What Henk Wrote Down

Nora had brought her father’s shopping trolley. It stood beside her car, the fabric bag open and the handle unfolded. She had put a towel in the bottom.

‘For his radio,’ she said when Lena greeted her. ‘I tried an ordinary bag, but a corner always sticks out.’

Cor came out carrying a wooden crate. ‘It’ll stand a knock. Your dad dropped it off the bench only last month.’

‘He didn’t tell me that.’

‘Didn’t tell me he’d dropped it either. I had to work out why it was stuck on one station.’

Nora took the crate. Cor pointed out a stiff switch, but she said he could show her later. First she wanted to get it into the car in one piece. Lena held the trolley while Nora settled the radio in the towel. Its lead fell out. Nora picked it up, looped it once round her hand and put it beside the radio.

‘I don’t know if I’ll keep it,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got room at home.’

‘You don’t have to decide now,’ Cor said.

Nora looked up. ‘Everyone says that. Meanwhile, his house still needs emptying.’

Cor put his hands in his pockets. Lena let go of the trolley. She’d had a reassuring answer ready about how little space a radio took up. Nora didn’t need it, and Lena didn’t even know what her home was like. They went inside together.

The front of the workshop smelt of coffee and machine oil. On the low counter were two mugs and a pile of old job slips weighted with a nut. There was a third mug with a broken handle. Not one for customers, Cor had once explained. Nobody was to throw it away while it still held water.

A box labelled with Henk’s name stood on the worktable in the back room, which opened into the shop through a wide doorway with no door. Beyond it were the passage past the stock shelves and the door onto the path by the harbour sheds. Lena had left her bicycle there because a small lorry was unloading at the front. The way out was the same as on her earlier visits: past the shelves, through the door, left round the low stone wall to the side street.

Cor checked his watch. ‘My supplier’s early. He’ll want his paperwork signed in a minute. After that it’ll be quiet.’

‘We’re not in a hurry,’ Nora said.

He gave a brief smile and put the box between them. ‘No. But some conversations deserve to have the bell switched off.’

The box held a brown pencil case, two exercise books, a wallet of cards and an envelope of till receipts. The pencil case rattled as Nora lifted it. She unzipped it. Inside were pens and a little ruler, cracked by the number eight.

‘I had that at secondary school,’ she said. ‘He pinched it from my desk.’

‘Perhaps you left it behind.’

‘Perhaps he pinched it back then too.’

She put the ruler back. Her mouth twisted briefly. Lena could see the joke had cost her more than her voice suggested.

The appointments notebook wasn’t in the box. With permission, it had gone to the police after their previous visit. Cor had filed the acknowledgement beside the copies of the relevant pages he was allowed to keep. Nora pulled a chair up to the table. Lena sat opposite her.

‘I want to know what you’ve still got,’ Nora said. ‘Otherwise I’ll go home and start suspecting every scrap of paper.’

Cor slid the list towards her. ‘This is what’s gone. The notebook itself and the job sheet they needed from me. None of your dad’s other things.’

Nora followed the lines with her finger. She asked why one of Cor’s job sheets was listed with Henk’s possessions.

‘They were handed over at the same appointment,’ Lena said. ‘It’s a record of what was received. It doesn’t mean the job sheet belonged to your father.’

‘So I don’t need to put that down as missing.’

‘No.’

Nora took her own notebook from her bag and made a note. She had drawn boxes for taking home, gone and later. Lena asked if she could lay the copied notebook pages beside it, to help identify building-related papers that might belong to residents. Nora nodded.

The 10 May entry was at the top of a page that also included cheese, Ria lamp and dentist. N.V. — getting keys cut, Cor. Lena held her hand above the paper, pointing without touching it.

‘So this is Henk knowing about the keys,’ Nora said.

‘He’s made a note about them. It doesn’t tell us exactly what he was there to see.’

‘He’ll have asked him.’

Cor rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table. ‘Your dad was good at that.’

‘Asking everyone questions?’

‘Asking questions they didn’t want to answer.’

Nora left her notebook open but put down her pen. ‘He could keep going after you’d answered too. If he didn’t think it was the right answer.’

Lena thought of Ria describing Henk knocking on people’s doors when they wanted to sort their own post. His interference had sometimes helped and sometimes annoyed them. Nora didn’t want a father made up entirely of good intentions after his death.

‘I used to pretend I was out sometimes,’ Nora said. ‘Then he’d ring because he could see my car. We spent a whole afternoon arguing about it once.’

She pushed the copy back towards Cor. Lena let the remark stand. She wasn’t going to turn Nora’s memory into another reference to keys and doors. This was a father who hadn’t been good at accepting his daughter’s boundaries.

On the page for 14 May was Ring Niels / key back. An appointment had been crossed out. The letters ran across a coffee ring. There was no time Lena could use to build a precise sequence for the evening.

‘This goes with what the detectives are checking against the other information,’ she said. ‘On its own, it doesn’t prove what happened by the steps.’

‘I understand that.’ Nora edged her chair back. ‘I rang yesterday. I don’t need to hear everything from you.’

Lena felt her face warm. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

‘I’m only saying. There are so many people talking about him now. Sometimes I can’t get a word in.’

Cor gathered the copies into his folder, then moved the box of other papers nearer to Nora. ‘Let’s do these first. This thing about the gutter is Ria’s, I think. He brought it in because he thought I might know someone.’

Nora handed Lena the paper. It was a folded quotation with a phone number on the back. Lena recognised the address and asked whether she could ring Ria about returning it. Nora said she would be seeing Ria herself. She started a separate pile for the neighbours’ post.

The next envelope held holiday photographs Cor had found in a drawer. Henk had brought them to show him a terrace in Germany where, he said, the owner had fitted the wrong locks to the toilet doors. Nora laughed aloud at that.

‘Wherever he went,’ she said. ‘Mum would still be standing outside some building while he talked to the owner about a hinge.’

In one picture Henk wore an enormous sunhat. Nora held it for a while, then laid it on top of the pile she was taking home. Cor didn’t look over her shoulder. Lena saw he was making a point of it and turned her own eyes towards the window.

Outside, a delivery driver lifted a narrow box from the lorry. He was talking on the phone, holding it between his cheek and shoulder. The street’s ordinary work hadn’t stopped because they were sorting papers. Lena sipped her lukewarm coffee and asked Cor where he kept the job sheets for ordinary work unrelated to the investigation.

‘Out front. You don’t need to see those.’

‘No. I just don’t want to take anything for my review that doesn’t belong in it.’

Cor bent to a drawer and took out a small bundle he had already prepared. It held only copies for jobs Lena had worked on herself, other clients’ names covered. The relevant originals were with the police. He showed her which jobs he had chosen. She checked the addresses against her own list. One was an inspection done by another surveyor. She slid that sheet back.

‘That one isn’t mine.’

‘There were two names on the job.’

‘On the cover sheet, yes. But I didn’t inspect that house.’

Cor looked at the sheet, nodded and set it aside. A small distinction she might once have left to sort out later. Nora looked from them to the separate piles.

‘Dad would have shoved all this in one bag,’ she said.

‘Which is why it’s taken us an hour already,’ Cor said.

His phone rang. The supplier out front wanted to know whether to bring in the two longest lengths of profile as well. Cor said he was coming, then looked towards the table.

‘Back in a moment. Don’t get anything else out of the cupboard. If there’s something missing, we’ll find it together afterwards.’

Nora picked up the box containing her own pile. Lena offered to carry it, but Nora already had both hands underneath.

‘I’ll put this in the car. Could you see if the paper about the damp patch is in those last two? Ria’s address is at the top. I don’t want to take it if she still needs it.’

‘Of course.’

Nora went with Cor into the front of the workshop. She paused in the opening. ‘We were going to have pancakes on Friday evening. With my son. He hadn’t written that down anywhere.’

She looked at the closed folder of copies. Lena almost said that an arrangement like that could matter to the investigation too. She swallowed the words.

‘How old’s your son?’ she asked.

‘Nine. He always eats three, and Dad insisted he could manage four. We’d sit there so long he’d eventually do it.’

Nora stood with the box against her hip. ‘I told him Grandad had fallen. It was all I knew then.’

‘It was all anyone knew then,’ Lena said.

‘And now I have to tell him something different. He’ll think I was telling him something different before as well.’

Lena couldn’t choose the words for Nora’s son. She had made enough mistakes with her own daughter, holding back half the truth.

‘You can tell him you know more now,’ she said. ‘And that you can’t answer everything yourself.’

Nora looked at the box. ‘He asked if his shoes were slippery. Grandad’s. I’ve been looking at them under the coat rack all this time.’

She shook her head and said she would ask someone who knew her son to help her at home. Lena said only that it sounded sensible. When Nora moved on, she didn’t compare him to Jip. A child who had lost his grandfather needed his own adults now.

Nora went before Lena could say anything else. Outside, the trolley squeaked over the paving slabs. Cor was talking to his supplier; their voices came through the opening, but Lena couldn’t make out the words.

She pulled the last two papers towards her. The first was a bill for a tap. The second described the damp patch and proposed a check after repair. It was Ria’s address. Lena put it with the papers to be returned to the residents and wrote why on Nora’s blank sheet. Henk’s little ruler was on the edge of the worktable. Nora had left it out of the pencil case while sorting. Lena put it on the lid of the box still to be taken home.

She looked up as the shop bell rang. Cor answered somewhere near the front door. A brief greeting, too quiet to make out. Lena pushed back her chair to ask if he had another envelope for the paper about the damp patch.