My Clocking In System

Chapter 39: Secret Investigation

By the Thursday, Danny had looked at eleven empty units and learned that he knew nothing about anything.

He’d thought buying a café would be like buying a coffee. You saw one you liked, you paid, it was yours.

Instead there were leases and premiums and something called dilapidations, and rateable values, and a man from a commercial agency named Gethin who said "footfall" the way other men said God, and eleven empty shops that had all, apparently, failed for reasons Danny couldn’t see and Gethin could see from the pavement.

"Barber’s went under here," Gethin said, outside the fourth one, not even getting out the car.

"And a vape shop. And a Turkish place before that. It’s the side of the road. Sun’s on the other side all afternoon. Nobody sits in shade." He pulled off. "You want the sunny side. People are lizards, Mr Flynn. Don’t let anybody tell you different."

Danny wrote sunny side in the notes on his phone, under dilapidations (find out), and thought, not for the first time that week, that he was a courier from Pembury with a spreadsheet, playing at being a man who bought things.

But he was learning.

That was the part that had surprised him.

He’d expected to feel like a fraud, and some of the time he did, but underneath it there was a thing he had not felt in years, maybe ever, which was interest. He wanted to know why the Turkish place failed.

He wanted to know what footfall a corner did on a Tuesday versus a Saturday.

He sat in the blue-front café two mornings running with a coffee going cold, not for the ache of it now but with a notebook, counting people in and out, watching which tables filled first and why, and the woman with the glasses in her hair, whose name turned out to be Sandra, had stopped asking if he wanted another and started just bringing it.

"You opening one," Sandra said on the Thursday, putting the second one down without being asked. Not really a question.

Danny looked up. "That obvious."

"You’ve been counting my customers for two days with your lips moving." She wiped the next table. "Either you’re opening one or you’re very lonely, and you don’t look lonely enough for that."

"Opening one. Maybe. For my mum, mostly."

Something in Sandra’s face softened at that, the way faces did when you said the true thing instead of the clever one.

"Sunny side," she said. "And don’t skimp on the machine. Everything else you can fake. Not the machine."

She straightened up. "And be nice to whoever does your mornings, because they’ll know more than you ever will and they’ll leave the second you forget it."

Danny wrote it all down.

He was, he realised, happier than he had been in a very long time. Not the vertigo of the money, the sick lurch of the number going up. This was quieter and it was his. He had a thing to build.

What he did not fully clock, riding home over the bridge that Thursday evening with a head full of footfall and machines, was how many people, across the grey sprawl of the city he was crossing, were thinking about him.

Four miles north of the bridge, in the tower he’d left that morning, one of them was in the water.

Mara swam at nine, the way she always swam at nine, and the pool was empty, the way it had been empty every morning for a week.

No Danny-from-forty.

She’d stopped pretending to herself that she wasn’t checking.

That was the humiliating part, the checking, the way her eyes went to the glass door every time the filter clunked on and made a noise like someone coming through it.

She was twenty-four years old and she had met the man precisely once, and she was doing lengths in a costume she’d bought specifically because of the way he’d looked at her in it, for an audience that was not there.

She flipped at the wall with a slap and pushed off hard, furious with herself, and swam it out.

The thing was, she kept thinking about the catch.

The slip, the half-second of going down toward the wet tiles, and then his arm around her, the whole of her weight taken like it was nothing, and how she’d looked up and found his face an inch from hers and watched him go carefully, deliberately still, holding himself and her both a specific distance from a thing they’d both felt coming.

She’d had men grab at her her whole life. She had never once had one catch her and then go still like that, like he didn’t trust himself, like she was something he had to be careful with.

She thought about his hands. She thought about the size of ’him’ behind her at the pool edge, the heat coming off him. And laid on top of all of it, worse than the wanting, was the not knowing.

She’d gone back to the directory three times now. Flat 40. The grey dash where a name should be.

Every other flat in the building had a name against it, the Al-Rashids, the Fentons, old Pemberton with his cap, her own, and flat forty had nothing, a little horizontal line, a man who had bought the whole crown of the building and left no mark.

She hauled out at the end, water sluicing off her, wrapped the cream linen shirt round herself, and stood dripping at the desk.

"Priyanka. Has forty been down at all? This week?"

Priyanka gave her the smooth smile. "I really couldn’t say, miss."

"Couldn’t or won’t."

"Bit of both," Priyanka said, pleasantly, and Mara laughed despite herself, because you had to respect it.

She rode up in the slow lift, wet and cross and awake in a way that had nothing to do with the swim, and she made a decision somewhere around the twentieth floor.

She was Mara Doyle.

She had spent her whole life inside the world of men who bought things and left no marks; it was her father’s entire world, she’d been raised in its clubs and its rooms.

If there was one thing she knew how to do, one skill her ridiculous upbringing had actually given her, it was find out who somebody really was.

She was going to find out who lived in forty.

She let herself into her flat and stood in the hall a moment, dripping on her own floor, cross with everything.

Then she peeled the wet linen over her head and dropped it where she stood.

Peeled the green costume down, off her shoulders, down over her tits, the cold air hitting her nipples stiff, down over the hard flat of her stomach, down her legs, and stepped out of it.

It lay on the floor looking exactly like what it was. A thing she’d worn for a man who hadn’t come.

Shower, she told herself. A normal shower. And while she was in there, she’d think about the problem of flat forty like a sensible woman, because knowing your neighbours was simply due diligence.