Chapter 163: Home Time

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 163: Home Time

17:45

"There are children in there," Iris said.

"I know."

"Cole. Whatever you did last night—"

"I know," he said again, and got out of the car.

He walked up to the gate the way you'd walk up to any nursery gate at quarter to six. Not fast. Hands out of his pockets, where people could see them. He lifted the latch at adult height and let himself in and closed it behind him, carefully, because that was what the sign said to do.

Nine faces at the window watched him come up the path.

He stopped about ten feet from the glass and looked at them — at the one with a fringe cut too short, and the one with a plaster on his chin, and the smallest one at the end who was holding a paper crown — and he did the only thing he could think of.

He waved.

Nine small hands waved back.

Behind them, Corvin's smile went out like a light.

17:46

The door wasn't locked.

Inside, the room smelled of poster paint and fish fingers. There were coats on pegs at knee height, each peg with a name on a laminated card, and a rug with a road printed on it, and very small chairs round a very small table.

Lottie Farr was standing in the middle of the rug, very pale, with Corvin's hand still resting on her shoulder.

"Hello," Cole said. To her. Not to him.

"Hi." Her voice shook. "We were — we were just doing our song. Before home time. Weren't we, everybody?"

"Yes," said nine voices.

"Keep doing it," Cole said. "Loud as you like."

Lottie looked at him. Something passed across her face — the thing that had come back to her in a café a week ago, the thing that remembered everything — and she understood him.

"Right," she said. "Everybody. Let's go into the quiet corner and do it really loud, so the mummies can hear it from the car park."

They went.

Nine children in a crocodile line across a printed road to the far corner of the room, and Lottie with them, and Corvin's hand came off her shoulder because it would have looked strange to keep it there, and he let her go.

The singing started up. It was not in tune. It was extremely loud.

Cole sat down on one of the little chairs.

It came up to about the middle of his shin. He sat on it anyway, with his knees somewhere near his chest, and looked up at Corvin standing over him.

"Where are they?"

17:48

"Back office." Corvin had his hands in his coat pockets. "The one with the lock. The big one's got a split lip and I'd like you to know he gave me this for it."

He turned his head. There was a fresh cut along the line of the old scar, temple to jaw, bleeding slightly.

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"Marek did that?"

"Marek did that. He's quick. I'd been told he was a B, and he's not a B anymore." Corvin said it without resentment, almost admiringly. "And your spotter's with him, being very calm about it, which I didn't expect either."

"What do you want?"

"I want you to watch me take him."

He said it simply. Not a threat. A man describing a plan.

"At six o'clock, the parents start coming. Nine sets. They'll come in through that door and they'll collect their children off the pegs, and I'll walk out behind the last one with your friend, and you won't do anything." He looked down at Cole on the tiny chair. "Because you can't. Not in front of them. I watched the video. I watched what you did in that road. You can't do that here."

"You're right."

"I know I'm right."

"No — I mean you're right," Cole said. "I can't. Not here. You thought that through properly."

Corvin blinked.

"You worked out that I'd be kept in a room till five. You worked out Lottie would ring Reeve, because Reeve can't not go to somebody who's frightened. You worked out Marek would go with him, so you brought something for Marek." Cole's voice was mild. "And you worked out that the one place on earth I wouldn't do anything is a room with a nursery rhyme going on in it. That's good. That's really good."

"Don't—"

"And you stayed." Cole looked up at him. "That's the bit I don't understand. You could have been gone an hour ago. Reeve in a car, motorway, nobody the wiser. And instead you stood at the window, and waited for me, and smiled."

Corvin didn't answer.

"Because it doesn't count," Cole said, "if nobody sees you do it."

The singing in the corner had moved on to a second song. Something about a bus.

Corvin's jaw was working.

"I'm going to tell you what happens at six," Cole said. "Not what you think happens. What actually happens. Nine parents come through that door and they're tired and they want their tea, and not one of them will look at you. They'll look at their kids. They'll get coats off pegs. And you'll walk out behind the last one, and you'll get in your car — and in a month, if you asked any of those parents to describe the man who was in the nursery the day they picked up late, not one of them could."

"Shut up."

"The kids won't remember you by Christmas." Cole didn't raise his voice. "You'll be a man who was in a nursery once. That's all. You'll have done the thing, and it won't have counted."

Corvin moved.

Not at Cole. At the door to the back office — fast, the way he'd moved in a car park last autumn, the distortion starting to thicken round his hands—

Cole looked at him.

That was all. From the little chair, without getting up. The look that had put a man on the floor of a tunnel under Kaelmoor and stopped a hand halfway into a coat in Ivor's hall.

Corvin sat down.

He did it in the middle of the printed road on the rug, cross-legged, all at once, the way a child sits down when a teacher says everybody on the carpet — and he stayed there, with his hands in his lap and his face gone blank with astonishment, and could not have told anybody why.

In the corner, the smallest boy — the one with the paper crown — looked round from the singing.

He saw a grown-up sitting on the carpet.

He toddled over, very seriously, and sat down cross-legged next to Corvin, and put his crown in his lap, and looked up at him expectantly, waiting for whatever carpet time was going to be.

Corvin looked down at the child.

And Cole watched something in the man's face come apart that had nothing to do with anything Cole had done.

17:54

The back office lock took Iris no time at all.

Marek came out first, with a split lip and a swollen eye and a zip tie still round one wrist that he'd half-chewed through, and he looked at the man sitting on the carpet with a toddler and said, "What the—"

"Language," said Lottie, from the corner, without missing a beat of the bus song.

Reeve came out behind him.

He was white, and completely calm, and he walked across the room and put his arms round Cole — who was still sitting on a chair built for a four-year-old — and held on for a second without saying anything, and let go.

"You came," he said.

"You went to somebody who was frightened," Cole said. "Of course I came."

18:01

The first parent came in at a minute past six.

A woman in scrubs, clearly straight off a shift, who took her daughter's coat off a peg and zipped it up and did not look at anybody else in the room, exactly as Cole had said she wouldn't.

By the time the third one had come and gone, Corvin had got up off the carpet. He had given the boy back his crown. He stood by the wall with his hands at his sides and did not try to leave, and did not try anything, and when Cole walked over to him he did not look up.

"I asked for four," Corvin said quietly.

"What?"

"Last night. The forty." He was looking at the floor. "I asked for four. That's the record. That's all I've ever been cleared for. I put in for four, and somebody above me signed it off — and forty came." He finally looked up, and his face was grey. "I didn't send them. I've never had forty. I don't know anybody who has."

"Then who did?"

"I don't know." Corvin's laugh came out cracked. "I've been in this organisation since I was twenty and I've never met anybody above Marguerite in my life." He looked at Cole, properly, for the first time since the window. "Have you?"

[End of Chapter 163]