Chapter 166: Doorstep

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 166: Doorstep

Fen had been watching the woman in the road for twenty minutes, and the woman had not moved once.

She was standing under the streetlight outside number fourteen, in a good coat, with both arms in plaster casts held against her chest in a sling, and she was looking up at Fen's bedroom window with an expression of mild, patient interest. Like somebody waiting for a kettle.

Behind her, a white van with no markings had its engine running.

Fen stood behind her curtain with her phone in both hands and did not breathe, and after twenty minutes the woman lifted her chin very slightly — the way you'd nod to somebody across a room — and Fen understood that she had been seen the entire time.

02:19

Thessaly stopped the car at the end of the road and nobody got out for about three seconds.

"That's her," Reeve said, from the back seat. "Barrowgate. The one Cole put through a diving board."

"Both arms," Thessaly said. "She's come with both arms broken."

"She's come with both arms broken," Cole agreed, "because she wants us to know it doesn't matter."

Mia already had her seatbelt off.

"I'm going to the door," she said.

"Mia—"

"I'm going to the door, and you're staying at the car." She did not look at him. She was looking down the street, at the woman under the light. "That's the arrangement. I made it on Friday and you agreed."

"I agreed before I knew it was her."

"It was always going to be somebody," Mia said. "You don't get to un-agree because it's somebody you've met."

She opened the door.

Thessaly said, very quietly: "Cole."

"I know."

"You're letting her walk down there."

"Yes," Cole said, and stayed where he was, and it was the hardest thing he had ever done with his body.

02:21

Mia walked down the middle of the road.

She did it the way she walked to school — bag on one shoulder, which she had brought for no reason at all, hands in her coat pockets, chin up. She walked past the white van without looking at it. She walked past the woman in the plaster casts without looking at her either, which the woman noticed, and which made her smile.

She went up the path of number twelve and knocked on the door.

Fen opened it in pyjamas, grey-faced, holding her phone.

"You came."

"I said I would." Mia stepped inside. Fen's mum's coat was on the banister and her car keys were in a bowl, and somewhere upstairs, very faintly, somebody was snoring. "Is she still asleep?"

"Yes."

"Good. Leave her." Mia turned round. "Stay in here. Lock this behind me."

"Where are you going?"

"Outside," said Mia, and went back out, and pulled the door shut behind her, and stood on the doorstep of number twelve with her back against it.

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02:24

The woman in the road turned to face her.

Lights were coming on along the street now. An upstairs window across the road. Then two more. The sound of a van engine idling at two in the morning does that to a street, and so does a girl in a school coat standing on a doorstep with her arms folded, and somebody further down had already opened a window and was leaning out.

"You're the sister," the woman said.

"Yes."

"I've read about you. Defiance. Oppositional resonance, moderate." She smiled. "I'm sorry about my arms. Your brother did them. I'd shake your hand otherwise."

"I wouldn't."

"No. I don't suppose you would." She tilted her head, and Mia felt her look — the way you feel somebody standing too close behind you in a queue. "I'll be quick, because it's cold and I'm told you have school. This has been decided. The paperwork was signed on Thursday. Fen's mother gave consent on the telephone. Tonight is not a discussion."

Mia felt it arrive.

Not a voice. A thought — her own thought, in her own voice, moved gently to the front of her mind the way you'd slide a plate across a table.

This is decided. There's nothing you can do. Go home.

It was very reasonable. It was the most reasonable thing she had ever thought. It sat there in her head, calm and final, like a door that had already been locked.

Final.

Mia, on the doorstep of number twelve, with her arms folded and her chin up, looked at the woman in the plaster casts.

"No," she said.

The streetlight above the woman went out.

Then it came back on — brighter, much brighter, humming, so bright it threw the woman's shadow across the tarmac like a stain.

The woman stopped smiling.

"That's interesting," she said.

"You told me it was final."

"It is final."

"No," said Mia, a second time, and the white van's engine coughed, and died, and did not start again.

02:27

Across the street, the windows were full now.

Mia could feel them without looking. Faces behind curtains, and more than faces — small rectangles of blue-white light held up at chest height, the way they'd been held up across from the laundrette on Friday. Somebody at number nine had come out onto their front step in a dressing gown. A man at number sixteen was filming openly from his bedroom window with his elbow on the sill.

The woman in the casts saw them too.

She looked round at the street — slowly, taking it in — and then back at Mia, and something had changed in her face. Not fear. Calculation.

"Everybody," she said, not loudly, "go back to bed."

It went down the street like a wind.

Mia felt it pass — the same gentle slide of a thought to the front of the mind, not aimed at her this time but at everyone, every window on the road at once. It's late. It's nothing. It's none of your business. Go back to bed.

The phones went down.

One by one, all down the street, the little blue lights lowered and went out. The man on the step at number nine turned round and went back inside and closed his door. The curtains at number sixteen fell back into place. A light went off. Then another.

And in the time it takes to breathe out, the whole of the street had agreed, quietly, reasonably, that nothing was happening, and gone back to bed.

Except Mia.

She was still on the doorstep.

She could feel the thought, sitting in her head with all the others — go to bed, it's nothing, it's decided — and she could feel, very clearly, what it was. A whole street being told that something was final. Thirty houses. Sixty people. A hundred phones. All of them agreeing, at once, that there was no point.

She had never in her life felt anything so final.

"No," said Mia.

Every light on the street came back on at once.

Not just the streetlights. Every bedroom. Every landing. Every front porch and back kitchen and bathroom and hall, all the way down both sides of the road, snapping on together so that for about a second the whole street was lit up like a stage.

Phones came back up in windows — dozens of them, faster than they'd gone down, and a woman somewhere shouted what the hell just happened at the top of her voice, and the man at number nine was back on his step, and this time he had his phone out too.

The woman in the plaster casts had taken a step backward.

She stood in the middle of a street that was blazing with light and full of people filming her, and she looked at a sixteen-year-old girl on a doorstep, and for the first time since Mia had seen her, she did not look patient.

"Oh," she said softly. "Oh, you're his, aren't you."

02:31

Behind her, the back doors of the white van opened.

Nobody had touched them. The engine was dead. And out of the dark inside the van, unhurried, a woman stepped down onto the tarmac and straightened her coat.

Mia had never seen her before.

At the end of the road, standing by the car where he had promised to stay, Cole had.

He had seen her through a windscreen, once, in a road outside his own home. And on the front steps of his flat, with a thin folder on her knees. And on a garden path, in broad daylight, with her hand at his throat and a smile that said she'd done it many times before.

Marguerite looked down the blazing street at the girl on the doorstep.

Then past her, all the way down the road, to him.

"Cole," she called, pleasantly, in a voice that carried in the cold. "Would you like to come and collect your sister? Or shall I?"

[End of Chapter 166]