Chapter 158: The Street

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 158: The Street

Elena tried.

She sat at Ivor's kitchen table with Reeve's hand in hers and her eyes half shut, and her lips moved, and for a long moment nothing came.

"Nothing is given," she said again, slower. "What is held—"

She stopped.

"What is held is held against—"

Reeve's nose started to bleed. He didn't let go. Mia moved toward him and Cole put a hand out without looking and she stopped.

"Against the name," Elena said.

And then her hand went slack in Reeve's, and she opened her eyes, and said in her own voice: "That's it. That's all there is. The rest is — it's like a page that's been torn off. I can feel the edge of it."

Ivor had not moved since the cup hit the floor.

"The rest is always torn off," he said.

Everybody looked at him.

"Eleven hundred and forty contracts. I've found every one of them in a house after somebody died. In a drawer, in a Bible, once sewn into the lining of a coat." He had both hands flat on the table. "And every single one of them is one line long. Nothing is given. And then a torn edge. I've spent four hundred years assuming the rest had been destroyed."

"And now?"

"Now a woman who's never seen one of them has just recited the second line," Ivor said, "and I'd like to know who tore the rest off — and whether they did it so nobody could read it, or so nobody could finish it."

Reeve wiped his nose on his sleeve.

"They're going to come for me," he said. "Aren't they. Properly this time."

"Yes," said Ivor.

"Because of the café."

"Because of the café, and Lottie Farr, and a man who left his umbrella and rang his mother for the first time in nine years." Ivor looked at him. "Everything you've done in three days has been reported. And I've watched this organisation respond to your Conviction twice in two hundred years, and neither time was it a woman with a lanyard."

The argument that followed was short and Reeve won it.

Dana wanted him moved. Somewhere with no address — Iris's money, a flat in another city, a month of lying low. Thessaly agreed. Mia agreed, which surprised everybody, including Mia.

"No," Reeve said.

"Reeve—"

"No. I've been the thing everybody moves for a year. Get Reeve out of the car park. Get Reeve out of the corridor. Walk Reeve to the bus." He had blood on his lip and did not wipe it. "I just found out I'm the one thing they're frightened of. I'm not going to spend the next year being hidden in a flat in Leeds."

"You'll be—"

"I'll be here. With you lot. And if they want me they can come here." He looked round the kitchen. "That's my decision and I'd like somebody to write it down."

Dana looked at Cole.

Cole looked at Reeve for a long moment.

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"Write it down," he said.

Mrs. Adeyemi saw them first.

She had lived on the first floor for forty-one years and she did not sleep past three anymore, and at ten past three on the Friday morning she was standing at her front window in her dressing gown with a cup of tea, because that was what she did.

The streetlight at the end of the road went out.

Then the next one.

Then the one after — one by one, all the way down, the way a hand might pinch out candles along a table.

And in the dark, where the light had been, something was standing.

A fox came out from behind the bins.

She saw it clearly, because the fox was an ordinary thing and her eyes would hold ordinary things. It trotted into the middle of the road and stopped, and put its nose up, and stood there for about a second.

Then it turned and ran, flat out, back the way it had come, faster than she had ever seen anything run.

She could not see them properly. That was the thing she would tell her son afterward, and he would not believe her. She could see that they were there — tall shapes, wrong at the joints, standing very still on the pavement — and her eyes would not stay on any one of them.

There were more at the corner.

More by the bus shelter.

More, when she leaned to the side, standing in the middle of the road where the cars went, perfectly still, in a line, all of them facing the same way.

Facing her building.

She put the cup down and went and knocked on the door of the flat upstairs.

She did not knock loudly. She had not needed to knock loudly in forty-one years and she did not start now. She knocked three times, the way she knocked when she brought round leftover jollof, and the door opened almost immediately, because nobody in that flat had been asleep either.

The tall boy opened it.

He was fully dressed. He had his coat on.

"I know," he said.

"There's a great many of them, love."

"I know." He looked past her, down the stairwell, toward the street door. "Go back inside, Mrs. Adeyemi. Lock your door and stay away from the front window."

"I'm eighty-one. I'll stand where I like."

"Then stand at the back window," Cole said. "Please."

Inside the flat there were nine people and nobody was speaking.

Thessaly was at the kitchen window with the curtain an inch open.

"I stopped counting at forty," she said. "They go round the corner onto Barrow Street. I can't see the end of them."

"Forty."

"At least forty, Cole." She let the curtain go. "The most anybody's ever seen in one place is four. I've read every incident report since 2003. Four is the record, and it was in a warehouse, and ten licensed operators went in and four came out."

Nobody said anything.

Reeve was sitting on the sofa with Lottie Farr's address still written on the back of his hand in biro. He was pale and very still and he was looking at Cole.

"They're for me," he said. "Aren't they."

"Yes."

"Then I should—"

"No," said Cole.

He went to the door.

Marek got up off the arm of the sofa. "I'm coming."

"No."

"Cole, there's forty of—"

"I know how many there are." He did not raise his voice. "If I've got you out there, I've got to keep track of you. If I've got nobody out there, I've got nothing to keep track of."

Marek stood there with his fists at his sides, and then, slowly, sat back down, and did not look happy about it.

Mia had not moved from the kitchen doorway.

"You said you'd ring me first," she said. "Before you bleed."

"You're thirty feet away."

"I know. I'm saying it anyway." Her voice was perfectly steady and her hands were in fists. "I'll be at the window. So you don't need to ring. But I'm going to be watching, and if you do something stupid I'm going to see it, and I'm going to tell everybody."

"That's fair."

"It's not fair. It's just what's happening."

Vesper was standing in the hallway.

She had not spoken to him directly since breakfast four days ago — not properly, not about anything that mattered — and she was standing between him and the door with her arms folded, and her face was doing the thing it did when she had decided something.

"You're going out there on your own."

"Yes."

"That's forty of them."

"At least."

She looked at him for a long time.

Then she stepped aside.

"I haven't told you what I understood at Agnes's," she said, as he went past. "I'm still not going to. Not tonight."

"I know."

"So you'll have to come back up these stairs if you want to hear it."

Cole stopped with his hand on the door.

"I'll come back up the stairs," he said.

He went down three flights in the dark, one step at a time.

Mrs. Adeyemi was standing at her back window, exactly as she'd been told, and she heard him go past her door, unhurried, and she heard the street door open, and she heard it close behind him.

Then she went to the front window anyway, because she was eighty-one and she would stand where she liked, and on the way she took her late husband's walking stick off the hook by the door, which she had not touched in six years, and held it in both hands.

Out in the dark street, under forty dead streetlights, a tall boy in a coat was standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets.

And every single one of them — every shape in the road, on the corner, by the bus shelter, all the way down onto Barrow Street — turned its head, very slowly, toward him.

[End of Chapter 158]