Chapter 161: By Five

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 161: By Five

11:42

"What result?"

Halden did not open the folder. She put one hand on it, as if it might go somewhere.

"Hostile," she said. "Class One. Immediate transfer to secure assessment pending indefinite review." Her voice held. Her knuckles didn't. "That's the result. It's already typed. It's on the second page. I'm supposed to spend the afternoon finding the evidence for it and sign at the bottom by five."

"And if you don't?"

"Then somebody else signs it at five past, and I'm not reinstated, I'm finished, and the somebody else is a man I've never met who was transferred here from London at seven this morning."

Cole sat down.

"So either way."

"Either way," Halden said. "I'd like you to know that I've been sitting in this room since half eight trying to find a third way, and I haven't, and I'm telling you so you can stop looking for one on my face."

11:58

They would not let Iris into the room.

She stood in the corridor outside Room 4B with her coat over her arm and a Ministry security officer on either side of her, and she did not argue with either of them, which frightened both of them far more than arguing would have.

"Mr. Vale's representative is entitled to be present during—"

"Mr. Vale's representative is being told that the assessment is clinical," said the older officer, who had been told what to say and was saying it. "Clinical assessments are private."

"I see." Iris looked at the door. Then at him. "What's your name?"

"I — Dobson. Mark Dobson."

"Thank you, Mr. Dobson," Iris said pleasantly, and wrote it down.

12:20

The Chamber was in the basement, and it was not like the one on Ranking Day.

That one had been white and clean and new. This one was older than the Ministry that owned it: copper panelling gone brown at the seams, a floor of worn rubber, a single chair bolted down in the middle, and on the far wall a bank of analogue dials that nobody had bothered to replace since the seventies.

A technician in his sixties was waiting beside the dials. He had the look of a man who had been brought in from retirement and told nothing.

"Sit," he said. "Hands on the arms. It'll hum. Don't fight it."

"What does it measure?"

The technician looked at him properly for the first time.

"Son," he said, "I've worked this room since 1981, and nobody has ever asked me that."

12:24

Cole sat.

The hum came up through the chair, through his spine, into his teeth — the same note as Ranking Day, the same note he'd felt in a tunnel under Kaelmoor from an old man with a torch.

The needles on the far wall began to move.

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Halden stood behind the glass with a clipboard. The technician stood at the dials with his hand hovering over a switch. And the needles went up — steadily, smoothly, a quarter of the way, a half — the way needles are supposed to.

"Normal," the technician said. "That's normal. That's a B, that's — "

Three-quarters.

"— that's an A, that's high, that's — "

The needles reached the top of the dials.

And kept going.

12:25

There is a sound an analogue needle makes when it hits the pin at the end of its travel. A small, hard tick.

Every dial on that wall made it at once.

Then the lights in the basement dimmed — not flickered, dimmed, the way they do in an old house when somebody switches on the kettle and the oven at the same time — and upstairs, three floors up, every screen in the east annex went blue for about a second and came back.

The technician had taken his hand off the switch.

He was looking at a small panel below the dials — a strip of grey glass with seven black segments in it, like the display on an old calculator, which had shown nothing but dashes for fifty years.

It was showing something now.

12:26

Halden came through the door without her clipboard.

"What is that?"

The technician didn't answer. He was reading the display with his lips moving, the way people read something they've been told about and never expected to see.

"What is it, Gerry?"

"It's a code," he said. His voice had gone thin and old. "It's a — there's a list. In the manual. The original manual, from when they installed it. There's a page at the back of codes nobody's ever seen come up, and we were told what to do if one did."

"What were you told to do?"

Gerry the technician took his glasses off and looked at the eighteen-year-old in the chair, whose nose had started, very slowly, to bleed.

"Turn it off," he said. "Turn it off, and ring a number, and not write anything down."

"Are you going to?"

Gerry looked at the switch.

Then he looked at the display.

Then, very deliberately, he took out his phone and photographed it.

"I'm sixty-eight," he said, "and I've worked this room for forty-four years, and nobody has ever told me what it's for. I'd like to keep one thing."

14:10

Halden sat in Room 4B with the form in front of her and did not write anything for an hour and a half.

Cole sat across from her with a wad of tissue pressed under his nose. Neither of them spoke. The clock on the wall was an old one with a second hand that ticked, and at some point Cole realised he had been counting the ticks, and stopped, and then started again.

At ten past two Halden said: "Did you know?"

"Know what?"

"That it would do that."

"No."

Cole took the tissue away from his nose and looked at the blood on it.

"Something told me once," he said. "Outside this building. Across the road, by the chemist's. Two words, in my own voice, and I didn't make them."

"What words?"

"Not this one."

Halden was quiet for a moment. Then she picked the pen up and put it down again.

"Not this building," she said slowly, "or not this one yet?"

Cole did not have an answer. He had been asking himself the same thing since half past twelve.

16:30

Half an hour.

Halden had written four lines on the form and crossed out three.

Outside the door, Iris had not moved from the corridor in four and a half hours. Mark Dobson had brought her a chair at two and a cup of tea at three, without being asked, and she had thanked him both times.

At a quarter past four he'd said, very quietly, looking at the wall and not at her, "They've brought a man up from London to sign it if she won't."

Iris had not turned her head.

"Thank you, Mr. Dobson."

"I've got a daughter his age," Dobson said. "Your lad. The one in there." He cleared his throat. "I just thought somebody should know it wasn't everybody."

"She's going to sign it," Cole said.

Halden looked up.

"You don't know that."

"I've been reading you since half eleven," he said, gently. "You've got a flat and a cat and a decade in this building, and they've put a man from London in an office down the corridor to sign it at five past if you don't. You're working out whether it's worse to be the one who did it or the one who let somebody else."

Halden put the pen down.

"And?"

"And you're going to sign it," Cole said, "because if you sign it, you're the one holding the file. And if you're holding the file, there's somebody in this building who knows what that display said and is still on my side."

Halden didn't answer. She turned the pen over, end to end, once.

"You've got that right," she said quietly. "You've got every single part of that right, and I hate that you have."

16:58

She picked up the pen.

She wrote her name at the bottom of the second page in small, careful handwriting, and dated it, and put the pen down, and slid the form into the folder, and closed it.

Hostile. Class One.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't be."

"I am anyway." She stood. "Transfer is at six. They'll come for you from this room. I'll be—"

The door opened.

Not Dobson. Not the man from London.

A woman came into Room 4B with silver hair and a dark coat she was wearing indoors, and she did not look at Halden, or at the folder, or at the cups by the water cooler.

She looked at Cole.

"Sit down, Ms. Halden," Voss said. "You've signed the wrong form. I'd like to explain whose name was on the order, and then I'd like you to watch me tear it up."

[End of Chapter 161]