"In this house," she said, "the small things are the record. Whoever went down those stairs at midnight counted on nobody writing the small things down." She rose, and began, with great deliberation, to make fresh tea, as if the ledger had asked it of her. "They counted wrong. Now we find out who held a code, who read a bulletin, and who had reason to be awake — and we do it from the record, not from gossip. Fetch Mr. Aguilar, Elena. Tomas has been quiet about that night, and Tomas is never quiet about his cellar without a reason."
Chapter 10: The Catering Van
Ben Osei began with the van, because, he said, vehicles were honest: they went where they were driven, and they almost never lied.
The catering company was called Marigold & Vine, a name Elena thought better suited to a wedding magazine than to the brisk operation Ben described after his first telephone calls. They were reputable, insured, and — since the gala — extremely nervous. Their owner, a woman named Patricia Doyle, answered Ben's questions with the speed of someone who had already answered them to her lawyer.
Yes, they had catered the gala. Yes, fourteen of their staff had been on site. Yes, their vans had used the service gate, three trips in the morning and one late delivery on the Friday evening before, a last load of glassware and folding chairs that the estate had requested at short notice.
"That Friday van," Ben told Elena and Ada, in the estate office with the door shut, "is where it gets untidy. In a good way. Untidy is where the truth usually rents a room."
The Friday evening delivery had not been on the original schedule. It had been telephoned in at five that afternoon, approved through the estate office in the ordinary way — Julian's office, Ben noted, and said nothing more about that for the moment — and the van had arrived at the service gate at twenty past seven. The gate camera, like the cellar logging, had been down for servicing. The driver had been signed in by the night gateman, Frank Pell, who had since retired to his sister's in Oregon and who remembered exactly two things about that evening: that the van was white, and that he was, as he quoted himself, "not paid enough to admire vans."
"But the catering staff list is better," Ben said. "Fourteen names for Saturday. Thirteen check out completely: agencies, addresses, people who exist and can describe Cook's temper, which is a form of identity document in itself." He allowed himself a dry flicker of a smile. "The fourteenth is our problem."
The fourteenth man had been hired late. Marigold & Vine, short of a server for a two-hundred-guest gala, had taken him on two days beforehand through a casual arrangement their captain now deeply regretted: a recommendation passed by telephone, no agency, no paperwork beyond a name and a signature on a timesheet Ben described as "optimistic." He had been paid in cash at the end of the gala night, the captain admitted, because that was how the man had asked to be paid, and the captain, in the chaos of a famous man's birthday, had agreed and told no one until Ben's questions made silence feel more dangerous than confession.
"Name?" Ada asked.
"He gave the name Daniel Reed," Ben said. "It is false. The address he gave is a car park in Sacramento. The telephone number rings a takeaway restaurant that has never heard of him. Nobody at the company had seen him before that weekend, and nobody has seen him since. He worked the Friday delivery as well as the Saturday gala, which means he was inside the service areas of this estate on the night our ledger goes quiet."
Elena felt the hairs rise on her arms. "What did he do on the Saturday?"
"That," Ben said, "is the interesting geography. He was assigned to the service pantry and the cellar stairs — fetching, carrying, clearing. Low work. Invisible work. The sort of work nobody watches a person doing. He could have carried a bottle up those stairs at seven-forty in front of six people, and every one of them would remember the bottle and not the man."
"Except someone must remember something," Ada said. "People always remember something. Usually the wrong thing, but something."
Ben nodded, and turned a page. "I asked three of the servers separately. Two remembered nothing worth repeating. The third, a young woman named Jess, remembered him because he was kind: he carried her crate up the cellar stairs on the Friday night when her wrist was hurting, and she noticed his hands because she was thanking him and looking down."
"And?" Dominic's voice came from the doorway. None of them had heard him arrive; for a large man, he could move with a film star's old, practised quiet when curiosity overcame his knees. He came in and sat, uninvited, and waved away Ada's instinctive rise. "Sit, sit. Go on, Ben. What did the girl notice?"
"She noticed a tattoo, sir," Ben said. "On his left wrist. A small anchor, dark blue or black, the size of a thumbnail, just where the cuff ends. She remembered it because her grandfather was in the navy and had a larger one in the same place."
"A small anchor," Dominic repeated. "On the left wrist."
"Yes, sir. She is quite certain. She drew it for me." Ben slid a photocopied scrap across the desk: a little anchor, clumsily drawn, unmistakable. "She also says he was about forty, medium height, dark hair cut short, and quiet — not shy, she said, just quiet, like a man doing sums in his head. And she says, sir, that on the Friday evening he asked her which stairs went down to the wine cellar, although he was carrying chairs at the time and the chairs were wanted upstairs."
The room was very still. Outside the window, the late-afternoon light lay gold across the vines.
"A man who doesn't exist," Dominic said at last. "Hired at the last minute, paid in cash, who asks the way to my cellar on the night my bottle walks out of it, and then carries bottles at my birthday. With a little anchor on his wrist, like a signature he forgot to hide."
"We don't yet know that he moved the bottle, sir," Ben said carefully. "We know he was here, at the right times, in the right places, under a false name. That is either a very large coincidence or it is a thread. I intend to pull it gently, through the catering company's other bookings, through Frank Pell again, through any photograph the guests took that shows the service pantry door. Anchors," he added, "are memorable."
Dominic looked at the little drawing for a long moment. Then he smiled, though it was not a comfortable smile. "In my films," he said, "the villain always had a scar, so the audience could keep track. I used to mock the writers for it. Cheap, I said." He tapped the anchor with one fingertip. "I owe several writers an apology. Elena— your scratch, his anchor. It seems this house is being solved by small marks on skin and foil."