Chapter 168: The Desk

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 168: The Desk

06:12

Cole typed one word back.

Where.

The reply took forty seconds, and the whole Harpers' kitchen watched him wait for it — Fen's mum in her dressing gown with the teapot, Thessaly in the doorway, Mia awake now, not moving, on Fen's shoulder.

east annex. basement. the chamber room. the old tech hid me

gerry

they know im in the building

"Gerry," Thessaly said. "The technician from Friday."

"He photographed the code." Cole was already standing. "He said he'd like to keep one thing. He's kept Corvin."

"Cole. The east annex is a Ministry building." Thessaly did not move from the doorway. "At quarter past six on a Tuesday morning, and there are nine million people who've watched you hold Marguerite's wrist. There's no version of this where you walk in unnoticed."

"I know."

"Then—"

"Then I'll walk in noticed," Cole said.

06:40

They took three people and left the rest.

Reeve, because whatever had found Corvin might be something only Reeve could see. Vesper, because the east annex had a dozen locked doors between the lobby and the basement and she had opened a magnetic lock in forty seconds once, and a padlock in under a minute, and had never once explained how. Thessaly, because she refused to be left.

Mia stayed with Fen.

She did not argue about it, which Cole noticed, and she hugged him at the Harpers' door and said into his coat, "Ring me before you bleed," and he said he would.

07:58

The lobby of the east annex had a reception desk, a row of plastic chairs, a potted plant that had been dying since the nineties, and about thirty people.

Every one of them stopped talking when he came through the door.

Not all at once. It went across the room like a spill — the nearest people first, a woman with a coffee who simply stopped with the cup halfway to her mouth, then the queue at the desk, then the man with the mop by the lifts. By the time Cole had crossed the first ten feet of floor, the only sound in the lobby of a government building at eight o'clock on a Tuesday morning was the hum of a vending machine.

Nobody moved toward him.

Nobody moved away either, which was worse. They just stood where they were and watched him cross the room, and a man near the door lifted his phone and then — slowly, as if he'd thought better of it — put it back in his pocket.

The security officer on the desk was Mark Dobson.

He looked up. He saw who it was. And Cole watched him go through about four different decisions in the space of a breath, each one written plainly on a tired, decent, fifty-year-old face.

Then Dobson looked down at his screen.

At the far side of the lobby a young clerk with a lanyard and an armful of folders had stopped by the door to the stairwell. She looked at Cole. Then, without a word, she shifted the folders to one arm and held the door open, and stood there holding it, eyes on the floor.

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"Morning," he said, to the screen.

"Morning."

"I've got a visitor log here." Dobson tapped at a keyboard without looking at anything he was typing. "And I've got a terrible eye condition, it's in my file, that means I can't see anybody who comes past this desk between eight and ten past." He did not look up. "Lifts are on the left. Basement's minus two. The stairs are quicker, because the lift camera works and the stair camera's been broken since Christmas."

"Mr. Dobson—"

"My daughter watched you on the telly," Dobson said. "That's all. Stairs are on the left."

08:04

The basement stairwell door had a keypad on it.

Vesper laid her palm against the metal, closed her eyes, and it clicked open in about the time it took Reeve to say "How do you—"

"Don't," she said. "I still don't know."

The second door had a card reader. The third had both. Vesper opened them one after the other, walking, without breaking step, and Thessaly watched her do it with an expression Cole had never seen on her — not suspicion. The look of a professional watching somebody do easily a thing she had spent twenty years learning to do badly.

"That's not a skill," Thessaly said quietly.

"No," said Vesper.

"Then what is it?"

Vesper didn't answer, and Cole saw her decide not to, and let it go.

At the bottom of the second flight his phone buzzed. Mia.

?

He typed two words with his thumb, still walking.

not bleeding

The reply came before he'd put it away. yet

08:09

Minus two was the old part of the building. Brown copper at the seams of the walls. A smell of dust and old electricity, the same smell as the tunnel under Kaelmoor.

Reeve stopped dead at the bottom of the stairs.

"Cole."

"What?"

"Somebody's been down here." He had the heel of his hand pressed to his temple. "Not just — somebody like the ones from the street. It's the same feeling. Like a room where a conversation's just stopped." His face had gone grey. "About an hour ago. Maybe less."

"Where?"

Reeve pointed down the corridor, toward a door at the end with a single strip light over it.

The Chamber room.

08:11

Gerry was on the floor outside the door, and he had clearly been there for some time — there was a flask beside him, and an unopened packet of sandwiches, and the careful, hopeless tidiness of a man who had not known what else to do with his hands.

He was sixty-eight and he was sitting with his back against the copper-panelled wall, with his knees up and his glasses in his hand, and he looked up when they came round the corner and his face went through relief and horror so fast Cole couldn't tell which one it had landed on.

"I couldn't stop her," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm a technician, I just — I kept him in the dial room since yesterday. Brought him sandwiches. And at seven a woman came down the stairs, and she didn't — she didn't do anything to me. She just looked at me and I sat down."

"Which woman?"

"I don't know. I was looking at the floor by then, I couldn't look anywhere else." Gerry pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "But both her arms were in plaster. Both of them. In a sling." "She went in there with him. She was in there fifty minutes. She came out ten minutes ago and walked past me up the stairs, and she said thank you, Gerald, like I'd held a door for her."

Cole opened the door.

The Chamber was exactly as it had been on Friday. Copper walls gone brown. Rubber floor. A bank of dials with the needles lying at rest. The grey strip of glass under them showing nothing but dashes.

And in the bolted chair in the middle of the room, sitting upright with his hands resting on the arms and his coat buttoned properly for once, Corvin.

He looked fine.

That was the first thing. There was no blood, no bruise, nothing wrong with him anywhere.

Thessaly, behind Cole, let out a breath she had clearly been holding since the Harpers' kitchen. "He's all right," she said. "Cole, he's—"

She stopped, because Cole had not moved from the doorway, and she had worked with him long enough to know what it meant when he stood still. His hair was combed. He was sitting in the chair the way a man sits in a doctor's waiting room — patient, a little bored, with nothing particular on his mind.

He looked up when the door opened.

"Corvin," Cole said.

Corvin looked at him politely.

"Sorry," he said. "I think you've got the wrong person. I was told to wait here. Are you the doctor?"

The dials on the wall didn't so much as twitch.

Reeve made a sound behind him — very small, like something had hit him in the chest.

Corvin's left hand was resting on the arm of the chair, palm up. And written on it in blue biro, in capitals, pressed so hard the pen had nearly gone through the skin, were letters — seven or eight of them. Written by a man who had known exactly what was about to happen to him, and had wanted one thing to survive it.

Half of them had been rubbed away.

Not smudged. Rubbed — carefully, with a thumb, by somebody who'd had fifty minutes and had not quite had time to finish.

Corvin followed Cole's eyes down to his own hand, and looked at the letters on it with mild interest, as though noticing a stain on a stranger's sleeve.

"Oh," he said. "I don't know what that is. Somebody must have written on me."

[End of Chapter 168]