The Dead Battery Above the Pharmacy

The megaphone dies on a Wednesday morning, three days before the biggest recital of the year, and Fatou takes it personally.

She stands in the middle of her dance studio, which sits on the first floor above a pharmacy. For the fourth time, she presses the trigger. Nothing comes out. The little light stays dark. Thirty small children are due in an hour, and they cannot hear a human voice over their own excitement, let alone Fatou's.

"Five, six, seven, eight," she says into the empty room, just to prove to herself that she has a voice. It sounds feeble and rather sad.

The megaphone was working on Monday night. She is certain of that, because she used it at the end of the evening class to call the final stretch. The sound bounced off the mirrors so loudly that a woman in the back row clapped her hands over her ears. It lives in the open cupboard by the door, where anyone can reach it. So where did the battery go?

Fatou is a person who solves things. She teaches fourteen classes a week, and she keeps the studio keys, the music and a spare pair of shoes in every size. She does not accept that a battery can die on its own. Somebody has used her megaphone, and she intends to find out who.

She tucks the dead megaphone under her arm and starts with a list on the back of an attendance sheet. Between Monday night and this morning, the megaphone passed through three sets of hands. She knows that because she asked the cleaner, who laughed and asked her to stop investigating her own cupboard.

The first name on the list is the ballroom teacher, who rents the studio on Tuesday evenings. Fatou finds her in the corridor, wrapping a scarf around her neck.

"Yes, I borrowed it," the ballroom teacher says at once. "For about four minutes. I needed to shout over a very loud waltz. Then I put it straight back in the cupboard."

"Did it work properly when you finished?"

"Of course it did. I even took a photograph of it, because the battery light was green and I wanted to show my husband how modern we are."

She scrolls through her phone and finds the picture. A green light, three solid bars, time stamped half past seven on Tuesday. Fatou studies it with the grim attention of a detective in a film.

"That is useful," she says. "Thank you."

"Is it a crime?" the ballroom teacher asks hopefully.

"Not yet," says Fatou.

The second name is the courier, a young man with a bicycle. He delivers prescriptions for the pharmacy and sometimes uses the studio stairwell as a shortcut. Fatou catches him in the middle of lifting his bike up the stairs.

He goes slightly pale when she says the word megaphone.

"I did take it," he admits, "but only for a minute. A dog escaped from a van outside and started running around the car park. I stood on the steps and shouted at it. It ignored me completely."

"What did you do with the megaphone afterwards?"

"I put it on the shelf by the pharmacy door. The one in the back corridor, next to the boxes. I thought it would be safer there." He looks at his shoes. "Was that wrong?"

Fatou writes on the sheet: Courier, Tuesday, about eight. Moved it to the pharmacy shelf. Then, because she is fair, she writes: Why did it come back to my cupboard?

"Someone must have carried it up to me," she says. "Someone who knew whose it was."

The courier shrugs. Fatou watches him carry his bicycle away.

That leaves the third person, and he is the one she was trying not to think about. He is the pharmacist, a tall, patient, untidy man named Nikos. He sells her cough sweets and cheerfully complains about her music through the ceiling every afternoon. The two of them have been neighbours for four years, and she has never once suspected him of anything worse than a bad singing voice.

She finds him behind the counter, writing a label with great care. His eyes are tired. There is a long queue in front of him, and she can see that the queue is not cheerful.

"Nikos," she says. "A word."

"Fatou, I would love to, but as you can see, I am drowning." He waves at the line of customers. "The number machine broke on Tuesday, and since then everybody has been standing in a heap and arguing about who arrived first."

Fatou stops. Something in her head clicks, the way a key clicks into a lock.

"Nikos, when did the number machine break?"

"Tuesday afternoon. Why?"

"And how did you call the customers on Tuesday evening?"

He opens his mouth and closes it again. He looks suddenly like a man who has been caught eating the last biscuit. "I had a little help," he says. "From the back corridor shelf."

"There is a megaphone on that shelf."

"There was a megaphone on that shelf. It was very useful. It has a lovely loud voice."

"Nikos," Fatou says, with enormous calm, "where is it now?"

She does not wait for his answer. She lifts the dead megaphone from under her arm and sets it on the counter between them. Nikos looks at it the way a man looks at an old photograph of himself. Then he bends closer and points at the trigger, where a sticky grey stripe shows that clear tape was once wound around it. Beside the stripe, a ragged scrap of paper still clings to the plastic. On it, in the pharmacy's thick black marker, are two words: NEXT, PLEASE.

"That is my label," he says weakly. "And that is my tape."

"You taped the trigger down," Fatou says.

"Only so that I would not have to hold it." Nikos is turning an interesting shade of pink. "I peeled the tape off before I brought it back, because I thought you would never notice. But it was not turned off properly when I carried it to the stockroom last night. I left it humming on the shelf. All night."

"All night, calling for the next customer in an empty pharmacy."

"I am told it was a very polite night."

In the line, someone laughs. Another customer starts to clap, slowly. Fatou presses her lips together, because she does not want to give him the satisfaction. A smile is creeping up on her, and she cannot stop it.

"Three people," she says. "Three people, and the one I should have started with was downstairs the whole time."

"In my defence," Nikos says, "I did bring it back to you. I left it in your cupboard this morning, at six, before you came."

"Dead."

"Humbly dead. I apologise." He pushes the megaphone an inch towards her across the counter. "I will buy you new batteries. I will buy you twelve of them, with a ribbon. And I will stand in the front row on Saturday and call every dance step you want."

"That," Fatou says, "is the best offer I have had all week."

"Left foot, right foot," says Nikos, lifting the dead megaphone to his lips and speaking into it with great seriousness. "Next customer, please."