Episodul 28 · A Plan This Time

Maxim called shortly before eleven.

— I’m coming home. Don’t start walking toward anything.

— What did you see?

— A man who might be him. I’ve told the investigator.

Soles put down the invoice and waited by the shed. When the truck stopped outside, he was already on his feet.

Maxim came through the gate with his work jacket open. He had dust on his sleeves and the tired look he wore when a collection had involved more carrying than the customer had mentioned.

— Sit down, he said.

— You said it might be him.

— And now I’m telling you why it might not. Sit down for that part too.

They sat on the shed step. Maxim took out his phone and showed him a photograph of the row of boat sheds.

— The one with the new sheet metal. That’s Ivo’s. I asked where to leave a parcel. I didn’t ask about Kerr.

He had left the truck out of sight and walked along the public path on the opposite bank. Through the gaps in the reeds, he could see the yard behind the shed.

— A man came out twice. Right arm in a sling, cigarette in the left. Broad face. I couldn’t be certain from there.

— You saw him at the truck. You know his face.

— I know what he looks like close enough to hit me. I wasn’t going that close again.

Soles looked at the small doorway in the photograph. He wanted to pull it nearer with his fingers until a face appeared.

— There’s something else, Maxim said.

On the road above the sheds, a gray car stood near the edge. It was a plain, clean shape Soles would not have remembered seeing in traffic.

— It was there when I arrived. Same man at the wheel when I left. Looking at the shed more than the road.

— Police?

— Could be. I told the investigator about him too. He didn’t tell me whether it was one of theirs.

Maxim put the phone down between them.

— He said to stay out of the yard. They’re checking the place and sending someone.

Soles stood before he had decided to. At the gate, Lucky moved aside, ready to follow him.

He stopped with his hand on the latch.

— I have to see him.

Maxim stayed on the step.

— You want to. I heard the difference.

— If the man in the car takes him first—

— We don’t know what he’s doing there.

— Neither does Kerr. He keeps looking at the road. You said so.

He was building certainty out of a man smoking in a yard. He could hear himself doing it, and the possibility of being right still felt larger than the gaps.

Maxim came over and waited beside the gate.

— Tell me what you’re asking me to do.

Soles looked at his cousin’s face. The last mark beneath his nose had gone yellow at the edge. It had come from standing between him and Kerr.

— Bring me to the public path. If it’s him, I can identify him from there. We call and wait. We don’t go in.

— And if he leaves?

— We tell them which way.

Maxim said nothing.

Soles took out his phone and called the investigator. He put the call on speaker, holding it to his right so they could both hear.

He explained what Maxim had seen and what he wanted to do. The investigator asked him for the photograph, then for the position of the gray car.

— Send both. Keep away from the shed. If you see him, call. You’re not there to hold him until we arrive.

— I understand.

— Then do that part.

After the call, Soles sent the photographs and a location from Maxim’s phone. He wrote to Krista too: they were going to confirm the man from the opposite bank, the investigator knew, and they would wait there.

Her reply came as he was putting on his coat.

Wait there means there, Soles.

He showed Maxim.

— I’m starting to like her, his cousin said.

They took the truck. On the way, Soles told Maxim about the invoice and Marta. His cousin listened without interrupting.

— Did Kale work that stretch?

— He might have. It says with crew. Three months.

Maxim knew what that meant. He had heard Kale talk about the crane at family meals, describing a difficult lift with whatever happened to be on the table.

— He’d know if the loads were wrong.

— If he was aboard.

Soles made himself add the condition. His father could not answer for the parts they wanted to fit together.

— He never guessed a load, Maxim said.

— You used to tell him he could see it from the cab.

— And he used to make me look at the figures anyway.

Soles remembered Kale turning a scrap of paper toward them over dinner, impatient with an answer that had begun with probably. He wanted that certainty now: the right number, the right name, something his father could put a finger beside and explain. The invoice offered none of it yet. He folded the phone cover shut.

The streets narrowed near the old riverbed. Maxim parked before the bend, leaving the yellow cab hidden from the sheds. They could walk to the public path from there without crossing the footbridge.

Before getting out, he put a hand on Soles’s sleeve.

— No disappearing into that garden in your head either.

Soles looked at him.

— I wasn’t going to.

— You weren’t going to knock the tea over. I still caught it.

He had been thinking about the soldier. One moment of knowing exactly where to stand, if something went wrong. He could not reach for that place and watch the yard at the same time.

— All right. Eyes open.

Maxim took his phone and keys. Soles checked that the investigator’s number was ready on his own screen, then followed him out.

Beyond the bend, the footbridge crossed the old channel. Ivo’s shed stood on the far bank. Above it, the gray car was still there.

They stopped at the public railing, together, with the way back to the truck behind them.