Chapter 129: Eleven Open Visits

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 129: Eleven Open Visits

Dana got nine of the eleven names.

Not from Nightline — from a retired volunteer coordinator in Hexley who kept her own records because the charity's system had migrated twice and lost things, and who handed over a folder without being asked twice because Dana had gone in as a family member looking for somebody's aunt and had not had to lie about anything except which aunt.

Nine names. Eight addresses. Seven living alone.

"Two of them are in their nineties," Dana said. "One's got a live-in son. Four are in sheltered housing with a warden."

"And the rest?"

"Two men and a woman, all over eighty, all alone, all visited fortnightly by a charity that reports upward." She capped the pen. "If any of the nine are what Dorrie is, it's one of those three."

They went to the first one on the Thursday.

A bungalow in a village with a war memorial and a shop that shut at two. A man called Wilf Trent, eighty-six, who had been a signalman for the railways and had a garden he could no longer kneel in and who talked to them for ninety minutes about signal boxes because nobody had asked him about signal boxes since 2006.

He was not one of the nine.

Cole knew inside about four minutes. There was no wariness in him at all — no second plate, no bag by the door, no checking of windows. Just an old man in a cardigan who was delighted to have visitors and who asked them twice whether they'd like to see a photograph of a level crossing at Diggle.

They stayed the full ninety minutes anyway.

Vesper made the tea. Cole looked at eleven photographs of level crossings and asked real questions about all of them, and when they left Wilf Trent stood at his gate and said, "Come again if you're passing," and meant it, and nobody in the car said anything for a mile.

"That was the right thing to do," Vesper said eventually.

"Yeah."

"We've got two left and about four days."

"I know."

The second one was in a seaside town and was not at home.

Not fled — on a coach trip. The warden showed them a laminated schedule with BLACKPOOL — 2 NIGHTS on it and said Mrs. Okonjo would be back Saturday and did they want to leave a note.

"No note," Cole said.

The third one was a man called Peter Halloway, eighty-three, and they got to his door at four on the Friday and found it standing open.

Not forced. Open, about eight inches, with the chain hanging loose.

Thessaly went in first. Cole second.

The house was tidy. The kettle was warm.

Peter Halloway was sitting in the back room in a chair facing the garden, and he was alive, and he turned round when they came in and said, in a perfectly level voice:

"You're the boy."

"Somebody's been here," Thessaly said.

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"Forty minutes ago." Halloway had a walking stick across his knees and both hands on it. "Nice woman. Dark hair, cut square. She sat where you're standing and asked me nine questions and then said thank you and left the door open on the way out, which I took as a message rather than bad manners."

"What did she ask?"

"Whether I remembered a room with chairs in it."

Nobody said anything.

"I said yes," Halloway said.

He had been a cleaner at Halvern for four months in 1991.

That was the whole of it. Four months, night shifts, and a corridor on the second floor that he'd been told not to clean and had cleaned once anyway, because the door was open and he was thirty-nine and paid by the hour and there was dust in it.

"Thirty chairs," he said. "Rows. Facing a wall with nothing on it."

"Was there dust?"

He looked at Cole properly for the first time.

"No," he said. "Not a speck. In a building that had been shut for twenty years. That's the bit I couldn't put down. I hoovered a room that didn't need hoovering and I went home and I didn't sleep and on the Monday I handed in my notice and gave a made-up reason."

"And then?"

"And then nothing, for thirty-four years." He shifted the stick on his knees. "A man came in 1994 and offered to clear out my mother's house. She'd been dead eleven days. I hadn't told anyone but my brother."

"Why are you still here?" Vesper asked.

It was the right question and Halloway took a while with it.

"Because I'm not brave," he said. "Dorrie ran. I've thought about her a lot, and I never met her, and I know her name because Ray told me once in 1996 that there was a woman who checked windows, and that was the single most dangerous thing anybody ever told me and I've never repeated it until now."

"You know Ray."

"I knew Ray." Halloway's hands tightened on the stick. "He came here twice. Ninety-six, and then in — 2011, I think. He sat in that chair you're standing next to and he told me that hiding properly meant losing everything and that most people can't do it, and that there was no shame in choosing not to."

"He told you not to run?"

"He told me the truth," Halloway said, "which is that if you stay, they know where you are, and if they ever want you they'll have you, and the only thing you get in exchange is thirty-four years of your own garden."

He looked out at it.

"It was a good trade," he said. "I want that said out loud by somebody who isn't me. It was a good trade and I'd do it again and today it came due, and that's how a trade works."

It happened at twenty past five.

They were getting him out — Thessaly had a car at the kerb and Marek was carrying a bag Halloway had packed in 1994 and never unpacked — and a man came up the garden path.

Ordinary. Late thirties, jacket, a clipboard.

"Mr. Halloway? I'm from the council, we've had a report about—"

Cole was eleven feet away.

Afterward, when Thessaly asked him to walk it through, he said: "He came up the path, he said council, I got to him."

He did not say the rest, because the rest was about four seconds long and he could account for none of it.

What Marek saw was this.

Cole crossed eleven feet of garden path without appearing to hurry, took the man's clipboard out of his hand, looked at it, and dropped it. Then he put his forearm across the man's throat and walked him backwards into the low brick wall hard enough that a coping stone came loose, and held him there, and said something.

Marek was nine feet away and did not catch it.

He caught the sound of it, though, and the thing he told nobody for eight weeks was that it had not been Cole's voice. Not deeper. Not louder. Just — flatter, and unhurried, and completely without the thing that usually sat under everything Cole said, which Marek had never had to find a word for until he heard it missing.

The man went white and started talking very fast.

Cole let him go and stepped back and the man ran, and Cole stood looking at the wall for about two seconds with his hand half-raised.

Then he turned round and said, in his own voice, "He's a genuine council officer. There was a report about the door being open. Neighbour called it in."

"Cole—"

"We should still move Halloway." He picked up the clipboard and handed it to Marek. "And somebody should give that back."

He was already walking to the car.

Marek stood on the path holding a stranger's clipboard.

"How do you know he's genuine?" he called after him.

"He told me."

"He told you while you had him against a wall."

"Yeah." Cole opened the car door. "People are very accurate at that point. It's the one useful thing about it."

Halloway saw all of it from the doorway, sitting down, because standing that long had stopped being free for him about four years ago.

He did not say anything about it in the car.

But at the safe flat that evening, when Vesper brought him a cup of tea and sat with him for a while, he said, apparently to the window:

"Ray did that once."

"Sorry?"

"In ninety-six. There was a man at my gate and Ray went down the path and came back up it, and the man left, and for about a minute afterward Ray wasn't — "

He stopped. Took a drink of the tea.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "I'm eighty-three and I've had a long day."

Vesper wrote nothing down.

She thought about it for the next eleven days.

[End of Chapter 129]