Chapter 138: Barrowgate

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 138: Barrowgate

The third address was a swimming pool.

Not a metaphor. A municipal baths in a town called Barrowgate, built 1908, closed 2004, sold twice and developed never, with weeds in the gutters and a For Sale board so old the phone number had an area code that didn't exist anymore.

"A pool," Reeve said, in the van, for the fourth time.

"Yes."

"A swimming pool."

"Reeve, mate." Marek didn't look up from checking the straps on his forearm guards. "You've said. We've all heard. It's a pool."

"I'm processing."

"Process quieter."

Ivor had cleared a house four doors down from it in 1988 and had walked past the baths on his way to the car and had gone back to his own car and sat in it for half an hour.

"That's the whole account," he'd said, on the Tuesday, in daylight, having waited the hour he insisted on. "I did not go in. It was open — the door was chained but the chain was long enough for a man to get through and I have got through a great deal worse than that chain. I stood on the step and I went back to my car."

"Why?"

"Because I did not want to." He'd said it without any embarrassment at all, which by now nobody found unusual. "That's the only honest answer and I'd rather give you that than build you a reason."

Thessaly planned it for six days and then said the thing nobody wanted to hear.

"I want Aldric there."

Four people said no at once.

"Hear it." She put both hands on the table. "The building's a hundred and seventeen years old and it's been three things. I've got plans from 1908 and a fire inspection from 1971 and between those two dates somebody put in a plant room that isn't on either. If it's a room we're looking for, it's in that gap, and the only person alive who's read Ministry facilities paperwork for forty years is sitting at the end of this table eating a biscuit."

Aldric, eating a biscuit, said: "I'd like to go."

"Absolutely not," Dana said.

"Dana."

"You're eighty-two and you're the last one on that list and there is a woman who took nine caretakers out there somewhere—"

"Six of the nine," Aldric said. "She was specific about it. I've thought about that more than I've thought about anything else in a month, that she wanted credit for six and not a heart attack." He put the biscuit down. "I'm going. I'm not doing the brave speech. I'm going because I can read a plant room schematic and none of you can, and because I have spent four decades being useful in exactly one way and I would like one afternoon of it being useful to somebody I like."

They went on the Thursday.

Nine in the morning, three vehicles, and Thessaly put Mia and Dov and Elena in a hotel twenty miles away and did not ask, she told, and Mia argued for six minutes and lost.

Cole came out to the car with her.

"I don't like this."

"No."

"That's not me being difficult. I've got a bad thing in my chest about it and I'd like you to know I said so before, not after." Mia had her bag over one shoulder and her chin up in the way she had when she'd already decided not to cry about something. "You're all going to a swimming pool to look at a room because a four-hundred-year-old man sat in his car once."

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"Yeah."

"And you're going anyway."

"Yeah."

She hugged him, hard and briefly, and got in the car, and said through the window: "Bring Aldric back. He's not built for this and he thinks he is and that's a bad combination."

The baths smelled like wet plaster and old chlorine, which should have been impossible after twenty-one years.

That was the first wrong thing and Thessaly clocked it on the step.

"Nobody's been in here."

"How can you tell?"

"Dust." She put her torch on the floor inside the door. Even, undisturbed, the grey of something settling for two decades. "There's no path. Kids get into places like this. Rough sleepers get into places like this. There's a chain on that door a man could step through and nobody in twenty-one years has stepped through it."

Behind her, Ivor said, quietly: "No."

The main hall was extraordinary and Cole was not prepared for that.

He had built a derelict box in his head. What he got was a Victorian swimming bath with a barrel-vaulted roof and clerestory windows, forty feet up, throwing four blades of grey daylight down onto an empty tiled basin the colour of a dead fish. The tiles on the walls were green and cream and laid in a pattern somebody had been proud of. There was a diving board. There was a clock on the far wall that had stopped at twenty past three.

The water had been out since 2004 and the deep end still had a tidemark.

"God," Reeve said.

"Yeah."

"It's beautiful."

"Yeah," Cole said, and did not like how much he agreed.

The plant room was under the shallow end and Aldric found the door in four minutes by reading a bracket on a wall.

"There. That's a 1953 conduit and it's going somewhere the 1971 inspection says there's nothing." He was breathing hard from the stairs and pretending not to be. "Follow the pipe and there'll be a door and it will not be on any plan."

There was a door and it was not on any plan.

It opened.

Not locked. Not stuck. It opened the way a door opens when the hinges were oiled inside the last year, and everybody in that corridor heard it not stick.

Inside was a room about twenty feet by twelve with a concrete floor and a single strip light that did not work and nothing in it at all.

Cole stood in the doorway.

Nothing. No hum, no heat, no mark. The most unobjectionable room he had ever stood outside of, and Ivor's account was the only thing in his head, and he understood suddenly and completely why a man had sat in a car for half an hour in 1988.

"Don't go in," Ivor said.

"I wasn't going to."

"Yes you were," Ivor said. "Everybody does. That's what it's for."

It took about four seconds after that.

Vesper said "there's somebody upstairs" — not a shout, a flat statement, and afterwards nobody could work out how she'd known, and she couldn't either.

Then the lights that didn't work came on.

All of them. The strip in the room, the corridor, the great dead fittings hanging forty feet up in the main hall — a building with no power supply since 2011 lighting up like a Tuesday evening in 1962, and the sound the fittings made warming up was the single most frightening thing any of them had heard in a year.

And a voice in the hall said, conversationally, amplified by the barrel roof:

"You brought the old man."

The Sixth was standing on the diving board.

Not dramatically. Standing on it, in the same flat ordinary clothes, with both arms working now — and Cole saw that and adjusted four things in about a second.

"That's disappointing," she said. "I had a whole approach for the version where you came alone."

Thessaly's weapon came up.

"Don't," the Sixth said, and Thessaly's arm went down, and Thessaly's face did something Cole had never seen on it. "Sorry. That's rude. I'll give it back in a minute — I want to say one thing and I've been told to say it properly."

"Who told you?"

"The person I answer to, obviously. I'm not the top of anything, I've told you that." She looked down the length of the empty pool at the six of them. "Here it is. You're in the wrong room."

Cole took one step forward and the whole building took a breath.

He felt it. Everyone did — a pressure change, like a door opening somewhere large — and the mark under his collar went from nothing to searing in under a second, and the thing behind his eyes came up without being asked and this time it did not wait to be let.

The Sixth saw it happen and her face changed.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's not—"

Cole crossed forty feet of empty swimming pool.

He did not go round. He went down the steps at the shallow end and up the dry floor of the basin at a speed that took the tiles off in strips behind him, and the noise of it came off that barrel roof like something being torn, and the Sixth got out one word — wait — and put her hand out and did the thing she did.

It worked.

That was the part Marek would describe for weeks afterward: it worked, and it did not matter. Cole's face went blank for a quarter of a second, his stride broke, he stopped —

— and then he was moving again, and the blankness was gone, and something in his eyes was very bright and not gold.

"This is close enough," the Sixth said, fast, and it hit him again and this time nothing happened at all.

"No it isn't," said Cole, in a voice that was not quite his.

He came up out of the deep end and took the diving board.

Not her — the board. Both hands round the end of it, and he pulled, and a hundred and seventeen years of bolted Victorian ironwork came out of the wall with a shriek that put everyone on the floor, and the Sixth went sideways into the tiles at the shallow end and came up spitting blood and laughing again, because apparently that was simply what she did.

"There you are," she said. "There you—"

He was already there.

[End of Chapter 138]