Chapter 6: Maintenance
The dome had a light in it.
A green pinpoint, low down on the housing, about the size of a pinhead. On when it was recording. That is all it did.
You could not see it in daylight. In the evening, with the chandelier off, you could, if you knew to look.
I knew to look, because in thirteen months I had crossed under that camera perhaps nine thousand times.
I had a private habit of glancing up at it when I came down at night with him.
Not because it comforted me. Because I liked knowing where I was being seen.
It was off.
Victor said, “How long has that been off?”
He did not say it to anybody in particular. He said it to the room.
Serena said, “Maintenance.”
One word. She did not decorate it.
That is the second thing I want on the record about her. She never over-explained. She gave you the smallest possible answer and let you build the rest yourself.
Victor said, “Since when.”
“Thursday, I think. Somebody came about the alarm.”
Then the front door opened and Marco Ruiz came in with the rain on him.
Marco was forty-five and built like a filing cabinet and he had run the gate and the grounds for nine years.
He had a torch in his hand and he had not put it away, and he took in the room from left to right the way he took in everything.
The place cards. Me on the floor with the child. The tear in my hem. Serena. Victor’s wet shoulders.
He said, “Sir.”
Victor pointed at the ceiling with two fingers.
Marco looked up at it for about a second and a half.
Then he said, “That’s down.”
“Since when?”
“I don’t know. It’s not on my board. Nothing’s flagged.”
Victor said, “Miss Montigue says maintenance.”
And Marco said the sentence that changed my life, in a flat and slightly puzzled voice, without the faintest idea that he was doing it.
“There’s no maintenance scheduled. Not tonight. Not this week.”
Then nobody said anything.
I have been in some quiet rooms. That was the quietest.
I counted it, because by then I was counting everything. Nine seconds.
Nine seconds is nothing on a clock and it is an era in a foyer.
I have wondered since what Victor Blackwood was doing in those nine seconds, standing in wet shoes in his own hall.
I have concluded that he was doing arithmetic, and that he did not care for the answer he got.
The only sound in it was Ethan breathing against my collarbone, fast and shallow and wet.
Marco said, “Nobody’s been on the gate log for the alarm company since June.”
He said it to the floor rather than to anyone. He was already sorry he had said the first one.
Serena said, “Then I have the day wrong.”
Perfectly level. No defensiveness in it at all. A woman correcting a small domestic detail.
“It may have been the week before. I don’t keep the diary.”
And she went back to the cards. She actually bent down and began picking up place cards.
I watched her hands from the floor. They were completely steady.
Mine were not. I could feel the shake coming up through my forearms and into the boy, and I hated it, because he could feel it too.
Ethan had worked his fist further into my collar and was pulling the whole shoulder of the uniform down.
I let him. It was the only thing in that room he had any control over at all.
Victor said, “Marco. Pull the recordings for the foyer. Tonight. The last week.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the drive.”
“Yes, sir.”
Marco crossed to the wall behind the console table where the cable run comes down inside a painted channel.
He wanted to get behind it. He put his torch in his teeth and took hold of the left end of the console table to walk it away from the wall.
It is a heavy table. Walnut, marble top, about two metres. He moved it perhaps fifteen centimetres.
Then he stopped.
He did not say anything. He took the torch out of his teeth.
I saw his shoulders change and I did not know why yet.
He went down onto one knee, and then further, onto both, and put his cheek nearly to the floor.
From where I was sitting I could see under the table now that it had moved, along the line of the skirting board, in the light from the lamps.
I saw what he was looking at before he said it.
It was small and black and rectangular and it was lying on its side against the wall.
And there was a red light on the end of it, going on, and off, and on again.