Chapter 118: Four Miles

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 118: Four Miles

The town was called Wellhurst and it had a population of about nine hundred and a petrol station that also sold fishing licences.

They went on a Thursday, in two cars, because Dana refused to put everyone in one vehicle four miles from a restricted zone and Thessaly refused to argue with her about it.

The address on the licence was 14 Gallow Row.

It was a bungalow.

That was the part nobody had prepared for.

Cole had built something in his head over three days — a cabin, maybe, or a flat above a shop, something with the shape of a man hiding. Instead there was a pebble-dashed bungalow with a low wall, a wheelie bin, and a hanging basket that somebody had watered recently.

A woman in her sixties answered the door.

"Oh," she said. "You'll be about Ray."

Her name was Gail Pettifer and she'd bought the house in 2020 and she'd had four people come about Ray Vale in five years, which she said in the tone of a woman reporting an ongoing mild inconvenience like a leaking gutter.

"Four?" Dana said.

"Two from a bank. A man with a clipboard who said he was council but wasn't." She counted them on her fingers at the door. "And a lady, about three years back. Very polite. Asked if I'd found anything in the loft."

"Had you?"

"Boxes. I'd already put them out." Gail pulled a face. "I felt bad after. But it'd been eighteen months and nobody'd come, and I needed the loft."

Cole stood on a path he had never walked on, outside a house his father had lived in, and found he wasn't feeling anything much at all.

"Did you meet him?" he said.

"No, love. He'd gone before I bought it. The estate agent said he'd moved on."

"Moved on."

"That's what they say, isn't it." She shrugged. "Could mean anything."

She let them look at the loft, which was empty, and gave them tea, which they drank standing up in a kitchen with a calendar from a garden centre on the wall.

"You're his boy, then."

"Yeah."

"You've got the height." Gail said it without much weight. "The man from the bank said he'd been a lorry driver. Is that right?"

"I don't know what he was."

"No," she said. "Well."

She topped his tea up without asking.

Vesper asked the useful question, which was not the one Cole would have asked.

"The polite lady. Three years ago. What did she look like?"

Gail thought about it.

"Older than me. Or not — that's the thing, I couldn't have told you." She frowned at the middle distance. "Grey hair. Not old-lady grey. Silver, more. Lovely coat."

Dana's pen stopped.

"Did she give a name?"

"She might have done. I'd have forgotten it." Gail laughed. "I forget everything. I forgot I had the — oh. Hang on."

She put her cup down.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"There was one thing," she said. "I kept it because it seemed daft to throw out and then I forgot about it for four years, which is how I do most things."

It was a key.

Not a house key. Smaller, flatter, stamped with a number — B-17 — on a fob of cheap orange plastic that had gone brittle.

"It was taped under the boiler," Gail said. "I found it when the fella came to service it. He asked if I wanted it and I said leave it and he taped it back, and then when he came the next year he asked again and I put it in the drawer."

Dana turned it over twice.

"That's a storage unit key."

"Is it? I thought it might be a locker."

"It's a storage unit. That numbering's a company called Fenwick." Dana's voice had gone flat in the way it did when she was working hard not to move. "Fenwick Storage."

Cole looked up.

"Unit 14," he said.

"Different site. Fenwick's got eleven sites." Dana closed her hand around the key. "And they're a Meridian subsidiary."

At the door, Gail said the thing that stayed with all of them.

"She went in the loft too, the lady. I said she could." She was holding the door open with her hip. "And she was up there a good while and she came down and she said there was nothing, and she was quite nice about it, and then she asked whether I'd had anyone else come about the house."

"What did you say?"

"I said no, because nobody had. That was three years ago." Gail shrugged. "And then she said — hang on, what was it. She said, 'If a young man comes, he'll be very tall and he won't look like he's in a hurry.'"

The four of them stood on a garden path in Wellhurst.

"And I said righto," Gail said. "And I never thought about it again till you knocked."

They didn't go straight there.

That was Thessaly, on the pavement outside the bungalow, and it took her about four sentences.

"He taped a key under a boiler in a house four miles from Sector Twelve, and then he left, and four separate people have come looking for it since including one who wasn't council and one who was 'very polite.'" She pulled her coat straight. "We're not driving to a Fenwick site today with a key we found an hour ago."

"It's eight miles."

"I know how far it is. I looked it up in the car while you were drinking tea." Thessaly met his eye. "The last time we went and looked at a place the day we found out about it, a woman with a bruise on her sternum was standing in your street at dawn."

Cole wanted to argue.

He had the whole shape of the argument ready — that they were close, that the key was eight years old and whatever was in that unit had been sitting there since before Kaelmoor came back into anybody's mouth, that they had five people and a car.

"Fine," he said.

Reeve blinked. "Fine?"

"Fine. Monday. Thessaly plans it."

On the way back Vesper said, "You're doing the thing."

"Which thing."

"The one where you agree with somebody instantly and then go very quiet."

"I agreed because she was right."

"Yeah," Vesper said, "and you've been looking out that window for eleven minutes."

Cole kept looking out the window.

"His name was Ray," he said.

Nobody in the car said anything.

"I've had eighteen years of not knowing that." His voice was perfectly level, which was its own kind of information. "I found out from a woman in a cardigan who binned his boxes because she needed the loft."

They stopped at the petrol station because the car needed it and because Mia, on the phone from home, had asked someone to buy her crisps.

Cole went in.

There was a corkboard by the till — the kind every rural petrol station has, three layers thick with cards for logs, lawnmower repair, a lost cat from 2021.

He wasn't looking for anything.

That was the true and boring fact of it, and he'd repeat it later and nobody would entirely believe him. He was standing at a till waiting for a woman to finish a phone call, and his eye went across a corkboard, and on a yellowing card at the bottom left, under a number that had been scratched out and rewritten twice, was a line of handwriting he had seen four times in the last year.

Neat. Unhurried.

ODD JOBS — CLEARANCE — LOFTS, GARAGES, OUTBUILDINGS. DISCREET.

He took a photo of it.

Then he took the card off the board, which the woman at the till did not notice, and put it in his pocket, and bought Mia's crisps.

"Anything?" Dana said, when he got back in.

Cole handed her the card.

She looked at it for about three seconds and then said a word Cole had not previously heard her use.

They got home at nine.

Dana had the card in an evidence sleeve by half past and three comparison documents on the table by ten — the Kaelmoor ledger, the Halvern payroll margin, and a 1994 Ministry redaction slip Aldric had never explained how he'd got.

Same hand. All four.

"He was advertising," she said. "On a corkboard. In a petrol station. Four miles from Sector Twelve."

"For clearance work," Aldric said. "Lofts, garages, outbuildings." He had gone grey around the mouth. "That's — Dana, that's not a cover story, that's a service. That's how you find things. You don't break into a house looking for an object you're not sure exists. You wait for somebody to call you about their mother's loft."

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Four hundred years," Mia said, from the doorway. "You said four hundred years."

"At least."

"So how many lofts is that?"

Cole went out at eleven and stood on the fire escape and got out the photo rather than the card, because Dana had the card.

Under the scratched-out number was a second number, also scratched out, and under that a third, which had not been.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he put the phone in his pocket and went back inside and said nothing to anyone about it, and Vesper, who had watched him come in through the window from the other side of the room, did not ask.

She wrote three words in her notebook instead, and looked at them, and then tore the page out and folded it and put it in her coat, which she had never once done before.

[End of Chapter 118]