Chronicle: The Grey Umbrella — A File for Jean

Jean Ashcroft had been waiting in the alley behind the Jolly Milkman for fifteen minutes, on her third cigarette of the evening — a habit she promised herself she'd quit roughly once a quarter, usually right after a particularly tense conversation with her editor — when Nigel finally emerged from the dark, silent as ever, as though he'd condensed straight out of the evening mist.

"You're late," she said, stubbing the cigarette out against the brick wall. "And you've got that face again."

"What face?"

"The face of a man who's just learned something he'd rather not have known."

Nigel gave a small laugh — she always read him more accurately than he'd like — and held out the thick envelope he'd spent the past fortnight assembling piece by piece: copies of the message thread from one of the men who'd jumped him on the construction site, photographs of financial documents Marlon had scraped together through a contact in the building firm's accounts department, and, most importantly, an audio recording he'd captured almost by accident a week earlier, walking past Grimshaw's office late in the evening and catching, through a half-open window, more than enough to record on his phone.

"This should be interesting," Jean said, weighing the envelope in her hand without opening it there on the street — she never read material out in the open, another habit built up over years of caution.

"Forty per cent discrepancy between the declared and the actual costs, across three buildings," Nigel said quietly. "Systematic, over at least two years. And on the recording, he's talking plainly to someone he calls 'our man on the fourth floor,' someone from the residents who 'needs sorting out.'"

Jean raised an eyebrow. "Our man on the fourth floor? That's literally your floor, Nigel."

"I'm aware," he said, and for the first time in the whole conversation there was something in his voice closer to real worry than professional focus. "I've spent all day trying to work out which of the residents on my floor could possibly be feeding Grimshaw information. There are only three flats. Mine, the Bennetts', who've been away for a month, and…"

He trailed off, and Jean, understanding the unfinished thought, completed it for him:

"And your upstairs neighbour's. Who, if I remember your account from last week correctly, has been behaving suspiciously, asking strange questions, and staging surveillance operations involving photographs of the back of your head."

"Dave doesn't work for Grimshaw," Nigel said firmly, almost before the thought had finished forming, because the intuitive certainty of it arrived faster than any logical argument could. "That's not it. Dave's just… too curious. But not in that direction."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," he repeated, though saying it out loud, he caught himself feeling, for the first time in the entire conversation with Jean, not his usual professional detachment, but something more personal — something close to offence at the mere suggestion that Dave might turn out to be one of Grimshaw's people.

Jean gave him a long, studying look — the same look she usually reserved for sources whose stories sounded a little too smooth — but said nothing aloud, simply nodding and tucking the envelope into her coat's inner pocket.

"I need a week to check all this," she said. "If even half of what's in here holds up, this isn't just a paragraph in the local news. This is a big case. Fraud, extortion, possibly tax evasion too, if I'm reading these figures right."

"Fine. Just be careful."

"I'm always careful," she said, with a small smile that didn't entirely conceal her genuine concern. "It's you who needs to be careful. You've got a torn coat, a black eye, and a neighbour who's either trying to expose you or trying to protect you, and you don't seem entirely sure yourself which of those two prospects worries you more."

Nigel didn't answer right away, turning her words over on the long walk home — that unusually long walk he'd been choosing more and more often lately, because it gave him time to think, and lately there'd been more and more to think about.

He thought about Dave's question about the laundry. The question about the book about the war. The insistence with which Dave had grilled him about the sprained arm at the gym. Each of these moments, taken alone, had been almost amusing, but together they formed the portrait of a man who, for all his clumsiness, was frustratingly close to the truth — and who now, if Jean was right about "the man on the fourth floor," might not simply be a curious neighbour, but a potential target for Grimshaw's people, if they decided Dave was the leak he had never, in fact, been.

This was the thought Nigel went to bed with that night, and it troubled him considerably more than any of the bruises he'd picked up over the past fortnight of practice.

On the walk back from the pub he noticed he was being followed again — this time he was almost certain he could make out a familiar jacket silhouette at the end of the alley, and, a little further back, a woman's — and, rather than his usual looping detour to shake a tail, he slowed down, allowing himself to consider, just for a moment, whether he ought to simply turn around and walk straight up to them.

He didn't. Instead he turned the corner slightly earlier than usual, and, already home, pouring himself a tea, caught a snatch of chatter over the old radio he'd picked up second-hand back in his first year of practice, tuned to frequencies he technically had no business knowing — a brief exchange about "a couple who were looking for a cat behind the Jolly Milkman" — and couldn't quite suppress a laugh, which quickly gave way to a fresh wave of unease: if the pub's security, which he'd long suspected had some not-entirely-clear connection to Grimshaw's people, had taken notice of Dave and Poppy right there by his meeting spot, it meant the circle around his neighbour was tightening from both directions at once — and he, Nigel, was the only one who could see the whole picture.

He took the notebook out from under the floorboard and, for the first time in a long while, wrote not about Grimshaw, but a short line addressed to himself: "Time to talk to Dave. Properly. Before someone else does."

He underlined it twice and went to bed, knowing it would be one of those notebook lines far easier to write than to actually carry out.

The next morning, against his own resolution, he put the conversation off again — first because of an urgent call from Marlon, who'd found another resident of the building willing to confirm the threats from Grimshaw's "consultants," then because of a meeting with Marlon himself that ran two hours instead of the planned thirty minutes, and finally, simply, out of the plain exhaustion that was piling up on him faster than he could keep track of it.

Going down the stairs that evening, he ran into Dave on the landing between floors — both of them reaching for the banister at the same instant to avoid a collision, and freezing for a moment in the sort of awkward silence that arises between two people each suspecting the other knows more than he's letting on.

"Everything all right?" Dave asked, and something in his voice — an unfamiliar softness, stripped of the usual performed nonchalance of the past few weeks' interrogations — made Nigel wonder, for a second, whether this was the moment he'd been putting off all day.

"Yes," he said instead, because the moment, as luck would have it, turned out to be entirely wrong: a landing between floors, ten at night, both of them rushing off somewhere. "Just tired. Busy week."

"I understand," Dave said, and they went their separate ways, up and down their respective staircases, each carrying the same unspoken thought that it was finally time to talk honestly — a thought that, as would soon become clear, was destined to come true under circumstances rather more dramatic than a chance meeting on a landing.