Chapter 125: Tuesday, Badly

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 125: Tuesday, Badly

Thessaly gave them the plan at eleven at night and told them exactly what it was.

"This is not a plan. This is a sequence of things we're going to attempt." She had two sheets of paper and normally she had nine. "We have thirty-one hours, one set of eyes on the building, no rota, no staffing pattern, and a transfer time we got from a receptionist who thought we were relatives."

"So what are the odds," Marek said.

"I don't do odds. I do inventories." She put the paper down. "We're going in short. Everybody in this room needs to understand that the thing that usually keeps us alive — me knowing more than the other side — isn't available this week."

Nobody looked at Reeve.

That was worse than looking at him.

The transfer was at nine.

They were in position by half seven, which sounded like preparation and wasn't, because being early somewhere you don't understand just means standing in it for longer.

Two vehicles this time. A Ministry transport and an unmarked escort car, and the escort car was the wrong thing — there hadn't been one in October and nobody could tell them why there was one now.

"Could be procedure," Dana said, on the radio.

"Could be the review flagged him," Thessaly said. "Could be somebody read a visitor log. Could be nine other things and we'd have known which one by Thursday if we'd had Thursday."

Cole went in through the service entrance at eight-fifty and it was open.

Not forced. Not propped.

He stood there for about two seconds with his hand on it, and every part of him that had spent a year learning to read a situation said turn around, and the part that had two days instead of nineteen went through anyway.

Dov was already out of the room.

They'd moved him early — not because of Cole, because a nurse had a dentist appointment and the paperwork was done and there was no reason to sit around. He was in a wheelchair in a corridor with a bag on his lap and an escort either side, and he looked up when Cole came round the corner and said, conversationally:

"You're late."

"You said you wanted to see where they took you."

"I did. I've seen it." Dov shrugged. "It's a garden and a room and a man who comes Thursdays and asks how I am, and I'd like to go home now, please."

The escort on the left said, "Sir—"

"Also," Dov said, "there's somebody in the stairwell who isn't with you."

What happened next took under a minute and Cole could account for all of it, which was the only mercy of the entire day.

The Sixth came out of the stairwell.

One arm still bad — a month, she'd said, and it had been nine days — and she did not do anything to Cole at all, which he understood immediately and far too late.

She did it to the escorts.

Both of them, at once, and it was not dramatic: two men simply arrived at the completely reasonable conclusion that this corridor was somebody else's problem and that they had somewhere else to be. They let go of the chair. They walked past Cole without registering him and went out through the service door and stood in the car park, and afterward neither of them could explain it and one of them resigned.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Which left a wheelchair in a corridor, unattended, and Cole eleven feet away.

"Don't," he said.

"I'm not taking him."

"Then what—"

"I'm putting you in a room with him with nobody watching," she said, "and going home."

She went.

And Cole stood in an empty corridor with the February anomaly in a wheelchair and worked out, about four seconds too slowly, what she had actually done.

The ward camera at the end of the corridor.

The visitor log with his name on it from October.

An escort who would resign and one who would file an account saying he walked away from a patient and did not know why.

And an eighteen-year-old Category Zero, alone, with a Ministry patient, no staff present, on the morning of a transfer.

"Oh," Cole said.

"Yes," Dov said. "That's what I thought at about half eight."

"You knew."

"I worked out that somebody wanted you in this corridor. I didn't know who and I couldn't have told anybody, because the only people who come in here write things down." He adjusted the bag on his lap. "For what it's worth, I don't think she wanted me. I think she wanted a photograph of you holding me."

Cole looked at the camera at the end of the corridor.

He had about eleven seconds to decide, and he'd think about them for a long time — that there was a version of the next minute where he walked out of the building alone, and the footage showed a boy arriving somewhere he shouldn't be and leaving again, and a twenty-year-old went north on a Tuesday with a garden and a man who came on Thursdays.

"Right," he said, and took the handles of the chair.

They got him out.

That was the thing that made it worse — it worked. Reeve and Marek had the van at the service door in ninety seconds, Thessaly got them through a gate that should have been staffed, and by nine-twenty Dov Vossberg was in a vehicle going the wrong way up a B road with his sister crying into his shoulder and telling him he'd got thin.

By ten the Ministry had a missing patient, two incoherent escorts, and a name.

By half eleven Halden had been suspended for the second time in four months, this time without a lawyer's phone call being enough, and she found out from a text message.

Cole took the call at noon.

Iris, this time genuinely.

"You have made yourself a fugitive," she said. "I want you to sit with that word for a second before I say anything else, because you're going to want to argue about it and it is, legally, the correct word."

"They moved him early."

"I'm aware."

"The escorts walked off. There's footage of them walking off."

"There is footage of two licensed officers abandoning a patient for no reason, and footage of you removing him ninety seconds later, and you are the only person in either clip who has a Ministry file with the words Category Zero in it." Iris's voice was flat. "Whoever did this to you is good. This is the best-constructed thing anybody's done to you all year and I'd admire it if it weren't aimed at my — at you."

There was a pause, and neither of them addressed the word she'd stopped on.

Dov ate three slices of toast at the kitchen table at two in the afternoon and said it was too sweet and had another one.

Nobody could take their eyes off him.

He was twenty and looked about sixteen, thin in the way people get thin sitting down for eight months, with hair his sister had been cutting herself on second Sundays and doing a kind job of. He hummed between sentences without appearing to notice, and every time he did it Trina's face did something she couldn't control.

"You're all doing it again," he said. "The staring."

"Sorry."

"It's all right. It's better than the ward. Nobody stared in the ward, they just wrote things down." He put his toast down. "Can I say the thing now or is there a queue?"

"Say the thing."

"The man who came on Thursdays wasn't the one I was worried about," Dov said. "He was sad and polite and he asked how I was. There's a woman who came three times and she didn't ask me anything at all, and the second time she came she looked at me for eleven minutes without speaking and then said 'not yet' and left."

Aldric's cup stopped halfway.

"Describe her," Dana said.

"Silver hair. A very good coat." Dov reached for the honey. "She said my name wrong the first time and right the second time, and she apologised for it, which I thought was odd for somebody who'd come to look at me like that."

"What did she call you the first time?"

Dov thought about it.

"Something with an L in it," he said. "I'm sorry, I was on a lot of things in April."

Nobody pushed him. But Vesper got up and went out of the room, and came back four minutes later, and did not say where she'd been.

Reeve went out onto the fire escape at four and sat there on his own for about an hour.

Nobody came out to get him, which was deliberate, and had been agreed by three people without discussion.

At five Mia went out with a mug and put it down next to him and went back in without saying anything at all.

The lamp was still on in the kitchen window. It had been on for twenty-three days.

[End of Chapter 125]