Chapter 175: Thursday

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 175: Thursday

Mia found him at the kitchen table at six in the morning with a sheet of paper in front of him and one word written on it.

He hadn't been to bed. She could tell from the way he was sitting — the way he sat after a long shift at the laundrette in the summer, shoulders gone, both hands round a mug he wasn't drinking from.

She read the word upside down.

"It's just a word," she said.

"Is it?"

"It's a word people say about bills." She pulled out the chair opposite and sat. "Mum used to say it. That's settled, then. About the gas."

"Every time I've said it, the display went up." He turned the paper round so she could read it properly. "Z-one on Friday. Z-four the day I walked into the Chamber room. Z-five in the corridor. I've said it four times since Ivor's kitchen and the number's gone up every time, and now Vesper says it's the name of a town where four hundred people disappeared."

Mia read the word twice more.

Then, very quietly, as if she'd only just heard it herself, she started to say something under her breath. A rhythm. Not a song — the half-spoken sing-song of a playground.

"Nothing is given, nothing is free—"

Cole looked up.

"What you are holding, you hold for me," Mia said. "One for the asking, two for the lend, three for the counting—" She stopped.

"Four for the end," Cole said.

"We skipped to it." Her voice had gone thin. "At primary school. Everybody did. I haven't thought about it in eight years, it just — it's just a skipping rhyme, Cole. There's nothing in it. It's for skipping."

Thessaly came in at half six with the news, and it was the one Cole had been expecting since the top of the Ministry stairs.

"Ansel's gone."

"Where?"

"North. He left his hotel at five. The night porter said he had a garden centre bag with him." She put her keys on the table. "Kaelmoor's four hours if you don't stop."

"He didn't ask us to come."

"No." Thessaly looked at him steadily. "He told you where he was going and he didn't ask. That's not the same thing as asking you not to."

Cole sat with it.

It would have been easy, a year ago. He would have been in the car by now, telling everybody in it why it was right. Ansel was marked. Somebody careful was coming for him. The only man in forty years who'd refused to take the last piece of Bellamy was about to sit on a wall in a dead town and wait to be tidied.

And Ansel had not asked.

"If I go," Cole said slowly, "I'm deciding for him."

"Yes," said Thessaly.

"And if I don't—"

"Then you're deciding for him the other way," Reeve said, from the doorway.

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He was already dressed.

He had his coat on and a bag over one shoulder, and he was pale in the way he'd been pale since Corvin, and he did not look like somebody who was asking permission.

"He didn't ask," Reeve said. "I know. But the person who comes for him won't ask either. And if it's who I think it is, there's only one person in this flat who can see him coming."

"Bell."

"Bell doesn't ask anybody anything." Reeve adjusted the strap on his bag. "I'm going. That's my decision. You can come with me if you want. I'd like you to. But I'm not going because you decided — you're going because I did."

Cole looked at him for a second.

Then he got up and got his coat.

They took Thessaly's car. Four hours north, the motorway, then the A-road, then the lane with no signs, then the fence with the pink warning notices that everyone in the country had seen on the news by now.

There was a tea van at the gap.

There was actually a tea van. Parked in the lay-by with a hand-painted board — KAELMOOR TEAS & COFFEES — and a woman in a fleece selling bacon rolls to a man with a camera tripod.

"I hate this," Reeve said.

"Buy a bacon roll," Thessaly said. "It'll be the last normal thing you eat today."

He bought a bacon roll. He did not eat it.

The woman in the fleece looked at Cole while she was wrapping it — looked properly, and then looked away, and then looked again — and when Reeve held out a five-pound note she pushed it back across the counter.

"No charge," she said, not quite to any of them. "I've watched the one with the lights about forty times. My lad thinks you're a superhero." She busied herself with the tongs. "You're going in there, aren't you. Where nobody goes."

"Yes."

"Then you'll want something warm first," she said, and gave them three teas they hadn't asked for, and would not take money for those either.

The town was exactly as it had been.

The boy on the porch swing, kicking the same slow arc. The man raking the same six feet of lawn. The dog in the doorway that had not woken since 1985. Standing on a street that had been on the news every night for a month, not one of them had changed by a single frame.

And on the main street, halfway down, at a window box full of geraniums — thick, green, carefully deadheaded, the only healthy plants in the whole dead town — a young woman in a flowered dress was watering the same three flowers, and humming four notes, round and round, never getting to the fifth.

She stepped back.

She looked down the road.

She went back to the flowers.

Across the street from her, on a low garden wall, sat Ansel.

He had a green plastic watering can on the wall beside him with a garden-centre sticker still on the side, and his hands folded in his lap, and he was watching her with an expression Cole had never seen on him in any room, in any car park, in any corridor.

Not grief. Not longing.

Patience. The kind that had stopped expecting anything a long time ago and kept coming anyway.

He did not turn round when they came up the street. He must have heard them — three people on a silent road — but he did not look away from the woman at the window box.

"You came," he said.

"Reeve came," said Cole. "I came with Reeve."

Ansel's hands tightened in his lap.

"That's the right way round," he said. "Thank you."

"I've sat on this wall every Thursday for thirty-nine years," Ansel said. "I've never once crossed the road."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know her name." He said it simply. "I knew it once. I must have. And somebody took it — carefully, the way I would have — and left me everything else. The dress. The flowers. The tune. The way she looks down that road." He watched her look down it again. "I think she's waiting for somebody. I've always hoped it was me. I've never been able to prove it, because to go over there and ask, I'd need to know what to call her."

Nobody said anything.

"I brought her a new can," Ansel said. "The old one's cracked. I'm going to cross the road and give it to her, today, without a name. Because I've been told I've only got today, and I'd rather cross without one than never cross at all."

He stood up. He picked up the green watering can.

He crossed the road.

It took him about a dozen steps, and every one of them was slower than the last. He did it slowly, the way he'd got up off his knee in Room 4B, as though his body had forgotten how to do something it had wanted for a very long time.

The woman at the window box stepped back from the flowers.

She looked down the road.

And then — for the first time in forty-one years, for the first time since the night the sky did something nobody could describe — she did not turn back to the geraniums.

She turned toward Ansel instead.

Reeve's hand closed on Cole's arm, hard enough to hurt.

"Cole."

"I see it."

"No — not her." Reeve's voice had dropped to almost nothing. He was not looking at Ansel, or the woman, or the watering can. He was looking at the space right beside the window box — at the empty pavement, where there was nothing at all. "There. Right next to her. He's been standing there the whole time."

Cole looked.

He saw a pavement and a window box and a woman in a flowered dress turning toward a man with a watering can.

He saw nothing else.

"Bell," Reeve whispered. "He's right there. He's right next to her. And he's smiling."

[End of Chapter 175]