Chapter 3
What Was Behind the Door
You’re picking up where you left off.
The door was not locked.
It opened onto a short corridor lit by a humming strip light, with yellowed posters on the walls — agricultural notices from the eighties, subsidies, an insurance scheme, a calendar from 1994 still showing March.
There was a smell of dust and cold concrete, and over it, very faintly, a smell of coffee.
On the right, an open door led into a former office: a Formica table, a grey dial telephone torn off the wall, a coat stand. On the coat stand, three women's coats.
Clara looked at them as she passed. A beige raincoat, a black padded jacket, a navy coat with a synthetic fur collar.
She thought, very quickly and without meaning to: which one?
And felt ashamed, because she was examining coats to work out which of them was sleeping with her husband, and because she already knew, by then, that it was nothing of the kind.
At the end of the corridor, a second door, with light and noise coming from it.
Not music. Voices.
Clara went forward. Her shoes made an unbelievable noise on the tiles, and she started walking on tiptoe, which was ridiculous, and carried on anyway.
One voice was speaking. The others were listening.
Then a second voice asked a question, short, and the first answered at length.
This was not a dinner. Nobody asks short questions at a dinner.
She did not make out the words. She recognised the rhythm: that of somebody explaining something precise to people who need to understand it.
She stopped with her hand on the handle.
That is the last moment at which she could have left, and she knows it to this day: there were two seconds, in that corridor, with the strip light humming, when everything was still possible. She could have gone back down, got into her car, driven home, laid the table for three, and lived another six years with a Tuesday-shaped hole.
She thought of Jonas, who is ten and has never known anything else.
She pushed the door open.
It was an enormous room, a former storage shed, with a steel frame and a concrete floor painted grey.
Only a third of it was lit. The far end stayed dark, with the silhouettes of stacked pallets.
In the middle of the lit part, arranged in a circle, were about forty chairs.
Thirty or so were occupied.
There was a folding table against the wall, with two vacuum flasks and some cups. There was a flip chart turned to face the wall. There was, on the floor beside a chair, a navy sports bag with a white stripe.
And standing in the centre of the circle, speaking, a sheet of paper in his hand, was her husband.
He stopped in the middle of a sentence.
Thirty heads turned towards the door.
What happened next, Clara would never be able to recall in the right order.
She remembers the silence. A total, immediate silence, of a particular quality — the silence of people who are used to being surprised and who are frightened.
She remembers a woman in the front row grabbing her neighbour's arm.
She remembers the very young woman, the one from the second car, jumping to her feet and pulling up her hood in a single movement, without thinking, the way you put on a helmet.
She remembers a man saying, very quietly: “Thomas.”
She remembers an old man at the back starting to put his chair away before anyone had asked him anything.
And she remembers her husband's face.
Not guilt. Not surprise.
Panic. An immediate, total panic, and — Clara would have sworn to it — not for himself.
He crossed the circle in four strides, took her by the arm, and walked her out into the corridor.
— What are you doing here?
— What are YOU doing here?
— Clara. — His voice was low, fast, urgent. — Did anybody see you arrive? Did you park in the car park?
— What?
— Did you park in the car park?
She had never heard him speak like that in twelve years.
It was not anger. It was the tone you use to ask somebody whether they have touched a live wire.
— No. A hundred metres further on. Along the wall.
He closed his eyes for a second. He breathed out.
— Good.
— Thomas, what is this place?
He did not answer at once. He looked both ways along the corridor, and Clara understood that he was checking the door at the far end.
— Is there a way out at the back? she asked.
— Yes.
— Why are you looking at the way out?
He looked at her. And for the first time in six years, he did not say I can't tell you.
He said:
— There are thirty-one people in that room. Twenty-six of them must not be found. And you have just parked your car in a village where everybody knows every number plate.