Chapter 131: The Man Who Answers Letters

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 131: The Man Who Answers Letters

The card from the petrol station had three phone numbers on it, two scratched out.

Dana had spent a month on the third and got nowhere, because it was not a phone number. It was eleven digits printed in the same format as one, and it had never been allocated to any network in this country, and the only thing it matched was a postal sorting code that had been retired in 1988.

"So it's an address," she said. "In the least convenient possible format."

"Where?"

"A sorting office in a town called Gessen that closed thirty-seven years ago and is now a carpet showroom."

They went anyway, because they had four days and no better thread, and because Thessaly said a carpet showroom was the least dangerous place any of them had been in a month.

The showroom had a back office and a manager called Denny who had owned the building since 2004 and who said, before anybody had asked a question:

"Oh, you'll be about the letters."

There was a drawer.

It was in the back office under a shelf of sample books, and it was full, and Denny opened it the way you open something you have stopped finding strange.

"Started in about 2006. Two, three a year. Addressed to the building, not to me, and no name on them — just the old sorting code." He shrugged. "First few years I binned them. Then I opened one."

"What was in it?"

"Nothing. That's the thing." Denny picked one up and handed it over. "Look."

A single sheet. Good paper. And on it, in neat, unhurried, four-hundred-year-old handwriting:

Still nothing at Wellhurst. I have looked twice.

"That's it?" Reeve turned it over. Nothing on the back.

"That's every one of them. One line, sometimes two, no greeting, no signature." Denny leaned on the doorframe. "I'll tell you the part that got me, though. He franks them. Properly. Correct postage every single time, right stamp for the year, never once underpaid."

"Why does that matter?"

"Because a man doing something dodgy doesn't queue up in a post office," Denny said. "Whoever that is, he's posting a letter. Same as anyone. Nineteen years."

There were sixty-one of them.

Dana went through the drawer on the floor of a carpet showroom for two hours while a man vacuumed around her, and what she assembled was not a conspiracy. It was a correspondence.

One-sided. Sixty-one letters over nineteen years, all from the same hand, all short, all reporting the same kind of thing.

Nothing at the Caldemere site. The water was high.

I have cleared the Bramwell house. There was a box but it was only photographs.

The Halvern room is still there. I did not go in.

Nothing at Wellhurst. I have looked twice. I do not think he left anything.

"He's reporting to somebody," Reeve said.

"He's reporting to a sorting office that shut in 1988," Dana said.

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Three of them were not reports.

Dana found the first at about the ninety-minute mark and read it twice before she said anything.

I did not take the Ferris woman. She has a daughter in the house. Send someone else or leave it.

The second was eight years later.

You will have been told I was slow at Ashenhall. I was. The man was dying anyway and I saw no reason to make his last four months about me.

And the third, undated, in the middle of the stack:

I have been asked to explain the delay at Pell. There was no delay. There was a decision, and it was mine, and I am not going to set it out in a letter to a room.

Vesper read all three and put them down carefully.

"He refuses things," she said.

"Three times in nineteen years," Dana said.

"That's three times he wrote down." Aldric was looking at the drawer rather than the letters. "A man who explains himself three times in nineteen years is a man who has been explaining himself for a great deal longer than nineteen years and has learned exactly how much of it is safe."

Cole read four of them and then stopped and read the same one again.

I do not think he left anything.

"Denny. Has anybody ever collected these?"

"Never. Nineteen years."

"Has anybody ever come and asked about them?"

"You lot." Denny leaned on the doorframe. "And a woman, once, about — eleven years ago? Twelve? Very well dressed. She looked in the drawer, didn't take anything, said thank you and went."

"Silver hair?"

"That's it."

The last letter was dated four months ago and it was different.

Two sentences instead of one, and the hand had changed — still neat, still unhurried, but the pressure was heavier, as though the pen had been held by someone making a point rather than a note.

The boy has begun.

I am too old for the rest of this and there is nobody to hand it to.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Dana photographed all sixty-one and put them back exactly as she'd found them, which took another forty minutes and which she insisted on.

"Why put them back?"

"Because a man has been posting letters into an empty room for nineteen years," she said, "and one of the very few things I'm sure about in this entire business is that he's going to post another one."

Denny made them tea in the back office and was, throughout, entirely unbothered.

"Can I ask you something," Vesper said. "You've had a drawer of strange letters for nineteen years. Why didn't you ever—"

"Do what?" Denny was genuinely curious. "Go to the police and say a man keeps writing to my building about carpets he doesn't buy?"

"Fair."

"I thought about it in about 2011." He stirred his tea. "Then I thought, he's not asking me for anything. He's never once asked me for anything. Whoever he is, he's the least trouble anybody's given me in twenty years, and there's a lad two doors down who parks across my loading bay every Friday."

Cole went outside while the others finished up.

He stood in the car park of a carpet showroom in a town nobody had any reason to visit, and got his phone out, and made a call that lasted under a minute.

Vesper came out two minutes later and he had his hands in his pockets and was looking at the sign above the door.

"Who was that?"

"Iris."

Vesper looked at him.

She had a whole sentence ready and she'd had it ready for eleven days, and standing in a car park she decided not to say it — not out of fear, and not out of tact, but because she had realised about four seconds earlier that she wanted to see how long he would keep doing it.

That frightened her more than the answer would have.

"Okay," she said.

On the drive back, Aldric said the useful thing.

"Sixty-one letters and not one of them mentions the Choir."

"They're reports."

"They're reports to a person, about a search, and there is nothing in any of them about doctrine, or the Mosaic, or wholeness, or any of the vocabulary I have listened to for forty-one years." He had the photographs on his knees. "He's been looking for something on somebody's behalf since at least 2006, and he does not appear to care in the slightest what it's for."

"He's staff," Thessaly said.

"He's older than the organisation," Aldric said. "That's what I keep circling. If the handwriting's right, then the Choir acquired a man who was already doing this, and has been sending him letters ever since, and I have never once heard his name spoken in a building."

Dana, from the front: "What was he looking for at Wellhurst?"

Nobody answered that.

The boy has begun.

Cole turned it over for eighty miles.

I am too old for the rest of this and there is nobody to hand it to.

At about nine that evening, on a dark stretch of motorway with everybody else asleep in the back, he said, quietly, to Thessaly at the wheel:

"If somebody had been doing a job for four hundred years and got tired, what would they do?"

Thessaly thought about it.

"Train a replacement," she said. "Or stop, and let whatever they were holding up fall over."

"Which one would you do?"

"I'd stop," Thessaly said. "But I'm forty-six and I've only been doing it for twenty."

They drove a while.

"There's a third option," she said.

"Go on."

"You find the person the job was always for," Thessaly said, "and you give it to them, and then it stops being your problem in a way that isn't quitting."

Cole watched the road markings go under the headlights.

"That's not a third option," he said. "That's the first one with better manners."

"Yes," Thessaly said. "That's usually how the good ones work."

[End of Chapter 131]