her mouth.

The clerk had a voice like a man selling something. “What are we holding the lady for, will somebody tell me that? A guest of the family. A particular friend of the family. And she’s stood in a storeroom the better part of an hour. Has the lady got all her things? Will somebody see to the lady’s things?”

Into the middle of that Nell asked, inside, whether she had anything to fear from the day she met a man who knew him better than the two of them did.

No one in the world knows him better than I do.

A woman near the front took hold of her arm. “I said from the first she was no ordinary girl. Come out of this corridor. You’ll come and take supper with me and we’ll get the smell of the place off you.”

“It ought to be me that buys,” said a man. “Those cakes she sent me. I’ve eaten nothing like them since, and I said so at the time. Miss Corrigan, you’ll come up to the Belvedere and I’ll order you one of everything.”

Nell had never sent anybody a cake in her life.

“I’m glad they were good,” she said.

There were hands on her sleeve, hands on her wrist, a hand flat at her back, and the whole press of them swung her round and put her shoulder into Miss Lund, who took two steps sideways and put her own hand out to the wall.

Lund straightened her cuff and started down the corridor without another word.

“Miss Lund.”

She stopped.

“You’ll have a drink with me,” said Nell. “I’d like to buy you one. You were the only soul in this hotel that wanted the truth out of me, and I’d not have got it out without you pushing.”

She said it pleasantly.

Miss Lund turned her head. The corridor was watching.

“No,” she said. “Keep your money.”

“Another time, then.”

“No.” Lund’s glove came flat against her own skirt, once. “I’ll be at the registry in the morning. Then the bank, then the assessment rolls, and then I’ll go and ask every person you named in there whether they know you, and I’ll find out what your people are called and where you were born and who paid for that dress. You had better pray that story of yours stands up. Because I’ll be standing under it.”

Somebody behind Nell laughed, and then three more, and a man said, “She’s only sore she was wrong,” and the laughing got louder, and Lund went down the corridor and round the turn.

Nell laughed too.

She laughed, and it went on longer than the joke, and she had to press her lips together to stop it, and when she did that her eyes ran over, and she wiped them with the back of her glove and laughed again at nothing at all.

“Miss Corrigan,” said the man with his hand at her back. “Miss Corrigan, shall I send for my carriage?”

She was carried down the corridor on a dozen hands. At the turn she looked back. The storeroom door stood open with the key in the lock. It swung an inch on its hinge, and swung back, and did not shut.