Chapter 167: Number Sixteen

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 167: Number Sixteen

Dev Marsh had been filming since the lights went out and came back on, and his arm was going numb, and he did not care.

He was forty-three. He worked nights at a distribution centre and he'd been on his first night off in a fortnight, and he'd woken up at twenty past two because a van was idling outside his house, and he'd gone to the window to swear at it.

He had not sworn at it.

He'd watched a girl walk down the middle of his road and stand on the Harpers' doorstep and say no, and every light on the street had come on, and now there was a second woman standing in the road by the van — older, a good coat, hair pinned up — calling to somebody at the far end of the street.

Dev swung the phone round.

The boy was already walking.

That was the first thing Dev would say, afterward, to the four news producers who rang him before seven. He was already walking before she'd finished the sentence. Not running. He came down the middle of the road from a car parked at the junction, hands out of his pockets, hood down, and he was very tall, and he did not hurry at all.

Dev knew who he was.

Everybody in the country knew who he was. He'd watched the video from outside the laundrette four times on his break. The lights man.

He zoomed in, and his hands were shaking, and he didn't care about that either.

The woman in the plaster casts stepped out of the boy's way.

Dev caught it on camera and didn't notice until the third time he watched it back. She was standing in the road between the van and the Harpers' gate, and the boy came down the white line toward her, and she took one step sideways onto the pavement — not like somebody getting out of the way of a car, but like somebody getting out of the way of the weather — and did not seem to know she'd done it.

The boy walked past her. He didn't look at her.

He stopped in the middle of the road, about ten feet from the older woman, and the girl on the doorstep behind her said, very clearly, "I didn't need you."

"I know," the boy said.

"I'm just saying. For the record. I had this."

"You had this," he agreed, without taking his eyes off the woman in the coat. "Go inside, Mia. Stand with Fen."

The girl hesitated on the step. Then she went inside and shut the door.

The woman in the coat smiled.

Dev had seen a lot of smiles in forty-three years and he would describe this one, eventually, on a podcast that got four million downloads, as the kind of smile you'd give somebody you'd beaten before.

"Hello, Cole."

"Marguerite."

"You were slower, last time. On your own front path." She had not moved. "I had you against a railing in three seconds."

"I remember."

"I'd rather not do it in front of all these people." She glanced round at the street — the lit windows, the phones, Dev's own elbow on the sill. "It's untidy. But you've broken a rule tonight in front of thirty houses, and your sister has broken a much larger one, and I've been sent to tidy it."

"You brought a van," the boy said, "to a seventeen-year-old's house at two in the morning, while her mum was asleep."

"Yes."

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Then you tidy that first."

She moved.

Dev did not see it. Nobody did. He'd slow the footage down afterward to a quarter of normal speed, and then to a tenth, and even at a tenth there's no frame where the woman in the coat is between where she was and where she ends up. She's ten feet away, and then she's there, with her hand coming up toward the boy's throat.

And the boy has her wrist.

That's the frame that went round the world. You can find it anywhere. A woman in a good coat with her arm out, and a tall boy in the middle of a lit street holding her wrist in one hand, not hard, the way you'd catch somebody's hand to stop them touching a hot pan.

He hadn't moved his feet.

The woman in the coat tried to take her hand back.

She couldn't.

Dev watched her try — watched her whole body lean into it, the way you'd lean against a door that won't open — and the boy stood there in the middle of the white line holding her wrist and didn't seem to be doing anything at all.

"Last time," the boy said, quietly, and Dev's phone only just picked it up, "you told me I was slow to defend. That I'd never had a reason to learn."

"I remember."

"I had months of a woman hitting me in the arms in a gym." He looked down at her, and he was a head and a half taller than her, and Dev had not really noticed that until right then. "I learned."

He let go.

She stepped back. Two steps. And she put her own hand against her own wrist and looked at it — actually looked at it, turning it over, the way you'd check a hand you'd just burned — and when she looked up again, Dev saw something on her face that the whole country would see by breakfast.

She was frightened.

"You read me," she said. "Just then. Through my wrist."

"Yeah."

"You got to the floor again."

"Further," the boy said. "There's something under the floor, Marguerite. I didn't know that last time."

He walked past her.

Not away from her — past her, toward the van, as though she'd stopped being something he needed to keep track of. The back doors were still open. Dev zoomed in and saw what was inside, and it took him a second to understand it.

It wasn't a van inside.

It was a room. Somebody had fitted the back of it like a room — a floor that wasn't a van floor, panelled walls that had gone brown at the seams, a single chair bolted down in the middle with straps on the arms that were unbuckled and waiting.

The boy stood at the open doors and looked at the chair, and at the straps, and at the empty space where somebody's arms would go.

Then the light came.

Dev had seen the laundrette video. He knew what was coming and it didn't help at all.

Gold, out of the corners of the eyes, running down the face like light through a crack in a door. From his window across the road he could see it on the boy's jaw, on his throat, on the backs of his hands — and he could see the boy's face in it, and the face was completely calm, and completely empty, and not the face of the lad who'd told his sister to go inside.

The boy said something.

Dev's phone picked it up, just. Everybody's did. You can hear it on every angle of every video that went up that night, if you turn the volume all the way up: one word, not loud, the way you'd close a book.

"Settled."

The room in the back of the van came apart.

Not the van. The van stayed exactly where it was — a white van with no markings, parked under a streetlight, engine dead. But everything inside it went grey. The panelling, the floor, the bolted chair with its unbuckled straps — all of it went grey at once and then crumbled, like paper that's been left in a fire and is still holding its shape until somebody breathes on it.

The boy breathed out.

It went to dust. All of it. Fell in on itself and settled on the floor of an ordinary van in a thin grey layer, and there was nothing in the back of it any more but an empty metal floor and some dust.

Nobody on the street made a sound.

The woman in the coat had not moved. The woman in the plaster casts was standing on the pavement with her back against a garden wall. The boy stood at the van doors while the gold went out of him, slowly, from the jaw up, and then he wiped the blood off his top lip with the back of his wrist, and turned round.

"Take her," he said, to the woman in the coat. "And go. On foot. I'm keeping the van."

Marguerite didn't answer. She held his gaze for as long as she could, which was not very long.

Then she went. She went over to the woman in the casts and said something to her, quietly, and the two of them walked away down the middle of the lit road toward the junction, not hurrying, not looking back — past the car where a woman with a scar on her forearm was standing with the driver's door open, watching them go.

At the corner, Marguerite stopped.

"Your friend Corvin," she called back, without turning round. "He's been asking questions since Friday. About who signs what. He's been very thorough."

The boy didn't answer.

"I thought you'd like to know," Marguerite said, "that he isn't the only one who's noticed."

Dev Marsh uploaded the video at 2:51 a.m.

By six, it had nine million views. By eight, the frame of the boy holding the woman's wrist was on the front page of every news site in the country, and a phrase had started trending that nobody could agree who'd said first.

The Zero.

Not the graphic with the white box. Not the bulletin. Just two words, and underneath them, forty thousand times over, the same frame.

At ten past six, Cole's phone buzzed on the Harpers' kitchen table, where Mia and Fen were asleep on each other's shoulders and a woman in a dressing gown was making tea for four people she'd never met and hadn't stopped apologising to.

Unknown number.

found the desk. found the name. they know im looking. dont think ill make friday

cole i need you to come get me

[End of Chapter 167]