The Room with the Curtains

Deputy Marshal Ozer took me through the hostel room on the Friday at noon, and she took me through it in the correct order, which is the order a police officer is taught and which no doctor is, and I have been grateful to her for it since.

First, the approach. The Quillon hostel is a motel of 1961 with a car park, a manager's office, and forty rooms in two wings, and it stands on the shore road at the southern end of the town on a piece of ground that slopes down to the water. Room 27 is in the western wing, on the first floor, at the end, with one window. That window has a view, over the roof of a boat shed and between two pines, of the shore road for four hundred yards in both directions and of the turn-off to the drive at Harrow Reach at the northern end of it, which is a piece of geography that took me a moment to understand and that Ozer made me work out for myself.

"Say what it means."

"He could see the gate."

"He could see the gate, and he could see anything coming down this road at night by its headlights, and from where he sat on that bed he could do it with the light off." She had her notebook out. "Now the room."

Second, the room itself. It had been let for nine days and it smelled of cigarettes and of a man who had been sleeping in his clothes in the open for ten months and had only just stopped. There was a bed with the sheets changed once. The rest of what was in that room told us the two things we could not have got anywhere else. One was a raincoat on the hook by the door, cheap, new, with a store tag still on it: a man who had spent ten months in a blackberry had walked into a shop on his first afternoon indoors and bought the cheapest shelter in the county, still meaning to be alive next week. The other was on the bedside table, where a bottle of cough syrup stood three-quarters empty beside a plastic bottle of vitamin tablets that had never been opened. He had bought the intention and had not yet had the money, or the heart, to open it, and Ozer stood looking at those two bottles for a long while without saying anything, and then wrote down the date on the tag.

I said what a doctor says. "The cough syrup is for the cough he went to the county clinic with on the second of October, and the vitamins are what a man buys when he has come in off a ridge and decided to look after himself, and has not yet had the money or the heart to start."

"The raincoat is new and the boots are old," said Ozer. "He came in out of the weather on the twenty-second of October with about forty dollars in his pocket, and he bought the cheapest coat in the county and a bed and food, and he did not buy a gun, a knife, a dog, a rope or a telephone, and he paid his rent by the week in cash like a man who does not intend to be here long and does not intend to be looked at." She turned a page. "Dr. Ashby, I have been asking myself for a week whether the man in this room was dangerous. I have his record. He hit a man in a bar in Eureka once, drunk, and killed him, and it was the only violent thing he ever did in thirty-eight years, and the court believed him about it and so do I. He walked away from a work crew to keep out of a six-year sentence, and everything I have found in this room says that he spent the whole of his time out there being frightened of something, and that when he had the money he came indoors and ate and slept and looked out of that window at the house where his sister works, because he had nobody else on this earth to watch over."

Third, the thing she had saved for last. As she had worked the room she had gone down on one knee beside the bed and put her hand flat on the mattress, and had then lifted the mattress at the foot, which is a thing she said she does in every room in every case, because people hide things under mattresses, which everybody knows.

What was under that one was a single leaf torn out of a pocket diary, covered on both sides in pencil, folded twice, and it had been there long enough for the fold to have taken a set, which means he had put it there at the beginning rather than the end. Ozer let me hold it in a plastic sleeve, and I have a copy of it in front of me as I write, and it is the single most useful document produced by anybody in this case, and it was written by a man who could not read very well and who was living in a blackberry, and it did not occur to either of us until we were standing at the window what it was.

At the top of the sheet, in capitals, was the word: NITES.

And under it, in a column, with a stub of pencil, in the flat hand of a man who had left school at sixteen, was a list of dates and times.

Oct 3, 11:20. It went down the cut and stopped and stood. Did not come up the ridge. Oct 8, 10:00. On the path below the orchard. Long. I did not move. Oct 11, 9:40. Close. I could hear it brethe. Went west. Oct 14, 10:10. On the path. Did not come. Oct 17, nothing. Oct 18, nothing. Rain. Oct 19, 9:30. ON THE PATH AND IT WENT TO THE GATE. Oct 20, 9:35. X — and here the pencil had gone through the paper. Oct 22 to Oct 30. In town. Slept. Chest still bad. Heard it 2 nites from the road. I am going back out.

I stood in that room at the window with a plastic sleeve in my hand and I understood, at last, and with the particular nausea that comes when a thing has been obvious for a week, that we had been reading the whole of this case backward.

"Deputy Marshal," I said. "Every date on this paper is a night."

"They are."

"Look at the hours. They are not the same hours. Ten o'clock, twenty past nine, twenty past eleven, ten past ten, twenty past ten — a man who exercises an animal keeps to a schedule, he keeps to the same minute every night, that is what makes a dog know when it is going to work. These are not a schedule. These are the nights when a man went out of his own door and had somewhere to be." I put the paper down on the bed and smoothed it flat, though it was in a sleeve and did not need smoothing. "He has been killing that old man for eleven days, marshal. The animal was out on the third of October and on the eighth and on the eleventh and on the fourteenth and on the nineteenth, and on every one of those nights the animal came up onto the ground between the cut and the gate, which is where the path runs, and on four of the five nights the man who wrote this set down that he saw it on the path itself, and the man in the house must have gone out on some of them, because look at what this paper says: on the seventeenth and the eighteenth nothing came, and it rained. He was waiting. He was standing in the fog on the path for eleven days with an animal in a truck, being rained on, waiting for one man to come out of a door, and on the nineteenth of October he made the man come out, and on the twentieth he got what he wanted." The one entry on that sheet that nobody has ever been able to read is the mark against the twentieth: a single letter, made with such force that the pencil went through the paper.

Ozer sat down on the end of the bed, which is not a thing a deputy marshal does, and looked at the paper for a while.

"We had it as a conspiracy from one date," she said. "A dog, a fake letter, one night. You are telling me it was a siege."

"I am telling you it was a siege and that the man in this room put an end to it, because he was lying in a blackberry four hundred yards away on the eleventh of October with a cough and a bad chest, and he watched the thing come up the ridge, and he wrote it down, because he had nothing else to do with his nights and because a man alone in the dark with something like that out there will write it down for the same reason people keep accounts." I handed her the sleeve. "Get this to the county today. And then tell Mr. Vandermeer that he is to be in the house by dark with the door barred, and tell the Nords that they are to be in the cottage with the door barred, because there is a man out there who has spent eleven days waiting and has not yet understood that the thing he built is a thing he cannot now stop."

I did not know, when I said that, how right I was, or how little time there was. The man whose pencil had made that column had left the hostel at four in the morning on the Thursday, in the rain, and had gone back out to the ridge, and he had one more night to live; and the last line he ever wrote is the one at the foot of that sheet, and it is four words long, and I have read it perhaps two hundred times, and I do not expect to stop reading it: I am going back out.