Chapter 164: Four Into Forty

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 164: Four Into Forty

Corvin followed them out onto the pavement and nobody stopped him, which was worse for him than if they had.

The last parent had gone. Lottie had locked the nursery door from the inside and was standing behind the glass with her arms folded, watching, and the painted handprints on the window made her look like she was standing behind a crowd of very small people.

Iris was in the car with the engine running. Marek was leaning on the bonnet with a wad of paper towel held to his lip. Reeve was sitting on the kerb.

Cole had stopped beside him on the way out, for about as long as it takes to say one sentence.

"You took Marek."

Reeve looked up. "What?"

"Last time you went on your own. To Ivor's, at four in the morning." Cole kept his voice low. "This time somebody rang you frightened, and you went — and you took Marek."

"It didn't help much," Reeve said. "He got his lip split and they locked us in a cupboard."

"He split Corvin's face open first," Cole said. "And you weren't on your own when they locked the door. That's the bit that matters."

Reeve looked at him for a second, then down at the pavement, and nodded, and didn't say anything else, and didn't need to.

Corvin stood by the gate, in the dark, in his good coat, and did not leave.

"Go on," Cole said. "Nobody's holding you."

"I know."

"Then go."

"I can't," Corvin said.

It took him a while to get to it.

He stood by the latch with his hands in his pockets and looked at the road, and Cole watched him do the arithmetic he'd been doing since the carpet — the same arithmetic Harriet Slade must have done, and Hendry, and a man called Colm who'd put his shoulder against a door.

"I've failed twice," Corvin said eventually. "The car park and this. And last night somebody sent forty things out on my paperwork, and they didn't come back." He laughed, once, without anything in it. "Do you know what they do with people who fail twice?"

"Tell me."

"I've filed them." He looked at Cole. "I've done the paperwork on four people who failed twice. I know exactly what happens. You go to a room, and a very kind woman tells you it won't hurt, and it doesn't. And afterwards you're fine. You get a job. You forget you ever wanted anything."

He stopped.

"I'd rather die," he said. "I'm not being dramatic. I've thought about it. I'd rather die than be a man who works in an office and can't remember why he used to feel like he was supposed to matter."

Iris got out of the car.

"No," she said.

"I haven't asked for anything."

"You're about to. I can see you working up to it." She came round the bonnet. "You held a nursery full of children as leverage an hour ago, and you're about to ask the person you did it to for protection."

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"Yes," Corvin said.

It was the most honest thing any of them had heard him say.

He had read Corvin twice before — in a car park, and through a nursery window — and both times he had got the same thing: I will be somebody they can't leave out. A young man's belief, loud and unfinished.

It was still there. But something had grown up round it since the carpet, the way ivy grows round a post, and it took him a moment to see what.

Please let somebody need me for something.

"Here's what happens," Cole said.

Iris turned. "Cole—"

"You don't get protection. You get a job." He didn't take his eyes off Corvin. "Somebody signed your four into forty. You've never met anybody above Marguerite, you said. So find out who's above her. Who signed it. Whose desk it went across."

"That's — I can't just—"

"You're the only person I know who's still inside," Cole said, "who's got a reason to want out, and who knows how to fill in their forms. That's worth something to me. That's the only thing about you that's worth something to me."

Corvin stared at him.

"You've got till Friday," Cole said. "Bring me a name by Friday and I'll make sure nobody puts you in a room with a kind woman. Don't, and I won't."

"And if they catch me looking?"

"Then you'll have been the man who found out," Cole said. "Which is more than you'd have been otherwise."

Corvin didn't move.

Then he nodded — once, jerkily, like a man agreeing to something before he could change his mind — and went to his grey car and closed both the doors, and drove away down Mill Lane without his headlights on for the first hundred yards.

Iris watched him go.

"That," she said, "was the coldest thing I've ever watched you do."

"He wants to matter. I gave him something to matter for."

"I know. That's why it was cold." She got back in the car. "You found the one thing he'd sell his own people for and you bought it with a deadline. I've done that in boardrooms, Cole. I didn't think you had it in you."

He got in the passenger side and didn't answer. He had not thought he had it in him either.

Mia was waiting at the top of the stairs.

She didn't speak when they came up. She looked at Marek's lip and Reeve's face and then at her brother, and then she walked down four steps and hit him in the arm, quite hard, and walked back up again.

"That's for not ringing," she said.

"I was in a Ministry basement."

"You were in a Ministry basement with a phone. I rang you thirty-one times." She turned and went into the flat. "There's pasta. It's cold. You deserve it cold."

She came and found him on the landing just before midnight, after everybody else had gone to bed.

She sat down one step below him, the way she always did, and she had her phone in her hand, face down, and she kept it that way.

"I need to tell you something," she said. "And I need you not to do the thing."

"Which thing?"

"The thing you did to Corvin. The thing where you work out what somebody wants and then decide what they're going to do about it." She turned the phone over in her hands. "I watched your face when you came up the stairs. You've been doing it all day. I don't want it done to me."

"Okay."

"Promise."

"I promise," Cole said. "Tell me."

"There's a girl on the Ellison programme called Fen."

He remembered the name. Seventeen. A thing she could do with sound. Mia had mentioned her once, months ago, over homework — that Fen had got more controlled, and was doing about a third of what she used to, and was very proud of it.

"She didn't come on Thursday," Mia said. "Or Monday. Or tonight. And she's not answering anybody except me, and she's only answering me because I'm the one who never told her she'd got better."

She turned the phone round.

A message, sent at ten past ten.

mia they rang my mum. theyre coming tuesday to help me. my mum thinks its a scholarship thing. its not is it

And underneath it, three minutes later:

they said it wont hurt

Cole read it twice.

Then he gave the phone back and did the hardest thing he'd done all day, which was nothing at all.

He didn't say I'll handle it. He didn't say tell me her address. He didn't reach for Iris's number or Dana's or Thessaly's, and every single part of him wanted to, and he sat on the step with his hands between his knees and let his sister be the one holding the phone.

"What are you going to do?" he said.

Mia looked at him. For a second she seemed surprised he'd asked.

Then her chin came up — the thing it had done since she was about six, whenever anybody told her something couldn't be moved.

"I'm going to be at her house on Tuesday," she said. "Before they get there. And when they knock on the door, I'm going to be the one who opens it."

"And say what?"

"No," said Mia.

The landing light, which had been buzzing faintly for a month and which the landlord had promised four times to fix, stopped buzzing.

Neither of them looked up at it. Cole noticed it anyway — the way you notice a noise only when it stops — and noticed, too, that his sister hadn't raised her voice, and that the single word had come out of her the way a door comes shut in a draught.

He said nothing about it. It was hers.

"Okay," he said. "Tuesday."

[End of Chapter 164]