The Call

The phone rang at twenty past six in the morning, and Marra Okonkwo knew before she picked it up that it was the job, because the job was the only thing left in her life that did not respect the hour. She had been retired four years. Four years of a small flat with good light, of a vegetable patch that produced more courgettes than two people could eat and there was only one of her, of long walks and longer evenings and a quiet she had spent thirty years imagining and had still, somehow, not learned how to inhabit. People told you that you would miss it. They never told you what you would miss — not the bodies, God knew, not the paperwork, not the families in the bad rooms. What you missed was being the person something depended on. "Okonkwo," she said into the phone, the old way, surname first, and was faintly annoyed at herself for it. "Marra. It's Dale Furniss." She sat down. Furniss had been a sergeant when she left, a careful unimaginative man she had liked precisely because he was careful and unimaginative, qualities the job undervalued. If Furniss was calling her at twenty past six, Furniss had thought about it first, probably for some days. "You're up early, Dale." "I'm not, particularly. Marra, I'm sorry to do this before you've had your tea." A pause, the careful man arranging his sentence. "It's about Aldous Vane." The name went into her like a draught under a door. She had not heard it spoken aloud in a long time and she had not, in all that time, gone more than a few days without thinking it. Aldous Vane had been her first. Her first homicide as lead — twenty-six years ago, a young woman named Janet Cleese found in the reservoir car park, and Marra Okonkwo thirty-one years old and certain, in the way you are only certain once, that she would close it inside a month. She had not closed it inside a month. She had not closed it at all. She had been certain of Vane within a fortnight, certain in her stomach and her notes and the long quiet hours of looking at him across a table, and she had never been able to turn the certainty into the one thing a courtroom accepted, which was proof. He had walked. He had walked, and he had known she knew, and over twenty-six years that shared knowledge had become a kind of marriage, the worst she had ever been in. "What about him," she said. "He's dying. Pancreatic, weeks they're saying, maybe less. He's in the hospice out at Carrow Bridge." Furniss let that settle. "Marra, he's asked for you. By name. He's told his nurse, and he's told the duty solicitor, and now he's told us, and what he's saying is he'll make a statement about the Cleese matter, but only to you, and only in person, and not to anyone else, ever." Marra looked at the window. The light was coming up grey over the courgettes. "Why me," she said, though she knew. She wanted to hear Furniss say it. "You know why you, Marra. You're the one who never let it go. Twenty-six years he's watched you not let it go. I think —" the careful man, choosing — "I think a dying man wants to give the thing to the one person who'll know what it's worth." She was quiet for a moment. Four years of courgettes and good light and a quiet she had never learned to inhabit, and now the job had reached back through all of it with one cold hand and found her still exactly where she had always been — thirty-one years old, in a reservoir car park, looking at a young woman who deserved better than the silence she got. "There's a catch," she said. "There's always a catch with Vane. He hasn't asked for me out of kindness. He's never done a kind thing in his life." "No," Furniss agreed. "No, I don't suppose he has. Will you go?" Marra Okonkwo stood up, and reached for the kettle, because some things you do not decide so much as discover you have already decided. "Tell the hospice I'll be there by noon," she said. "And Dale — pull the file. The whole file. I want the cold file on my kitchen table before I drive out there, because whatever Aldous Vane is planning to hand me, I'd like to know what he thinks I've forgotten."