Cursorily he checked the vans, then opened, with the keys entrusted to him, the back door of the offices.
Because he had been delayed that morning by the police cordon and was behind with his routine, he hurried to the toilets – men's and women's. His first task of each day was to wash them, clean the hand basins and sluice the floors. Then, he should have- The bell at the office door pealed. He left the toilets, his mop and bucket, and hurried past the unlit offices of Administration, Sales and Accounts, and unbolted – top and bottom – the street door. The man glanced over his shoulder, scanned the street, then pushed past him.
'I'm late, I'm sorry.'
The man who had waited on the doorstep shrugged.
The forklift driver babbled, 'I was delayed this morning…'
It was many months since he had been late opening the yard and offices. He thought the man had not slept that night – his eyes were baggy and lines cut his face at the side of them. The man leaned against the corridor wall and his shoulder was against a photograph of a dining-room table and chairs set after they had been assembled from a flat-pack.
'… I could not leave home. You know Hamburg, I suppose. Yes? I live at Wilhelmsburg. Police, so many police, there. I have to prove my residence to the police before I can leave, show my papers, but there is a long queue ahead of me. Not in my block, but the one next to it, a woman was killed.'
The head turned and tired eyes raked his face. As an Albanian he was trusted, and sometimes Timo
Rahman – when he came to the warehouse – would drop a hand on his shoulder and tighten it there. Then he glowed with pride. He thought, for what he did, he was well paid, but the wage given him allowed him to live only in a Wilhelmsburg tower block. The reaction of the man encouraged the forklift driver to go further with his explanation of lateness.
'My wife knows everything. She says the woman was murdered in her apartment by strangulation. It is not her husband – he was at work. It is not a thief. The people of the towers in Wilhelmsburg, they have nothing to steal. My wife made coffee for the police when they came yesterday. They said what they think.
She was killed, most probably, by a boyfriend she entertained in secrecy. They will go back in her history because always there is a trace of a friend, they told her. They are confident that, very soon, they will have the identity of the friend. It is good. A man who kills a woman close to her baby, he is a beast. He is con-temptible.' He apologized again for his lateness, and asked what he could do.
Did he have a number for the residence of Timo Rahman?
'I have, but I am instructed to call it only on matters of great importance.'
He should ring the number.
'What am I to say?' He felt a tremor of nervousness at the thought of ringing the residence of Timo Rahman before dawn. 'Would you not wait till the manager comes, in less than two hours?'
He should ring the number now. He should say that a Traveller has come.
'A Traveller, yes.' The man's eyes were locked on him. 'I will say to Timo Rahman that a Traveller has come.'
'Who is he?'
His wife, Alicia, mother of his children, stared back dumbly at him.
'What is his name?'
The children, the girls, had come to the bedroom door, had huddled there and had shaken in fear, and he had dismissed them.
'Does he come often?'
Timo Rahman did not believe that Ricky Capel, the mouseboy, would have dared lie to him. Nobody lied to him. If Ricky Capel said he did not know the man who had broken into their garden, then he was believed. It was inconceivable that Ricky Capel – in his power – should lie to him.
'You were in the summer-house. You give me no explanation why, in the darkness, you were in the summer-house. When he is seen, the man is on the wire behind the summer-house. Why was he there?'
His wife, Alicia, was on the bed, curled, shrivelled, against the pillows. She had pulled her knees close up to her chest, and he could see her shins and thighs.
Anger swarmed through him.
'Is my wife, to whom I have given everything she could want, a whore?'
Her arms were round her head and her body shook with her tears.
'Does my wife go to the summer-house in the evening to be fucked? Do you lie on the cushions and open your legs wide to take him? Is that what my wife does?'
She seemed to wait for him to strike her.
'You are in the summer-house, and he is there. What else should I think?'
She flinched, was back against the cushions, could not escape further from him.
'Do you not understand the shame you have brought on me, on my children?'
There was a light knock on the door.
'I will clean you. The dirt on your skin will be taken off, where his body was against your body. I promise it – I will clean you.'
He left her. Outside the door, Timo Rahman turned the key in the lock. The Bear was impassive, as if he knew of no crisis gripping the family. He had made his promise: he would clean her. He was told of the telephone message sent from the warehouse of his company that sold self-assembly furniture, and as he strode away from the bedroom door, he showed no sign of the hurt that wounded him – deeper than a knife had, more painfully than a bullet had.
He believed that his wife, his children's mother, was a whore.
Malachy saw the dawn come up.
She'd said, 'I am reliably told you are a man with a price on your head. So, to keep that pretty head on your shoulders, you keep it down. What you've seen already is good enough for me and should be for you.
Play the silent wallflower in the corner, if you want to, but understand that, right now, computers are spilling out your life story. When I come back, with your biography, I want you here, no more silly buggers, with explanations.'
First light caught the beds of flowers, with colours laid in tight-set banks, and above them were canopies of spring blossom. She had clasped her hands together, made a stirrup for his shoe, taken his weight, then heaved him up so that he could straddle the top of the fence separating the empty car park of the conference centre from the botanical garden and she had waved him off towards dense shrubs. Her questions in the car on the drive through the city had gone unanswered. He had been shaken awake in the car, a few minutes after he had given her the name and street where the hotel was. Then they had gone slowly down Steindamm and had seen men hurry out through the doors carrying the clothes he had left there and the bag. They had shouldered past two girls looking for the last trade of the night, and one had had a mobile at his face. He had not been able to answer the spray of questions because to have done so would mean reliving the pain of his disgrace. He could not, yet, confront it. The low point, down in a gutter of slime and shit, was deep-set agony – since he had taken the train to London, months before, he had not known a friendship tight enough for him to confide in. A dog did not go, after so hard a kicking, back in search of love.
She'd called after him, as he'd sloped towards deeper shadows, 'Did you hear me? I want some talk out of you, no more of wasting my bloody time.'
Hidden from the main path by the bushes, he sat on a bench and the wind flaked blossom petals down on him. They lingered on his hair, face and shoulders. He doubted he could fight her any more.