Chapter 122: The Man Who Is Better Than Ansel

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 122: The Man Who Is Better Than Ansel

Ansel came to the laundromat, which was becoming a habit that nobody had agreed to.

He was sitting in the same plastic chair Voss had used, which Cole did not think was a coincidence and did not mention.

"Hollis Verrin," Ansel said.

"You heard."

"I heard at eleven this morning and I have spent the day being told, by three separate people, that I did it." He had his hands flat on his knees. "I'd like to say I didn't. I'm aware that's what a man would say."

"I know you didn't."

Ansel looked up.

"You seem certain."

"It took less than nine hours and there's not a seam in him." Cole sat down two chairs along. "You told me in a corridor that you need weeks. You weren't lying — there was nothing in it for you."

"No."

"So either you were lying about something with no upside, or somebody's better than you."

Ansel was quiet for a moment.

"That's the first time in forty-one years anybody's said that sentence in front of me," he said. "I find I don't enjoy it as much as I'd have predicted."

"Can you do it in a night?"

"No."

"Could Marguerite?"

"No." Ansel said it without any hedging. "Marguerite doesn't smooth. She processes — she opens people up and takes what's wanted and closes them badly, which is why her work leaves scarring and mine doesn't. It's not a skill difference. It's a different job."

"Then who."

"I've been asking that since eleven." He looked at the broken machine opposite. "There are four people alive who can do what I do. I trained two of them. The third is dead and I attended. The fourth is a woman in Denmark who hasn't worked since 2009 and could not, physically, have been in that house."

"Then the answer's none of them."

"The answer is none of them," Ansel agreed, "which means there is a fifth, and I have been inside that organisation for four decades and I did not know there was a fifth."

Cole watched him work through it.

That was the useful thing about Ansel, and the frightening one — he didn't perform his own thinking. He just went quiet and came out somewhere.

"Say it," Cole said.

"I've been assuming I was near the top." Ansel's voice had gone strange. "Not the top. Near it. Voss above me, Marguerite beside me, and beneath that a structure I built a good deal of personally." He rubbed his thumb along the arm of the chair. "If there is a person operating at that level whose existence was withheld from me, then I have spent forty years as something other than what I believed I was."

"Middle management."

"That's a cruel way to put it."

"Is it wrong?"

"No," Ansel said.

He stayed eleven minutes, which was two longer than his corridor visit and which Cole noticed.

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"I came to tell you something and I've spent the time being humiliated instead, which is a fair trade and I'm not complaining." Ansel stood. "Verrin wasn't the last one."

"There's Aldric."

"There's Aldric, and there's a thing you haven't considered." He straightened his coat. "Eleven caretakers maintained Kaelmoor. That's the list you have. It is not the list of people who know things."

Cole's stomach dropped about an inch.

"Dorrie Lachlan," he said.

"I don't know that name and I would prefer to keep not knowing it." Ansel was already at the door. "But if you are in contact with anyone at all who worked in a building they shouldn't have been in, at any point in the last sixty years, I would move them this week."

"You know I can't move people who won't tell me where they are."

"Yes." Ansel put his hand on the door. "That's rather the design."

They found her on Sunday.

Not smoothed. That was the first mercy and there weren't any others.

Dorrie Lachlan had been living in a one-room flat above a shuttered betting shop under the name Ruth Neale, and she had not been there when whoever came, came. The door had been opened without force. Nothing was taken. The bed was made.

On the kitchen table, squared up neatly, was a photograph of her that had been taken from across a road.

It was dated on the back.

Tuesday.

The night she'd first seen the lamp and decided it was a coincidence.

Nobody said anything in the flat for a long while.

The room told you everything about thirty-five years of being careful. Two plates. One chair. A bag by the door with clothes in it, packed, which had clearly been packed and repacked so many times that the folds had gone soft. A tin of soup and nothing else in the cupboard, because you don't stock a flat you might have to leave.

And a paperback on the arm of the chair with a bus ticket in it as a bookmark, eleven pages from the end.

Elena picked it up and looked at the page number and put it back down and went and stood by the window.

"She's alive," Vesper said eventually. "That's not — they didn't take her. They're telling us they could have."

"They're telling me," Cole said.

Dana turned. "You don't know that."

"She came because of a lamp in my kitchen window. She sat across the road from my building for a night, and somebody photographed her doing it, and then let her walk eleven miles home and go about her week." He was looking at the photograph and not touching it. "That's not a threat to Dorrie Lachlan. That's an invoice."

"For what?"

"For the lamp." He straightened. "I lit a signal that hasn't been lit in nine years and somebody was watching the first person who answered it. That's not surveillance on her. That's a trap that was already built, and I baited it."

Aldric was waiting up when they got back.

He'd made tea for six people nobody had asked for and had lined the cups up on the counter, which was a thing he did when he was frightened and which nobody had ever pointed out to him.

"She's gone?"

"She's alive. She wasn't there."

"Ah." He nodded slowly. "That's better than my week's been going, I'll take it."

"Aldric."

"I know what you're about to say and I'd like to get in first." He picked up one of the cups and didn't drink from it. "You're going to put somebody on me. Thessaly, or Marek, or both, and there'll be a conversation about how it's temporary."

"Yes."

"Do it. I'm not going to be Hollis about it." He set the cup down. "I've had four days to think about whether I'd rather die in a chair I like, and it turns out I don't like any of my chairs, and I'd quite like to see how this ends."

He took the lamp out of the window that evening.

Mia was the one who stopped him, with both hands on the sill.

"No."

"Mia—"

"You put it there. I put it there, technically, but you said leave it on." She wasn't shouting. "And a woman walked eleven miles at two in the morning because of it, and then said there are nine more of them, and then said most of them have stopped looking."

"And now one of them's been photographed."

"Yes." Mia's chin was up. "And if you turn that off tonight, then the message to the eight people who might still be walking past windows is that the one lamp anybody's lit in nine years went out the first time somebody got frightened."

Cole stood there with his hand on the switch.

"That's a good argument," he said.

"I know it is."

"It's also the argument that gets somebody killed."

"Yes," Mia said. "That's why I'm making it and not you. You'd never forgive yourself. I'll manage."

The lamp stayed on.

Cole went out at eleven and stood in the street across from his own building, at the exact spot in the photograph, and looked up at his own kitchen window from where a stranger had watched it for a night.

It was a good view. Clear sightline, no streetlight glare, a low wall to sit on.

He stood there for about twenty minutes, and for most of it he was thinking about nothing useful at all — about how cold it was, about a woman with one shoe, about the fact that she'd sat here all night and gone home and come back anyway.

Then he turned around and looked at the building behind him — three storeys, flats, a stairwell window on the second floor with a clear angle down onto the wall he was standing at — and he went up and knocked on the door of the flat at the end of the second-floor corridor, and a man answered it, and Cole was in there four minutes.

He came out with a name.

He did not tell anybody that he had it.

[End of Chapter 122]