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‘Would you be kind enough to tell me where they keep people’s bodies,’ I said.
The porter blinked. The edges of his eyelids were pink in a brown face, lashes sparse and painful-looking like the bristles on a gooseberry. Odd the things you notice when your mind’s trying to shy away from a large thing. When he saw me coming towards him over the cobbles among the crowds leaving the evening steam packet, he must have expected another kind of question altogether. Something along the lines of ‘How much do you charge to bring a trunk up from the hold?’ or ‘Where can I find a clean, respectable hotel?’ Those kinds of questions were filling the air all round us, mostly in the loud but uneasy tones of the English newly landed at Calais. I’d asked in French, but he obviously thought he’d misheard.
‘You mean where people stay, at the hotels?’
‘Not hotels, no. People who’ve been killed. A gentleman who was killed on Saturday.’
Another blink and a frown. He looked over my shoulder at his colleagues carrying bags and boxes down the gangplank, regretting his own bad luck in encountering me.
‘Would he not be in his own house, mademoiselle?’
‘He has no house here.’
Nor anywhere else, come to that. He would have had one soon, the tall thin house he was going to rent for us, near the unfashionable end of Oxford Street when we … Don’t think about that.
‘In church then, perhaps.’
I thought, but didn’t say, that he was never a great frequenter of churches.
‘If an English gentleman were killed in … in an accident and had no family here, where might he be taken?’
The porter’s face went hard. He’d noticed my hesitation.
‘The morgue is over there, mam’selle.’
He nodded towards a group of buildings a little back from the seafront then turned, with obvious relief, to a plump man who was pulling at his sleeve and burbling about cases of books.
I walked in the direction he’d pointed out but had to ask again before I found my way to a low building, built of bricks covered over with black tarry paint. A man who looked as thin and faded as driftwood was sitting on a chair at the door, smoking a clay pipe. The smell of his tobacco couldn’t quite mask another smell coming from inside the building. When he heard me approaching he turned his head without shifting the rest of his body, like a clockwork automaton, and gave me a considering look.
‘It’s possible that you have my father here,’ I said.
He took a long draw on his pipe and spoke with it still in his mouth.
‘Would he be the gentleman who got shot?’
‘Possibly, yes.’
‘English?’
‘Yes.’
‘She said his clothes had an English cut.’
‘Who said?’
Without answering, he got up and walked over to a narrow house with a front door opening on to the cobbles only a few steps away from the morgue. He thumped on the door a couple of times and a fat woman came out in a black dress and off-white apron, straggly grey hair hanging down under her cap. They whispered, heads together, then he gave her a nudge towards me.
‘Your
