Chapter 106: The Thursday Coat

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 106: The Thursday Coat

Priya called it in on a Sunday.

"I found her."

Dana had the phone on speaker before the second word was out. "Say that again."

"Lian Chen. Everett's mother. She's not on any Ministry roll, she's not in any of your ledgers, and she's not dead." Paper sounds on the other end. "She's in a residential care facility two hundred miles east under the name Lian Park. Admitted 2011. Diagnosis on file is early-onset dementia."

"That's a year after she disappeared."

"Eleven months. And here's the part that made me call on a Sunday instead of Monday." Priya's voice tightened. "The admission was paid for. Privately. Fifteen years of fees, current, never late. The account routes through a trust and the trust routes through Meridian."

They didn't tell Everett.

That was the first argument, and it took two hours, and it was ugly the way arguments get ugly when everybody is right.

"He gets told," Dana said. "That's not negotiable. It's his mother."

"He gets told after we know what she is," Cole said. "Not before."

"She's a sixty-eight-year-old woman in a care home."

"She's a sixty-eight-year-old woman in a care home that the Choir has been paying for since 2011, and I'd like to know why before we drive a man two hundred miles to look at her."

"You think it's a trap."

"I think it's a hook," Cole said. "There's a difference. A trap is for us. A hook is for him."

Dana stopped.

"Say that again."

"Everett Chen has been writing letters to journalists and police departments for fifteen years. He's got a group. They meet in a library." Cole was leaning against the counter with his arms folded. "If you wanted to know which of your old cases had families still making noise, and you wanted a way to bring one of them somewhere quiet whenever you chose to — you'd keep the mother alive, you'd keep her findable, and you'd wait."

"That's monstrous."

"That's forty years of administration." He looked up. "They didn't do it for Everett. Whoever set that account up in 2011 didn't know his name. They set it up because a living relative is an asset and a dead one isn't, and then they filed it and forgot about it, and it's been sitting there earning interest ever since."

Elena, who'd been quiet in the doorway, spoke for the first time.

"He's right," she said.

"Elena—"

"I was an asset with a maintenance schedule for four years, Dana. I know what one looks like from the inside." She came in and sat down. "They didn't hate me. That's the part nobody understands. Nobody down there was cruel. They were diligent. Somebody came every four hours because the paperwork said every four hours, and that man had a thermos and a bad knee and once he apologised to me for being late."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"So we go and look," Elena said. "And if she's a person, we bring her son. And if she's a hook, we take it out of the water before it catches him."

Thessaly drove. Cole, Vesper and Dana went. Nobody else, because six people arriving at a care facility on a Tuesday afternoon is a thing that gets remembered.

The place was — and this was the part that would sit with Cole for weeks — nice.

Not institutional. Low buildings, a garden with actual maintenance in it, a woman on the front desk who asked who they were there to see and then said "oh, Lian, she's lovely" without checking a screen.

"Family?"

"Friends of her son," Dana said.

"That's wonderful. She doesn't get visitors." The woman came out from behind the desk. "I should say — she's very good in the mornings and less good after lunch. It's half two. Just so you're prepared."

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Lian Chen was in a chair by a window with a blanket over her knees and a paperback she wasn't reading.

She was small. That was the first thing. Everett was a tall man and his mother was very small.

She looked up when they came in, and she smiled at them the way people smile at strangers who might be somebody they've forgotten, and said, "Hello. Are you here about the coats?"

Cole felt the floor move.

"Sorry?"

"The coats." She gestured vaguely at the window. "Grey for most days. Brown for cold. I keep the brown one in the — " She stopped. Her face did something. "I'm sorry. That's not right. Start again."

"It's alright."

"It isn't, but thank you." She folded her hands. "I have a bad memory. They tell me it's an illness. I don't think it is, but I've stopped saying that to people because it upsets them."

Dana sat down slowly in the chair opposite.

"Why don't you think it's an illness?"

"Because illnesses take everything," Lian said. "Mine's very tidy."

She was lucid for nineteen minutes, and in that time she told them four things.

That she had a son and his name was Everett and she could not remember his face.

That she had worked somewhere with a long corridor and a smell like a coin held in your hand too long.

That in the week before she stopped going, she had found a room she wasn't supposed to find, and had known immediately that she would not be allowed to keep having found it.

And that she had worn the wrong coat on purpose.

"I wanted him to ask," she said. "He was eight and he noticed everything. I thought — if I do one thing that's wrong, one small thing, he'll ask me, and then there'll be a moment he remembers." Her hands were shaking. "I couldn't tell him anything. They'd have known. But I could put on the brown coat on a Tuesday."

Vesper had gone completely still.

"He asked," she said.

Lian looked up.

"He asked you," Vesper said. "He wrote it down. Fifteen years ago, in a notebook, because he wanted to remember his mother. Page sixty. She wore the Thursday coat on a Tuesday and she said don't worry about it."

Lian Chen put both hands over her face.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, good."

And then, after a while, still behind her hands:

"That's all I wanted. That's the whole thing I wanted. I've been trying to remember whether it worked for fifteen years."

She went after that. Not all at once — she drifted, came back twice, asked Dana whether it was Thursday, and then asked again four minutes later.

At ten past three she looked at Cole for a long time.

"You're very tall," she said. "Are you the one who—"

She stopped.

Her face changed. Not confusion this time. Something else.

"You shouldn't be here," she said. Clearly. No drift in it at all. "They come on Thursdays."

"Who does?"

"The man who pays." Her hands had gone to the blanket, gripping it. "He's very polite. He asks how I am. He's been asking how I am for fifteen years and he has not aged one day, and I am not confused about that, whatever it says on my chart."

They got her name. Ansel.

They got it because Cole asked what the man looked like and Lian Chen, sixty-eight years old with a tidy illness that took exactly the right things, said: "Grey at the sides. Old coat. Sad."

And then she was gone again, asking about the garden.

Thessaly had the car running before the rest of them reached the doors.

Nobody spoke until the second roundabout.

"He's been visiting her for fifteen years," Vesper said.

"Yes."

"Every Thursday."

"That's what she said."

"Why?" Vesper had turned around in her seat. "He's not maintaining her. She's not edited — she's ill, that's a real illness, whatever she thinks about it. He's not extracting anything. He goes and asks how she is."

Dana was looking out the window. "Because he's got a woman in Kaelmoor he can't talk to."

Nobody said anything for about a mile.

"That's not a defence," Dana said. "I want to be clear I'm not defending him. He's the reason she's in that chair. He's the reason a boy grew up without a mother and spent fifteen years writing in notebooks."

"But."

"But there's a man who does a monstrous thing and then visits the wreckage every week for fifteen years, and I don't have a filing category for that, and I'd like one."

Cole did the arithmetic in the back seat and didn't like where it came out.

Thursday. Two days. A room they knew Ansel would be in, at a time they knew, for the first time since any of this started.

Everything in him wanted to be there.

"We're not going," he said.

Thessaly's eyes came up in the mirror. "Say that again slowly, because I had an argument prepared."

"We're not going." He watched the road. "Two days isn't enough to plan anything against a man who's been doing this for forty-one years. We'd be walking into a place we've seen once, full of sixty-eight-year-old civilians, on a schedule he set."

"He doesn't know we were there."

"The woman on the front desk said Lian doesn't get visitors. Then she got three." Cole let that sit. "He'll know by Thursday. He might know already."

Dana turned around. "So we lose her."

"We don't lose her. We lose Thursday." He met her eyes. "There's a difference and I'm going to hold onto it, because if I don't I'll be in that garden in two days with no plan and a lot of feelings, and that's how Everett Chen ends up with a second thing to write in a notebook."

They told Everett on Wednesday.

All of it. That she was alive. That she was ill, and it was real illness, not something anyone had done to her. That she remembered him and couldn't remember his face. That the fees had been paid, every month, for fifteen years, by the people who took her.

And the coat. Vesper told him about the coat, because she was the one who'd found it, and because Dana asked her to.

He sat with his hands on his knees.

"Can I see her?"

"Yes," Dana said. "Not this week."

"Why not this week?"

"Because on Thursdays somebody else visits," Cole said, "and I want a month to work out what to do about that before you're in the building."

Everett looked at him for a long moment.

"You're asking me to wait a month."

"I'm asking you to wait a month after fifteen years. It's an unfair thing to ask and I'm asking anyway."

He was quiet.

"The coat worked," he said finally, to nobody in particular. "She did that on purpose. She did that for me. I've had that line in a notebook since I was twenty-three and I thought I'd imagined it."

"It worked," Vesper said.

"It took fifteen years."

"It still worked."

Everett Chen put his face in his hands at somebody else's kitchen table for the second time in a fortnight, and this time nobody pretended to look anywhere else.

[End of Chapter 106]