Chapter 64: The Gatehouse
The gatehouse is one room and a kettle and a bank of nine screens, and it smells of coffee and rubber matting.
Marco Ruiz has run that gate and those grounds for nine years.
He is forty-five and he is built like a filing cabinet.
He was on the late turn and he had a paperback face down on the console, and he did not look surprised to see me.
The nine screens were on the wall behind him and eight of them were black, because eight of them are outside and it was dark.
I want to be accurate about him from the beginning, because a great deal was said about him afterwards by people who never met him.
He is not a warm man. He is a careful one.
Those get confused in houses like that.
“Miss Carter.”
“I’m going to ask you for something and I’m going to tell you what it costs you first.”
He put the kettle on, which I have decided since was his way of giving me eleven minutes.
I asked for the gate log. March to September. Every vehicle in and out, with times.
He said no before I had finished the sentence, and he did not soften it.
Then he explained it, standing up, with his back to the screens, in about ninety seconds.
On the twenty-first of September his contract had been converted from staff to consultant.
“Do you know what that means?”
I said I did not.
“It means there’s no notice period and no process. Anybody with the authority can end it in an email, and nobody has to write down why.”
He has a mortgage in Berwyn with eleven years on it and a daughter in her second year at Loyola.
“I am not telling you that to be pitied. I am telling you it so you know the price of what you’re asking, because you don’t.”
I said that was fair and that I had come to say the price out loud rather than pretend I did not know it.
“Then say it.”
“If you give me that log and they find out, you are finished in this house and probably in this business.”
“Yes.”
“And I have nothing to give you. I am suspended, unpaid, and I was wrong about something in front of eight people on Monday.”
He looked at me for a moment.
“I heard about Monday,” he said. “The whole house heard about Monday by lunchtime.”
I said that was the reason I had brought paper instead of a sentence.
Then I put three sheets of paper on the console, face up, and stepped back from them.
The tank log. Two entries. Seven fields.
The stock card copied out in my own hand, with the five cartridge dates and the one blank line.
And the nine numbers off the recordings. Five nights at ten to five. Four nights at twenty past six.
I did not explain them. I have learned that if you explain a sheet while somebody is reading it, you are arguing.
He read for four minutes and turned the pages twice.
“What is this at the bottom?”
“That’s the machine running out of water. That’s the hum stopping.”
“On the nights it happened, it ran ninety minutes longer.”
“On four of the nights it happened. I have fifteen more files to do and no machine to do them on.”
He put the sheet down flat and squared it to the edge of the console, and I thought of Detective Ferreira doing the same thing with a pen.
“You think somebody put water in it.”
“I think more water went into that tank than went into it at half past five, and I can only say that about four nights.”
“That’s not the same as somebody.”
“No. It isn’t.”
He was quiet, and the gate light went green and a car went out, and he logged it without looking at me.
It was Miss Devlin’s relief going home at ten past nine, and he wrote down the plate and the time.
“No,” he said. “I’m not giving you the gate log.”
I said I understood and thanked him and picked up my sheets.
I got as far as the door.
“Miss Carter.”
I turned round.
He was looking at the third sheet, which he had not given back, and he asked me one question.
“What time?”
I said between eleven at night and one in the morning, if it happened at all.
He did not answer that. He folded the sheet in half and put it in his shirt pocket and said goodnight.
He did not say yes.
He asked me what time, which is a question a man only asks when he is already looking at something.
There was frost on the gravel and I walked back up six hundred meters of it doing arithmetic I could not finish.