Chapter 162: Six O'Clock

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 162: Six O'Clock

16:59

Nobody in Room 4B had heard her come down the corridor, and there had been two security officers and an S-Rank standing in it.

Voss did not sit. She put one gloved hand on the back of the chair nearest the door, and Halden — who had been standing — found that she had sat down without deciding to.

"Ms. Halden."

"Who—" Halden's voice came out wrong. She tried again. "Who are you? How did you get past—"

"I give money to things," Voss said pleasantly. "You'll find that's what most people say about me, if you ask them, and most people don't."

She held out her hand.

It took Halden about three seconds to understand what was being asked for, and then she was holding the folder out across the table, and Voss was taking it, and Halden could not have said at what point she'd agreed to that either.

17:01

Voss read the second page standing up.

It took her about as long as it takes to read a bus timetable. Then she folded the page in half, and in half again, and tore it — once, cleanly, down the crease — and put both halves on the table in front of Halden.

"There," she said. "I did say you should watch."

"You can't — that's a signed Ministry order. You can't just tear—"

"I've just done it, Ms. Halden. You watched." Voss put the rest of the folder down. "Nobody is coming to transfer anybody at six. There'll be a phone call at twenty past five cancelling it, and the man who takes the call will be very relieved, and he'll never know why."

17:03

Cole had not moved from his chair.

He had a wad of bloody tissue in one hand and he was watching Voss the way you watch weather coming in over a hill, and she let him, and did not look at him directly until she was ready to.

"You didn't send them," he said. "Last night."

"No."

"Then who did?"

"The same person who wrote this." Voss touched the torn halves with one finger. "He didn't sign it. He's careful about that now. He found a deputy director who'd been in the building for a day and wanted to be useful, and put a pen in his hand."

"Name."

"You know the name," Voss said. "You put him into a pay machine once. He's been waiting a year to be the one who delivers you, and when I told him no, he went and found somebody who'd say yes."

"Corvin," Cole said.

"Corvin." Voss almost sounded tired. "I told him to his face that he'd disobey me by February. He's six weeks late. I'd been starting to think I'd misjudged him."

"You let him."

"I let him," she agreed. "I have been letting him for a year. And last night he sent forty of something at a building with a sixteen-year-old girl asleep in it, and I've decided I was wrong to."

Halden said, very quietly, from the table: "Forty?"

Nobody answered her.

17:08

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"Then why today?"

Voss turned her head, finally, and looked straight at him.

"Say that again."

"Why today?" Cole had put the tissue down. "If Corvin wanted me in a secure facility, why a reassessment? Why a room? Why sit me in a chair with a clock in it until five?"

Voss did not answer.

She did not have to. He watched her not answer, and he read it off her in less than a second — not from her face, which gave him nothing, the way it always had, but from the silence, from the exact length and shape of it, from the fact that a woman who had tidied a torn order onto a table did not want to be the one who said the next part.

"It wasn't about the transfer," he said. "It was about keeping me here."

"That's the right question," Voss said softly. "I'm sorry it took you until eight minutes past."

17:09

The door opened and Iris came in without knocking.

She had her phone in her hand and her face had gone a colour Cole had never seen on it, and she did not look at Voss — did not appear to register that there was anybody in the room at all except him.

"Mia," she said. "Four minutes ago."

She turned the screen round.

Lottie rang Reeve at 3. Crying. Said a man in a grey car had been outside the nursery since lunch and she was scared to walk to the bus. Reeve went. Marek went with him. Neither of them answering since 4.

Cole where are you.

COLE.

17:10

Nobody moved for about a second.

Then Cole was on his feet, and the chair he'd been in went over backwards, and Halden flinched.

"Where?"

"Halden Cross." Iris was already dialling. "The nursery on the corner of Mill Lane. Dana's on Marek's phone — last ping was four-twelve, a hundred yards from the building. Nothing since."

"How long to get there?"

"Forty minutes in traffic. Twenty-five if somebody drives like an idiot."

"Then somebody drive like an idiot."

He got to the door and stopped, because Voss had said his name.

Not Mr. Vale. His name. Quietly, in the same voice she'd used in a ballroom eight months ago.

He turned round.

"The nursery shuts at six," Voss said. "There are nine children in it until then, and four members of staff, and one of them is a girl who used to be able to remember everything." She had not moved. "Whatever you do out there, you'll do it in front of them."

"Are you telling me to be careful?"

"I'm telling you there's a rule I've kept for a very long time," Voss said, "which is that nobody under the age of ten sees what we are. Corvin has just broken it. I would take it as a kindness if you didn't break it worse."

Cole looked at her across Room 4B.

"Then you'd better hope," he said, "that he's not standing near the children."

He went.

17:12

Halden heard him on the stairs — not unhurried now, not one at a time, but taking them — and then Iris's heels behind him, and then the fire door at the bottom banging open, and a car engine outside starting before the door had finished swinging shut.

Then quiet.

She was alone in Room 4B with a torn order, a pool of bloody tissue on the table, and a woman in a dark coat who had not yet sat down.

Voss sat down.

She took the chair across from Halden — the one Cole had been in all day — and folded her gloved hands on the table, and looked at Halden with an expression of mild, patient interest, the way you'd look at a colleague you'd been meaning to have lunch with for years.

"Now, Ms. Halden," she said. "You and I have never been introduced, which is a great shame, because I've been signing off your pay reviews since 2014."

Halden stared at her.

"That's not possible. My reviews go through the regional—"

"Yes," said Voss. "They do."

17:31

Iris drove like an idiot.

She went through two amber lights and one red, and down a bus lane for half a mile with her hazards on, and she did not speak once, and she did not look at Cole in the passenger seat, which he was grateful for.

He rang Reeve four times.

The fourth time, he let it go to voicemail, and listened to the whole greeting — Reeve's voice, recorded in about 2022, slightly too loud, clearly reading it off something: Hi, it's Reeve, I'm probably at training or I've left my phone somewhere stupid, leave a message and I'll ring you back, promise — and then the beep, and then nothing, because he didn't know what to say.

He hung up.

"Dana," he said.

Iris put the phone on speaker without taking her eyes off the road.

"Marek's still dark," Dana said, before he could ask. "But Mia's been ringing the nursery landline every two minutes since five. For the first twenty minutes it rang out."

"And now?"

A pause on the line.

"Now somebody's picking it up," Dana said, "and not saying anything. And Cole — you can hear children in the background. Singing. It sounds like they're doing a song before home time."

17:44

They came round the corner onto Mill Lane with Iris braking so hard the seatbelt bit into his collarbone.

The nursery was on the corner. Low building. Painted handprints on the windows. A gate with a latch at adult height.

A grey car was parked across the gate, both front doors hanging open, engine still running.

Every light in the nursery was on.

And in the big front window, behind the painted handprints, nine small faces were pressed against the glass, looking out at the road — and standing behind them, tall enough that his head nearly touched the top of the window frame, with one hand resting almost gently on the shoulder of a girl in a lanyard with a gap in her front teeth, was a man in a high-collared coat with a thin scar from temple to jaw.

Corvin looked out of the window, straight at the car.

And smiled.

[End of Chapter 162]