He stood in the rain with the flashlight in his hand.
He thought of the kitchen, the terracotta tile his mother had wanted for twenty years. He thought of his father's back at the counter. You want the house.
He had not wanted the house. He had wanted, he understood suddenly, standing on Ridge Road with the rain in his collar, exactly what this woman had: to be in it. To be the one who knew which stair creaked. To have been asked, every morning for six weeks, Watch? To have been somebody the old man was waiting up for.
"There was a lady," he said. He did not know why he was telling her. It came out of him the way things come out of men at two in the morning in the front seats of cars, the confessions he had heard ten thousand of and never once made. "On Old Church Road. Two weeks ago. Eighty-four years old. She came downstairs and somebody knocked her down and she lay on her kitchen floor six hours. She was my teacher. Fourth grade. She—" He stopped. "She said a woman. She said an accent. I've been hearing it in my sleep. Come on, come on, the train."
"I am sorry for your teacher," Solange said, and she meant it; he could hear that she meant it. "I hope you find them. I hope you find the woman with the accent who pushes old ladies down. I would like to meet her. I would like to have a word." She put the watch back in its blue box and closed the lid, gently, with one finger. "But it is not me. And you knew it was not me when I said Quarry Lane. You knew it on your face. I watched you know it. You just could not go up that hill."
The radio on his shoulder crackled. "Two-one, Wickham. Status?"
He turned his head and keyed it. He was quiet a second too long, and Mulcahy said, "Two-one?" in a different voice, the voice dispatchers used when a car did not answer.
"Two-one," he said. "Wickham, subject's been identified, checks okay. Resident of the north sector. Negative on any connection to the open cases." He looked at the woman. She was putting the white lid back on the white box, folding the damp brown paper back over it, one end and then the other. "I'm going to be providing a courtesy transport. Quarry Lane."
"Copy, two-one. Quarry Lane." A pause. The click of keys. "Two-one, you want a time on that?"