Chapter 137: The Eleven Months

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 137: The Eleven Months

Dana did not sleep on the flight and had the answer before they landed.

Not the whole answer. A shape.

"The flat above the bakery was empty from May 2015 to April 2016," she said, in the taxi rank at six in the morning with her hair flat on one side and her coat over her arm. "Ingrid Fiskvik died in April 2015. Probate took until the following March. And in that window somebody rented it."

"Rented a flat in probate?"

"You can't. That's the point." She had the phone at an angle nobody else could read. "But there's a utilities account. Eleven months, gas and electric, in a name that isn't Fiskvik, opened three weeks after she died and closed four days before Anders moved in."

"Name?"

"H. Vestergaard." Dana looked up. "I've run it. There isn't one. There's four hundred Vestergaards in Norway and not one of them has an H and a national ID that resolves."

Ivor said nothing about any of it for two days.

That was unusual enough that Cole went to his flat on the Thursday — eleven minutes' walk, a door Thessaly had chosen, a kitchen with four things in it — and found him sitting at a table with a piece of paper and a biro and nothing written on the paper.

"You've been quiet."

"I've been thinking about whether to tell you something and I've come down on the wrong side of it twice." Ivor set the biro down. "Sit. I'll do it badly."

"I've been to that flat."

Cole didn't move.

"Not in 2015. In 1971." Ivor had his hands flat on the table in the way he did when he was about to say something he'd rather not. "It wasn't a flat then, it was two rooms over a different bakery — same building, same stairs. I was sent to clear it after a woman died and I was in it for four hours and I found nothing and I reported nothing, and that is the truth and it is also not the whole truth."

"Go on."

"There was a room I didn't like." He said it flatly and without embarrassment. "I want to be accurate: not a room with anything in it. The back room, empty, a window, a floor. I did my work in it and I came out and I stood on the landing for about a minute, and I have been in eleven hundred and forty houses and it is the only room I have ever stood outside afterwards."

"What was wrong with it?"

"Nothing. That's what I'm trying to say and I'm doing it poorly." Ivor's hands opened slightly. "Houses have things wrong with them constantly. Damp, bad wiring, a man died on the stairs in 1931 and the family never got over it — you feel all of that, everybody does, it's not a talent. This was the opposite. It was the most unobjectionable room I have ever been in, and I stood on a landing afterwards for a minute and could not have told you why."

"And you never went back."

"I was never sent back. That's not the same as not going back, and I want you to notice the difference, because I have had fifty-four years to go back to that building of my own accord and I have not done it once."

Cole sat with that.

"You think it's the room."

"I think a man who lived in that building wrote eleven pages in four months and a woman before him lived there for thirty years and died of an ordinary cancer, and the eleven months between them somebody paid the gas bill." Ivor turned the blank paper round, as though there were something on it. "I think buildings are just buildings. I've believed that for four hundred years and I would like to keep believing it and I am no longer able to."

They did not go to Norway again.

That was Thessaly, and she won it in under four minutes, and her argument was so obviously correct that even Vesper stopped pushing.

"You have a man in a flat who told you what it feels like, a pair of eleven-month gas bills, and a name that doesn't exist. That's not a place to go. That's a thing to look for — and if there's a building here that does it, you'd rather find that one, because you can stand outside it on a Tuesday instead of on a plane."

"There's no reason to think there's one here."

"There's no reason to think there isn't. And there's a boy asleep on your sofa who broke a machine in February and a girl at your table with eleven pages." Thessaly capped her pen. "Find out where they were."

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It took Dana nine days and it was not clean.

Dov was simple, in the way that made everybody feel worse: he had lived in the same flat in the east district his whole life, with his sister, and the building was a nineteen-eighties council block with nothing under it and nothing before it.

"So that's the end of that theory," Reeve said.

"No." Dana had the map up. "He went to classification in February. The Chamber in the east annex."

"Everyone goes to a Chamber."

"Everyone goes to one of eleven," Dana said, "and Cole went to the one on Marling Street and Dov went to the east annex and those are two different buildings, and Elena's records say she was scanned at the east annex too, in 2018."

The kitchen got quiet.

"That's three," Vesper said.

"That's two and a maybe. Cole wasn't scanned there." Dana put the pen down. "And I've been doing this long enough to know that two is a coincidence and three is a shape, and I'd rather have the shape than a feeling, so I'm going to go and get the other eight."

She got them in four days, by being extremely boring.

Not through Halden — Halden was reinstated pending review and Dana would not spend her on this. Through the Ministry's own published estate register, a facilities maintenance schedule, and eleven phone calls to a man in procurement who thought she was writing a dissertation.

Eleven Chambers in the region.

Three of them predated the Ministry.

"Predated it how?"

"The Ministry was founded in 1986. Marling Street's Chamber was installed in 1991, most of them are nineties or later." Dana had the list on the whiteboard now. "The east annex Chamber was installed in 1974."

Aldric had gone very still.

"That's twelve years before there was an organisation to install it."

"Yes."

"Installed by whom?"

"The paperwork says 'transferred from previous operator,'" Dana said, "and there is no previous operator listed, and I have spent two days trying to find out what a previous operator is and the honest answer is that it's a box on a form from 1986 that somebody ticked."

Cole went to look at it.

Not to go in — to stand across the road for an hour on a Wednesday afternoon, which he told nobody about and which Vesper worked out from his shoes.

The east annex was a low brick building from the seventies with a car park and a wheelchair ramp and a sign that had been replaced at least twice. There was a woman having a cigarette by the bins. A man came out with a lanyard and got into a Vauxhall and drove off.

It was the most ordinary building Cole had ever looked at.

He stood there for fifty minutes and felt nothing at all — no hum, no pull, no mark heat — and was about to go home when a thought arrived that he had not built and did not recognise.

Not this one.

It was in his own voice. It came with no accompanying feeling, the way a name arrives when you've been trying to remember it and have given up, and it was so completely unremarkable that he was two streets away before he understood what had happened.

He stopped walking.

He stood on a pavement outside a chemist's for about four minutes.

Then he said, out loud, to nobody, in a perfectly normal tone: "Which one, then?"

Nothing answered.

He told Vesper that night, which he had not planned to do, and which he did in about nine words.

"Something told me it wasn't the east annex."

"Something."

"In my voice. Two words." He was looking at the street. "And then I asked it which one and it didn't answer, and I stood outside a chemist's like a lunatic waiting for it to."

Vesper was quiet for a long time.

"That's the first one you've told me the same day," she said.

"Yeah."

"I'd like to say that I feel better and I don't." She pulled her sleeves down. "Because the thing I've been frightened of for a month isn't you keeping things. It's that you'd stop noticing you were doing it. And now you've noticed and told me and it hasn't helped at all, which means the problem was never the telling."

"No."

"It's that there's something in you answering questions," she said, "and I've got eleven pages, and Dov's got a language, and Anders had four months, and every single one of us has decided the useful thing to do is keep going."

Ivor was at the kitchen table when they came in from the fire escape at midnight, which he was not supposed to be, because the rule was that he did not come to the flat after eight.

Thessaly was standing by the door with her arms folded, which explained how he'd got in.

"He rang me," she said. "Not you. Me. Which I'd like noted as the only reason he's sitting there."

Ivor had the blank sheet of paper from his own kitchen in front of him and this time there was one line on it.

"I have been trying since Thursday to remember the address of the building in 1971," he said. "Not the flat. The one before it — the woman who died in the back room had a daughter and I cleared the daughter's house as well, nine years later, in a different country."

He turned the paper round.

One line. An address in Lisbon.

"There are three," Ivor said. "That's what I came to say and I'd rather have said it in daylight. There aren't a lot of these. I've found three in four hundred years and I have never once put them next to each other on a piece of paper, and I did it on Thursday, and I have not slept since."

Dana was already reaching for the paper. "Three what, exactly? Rooms?"

"Three places I came out of and stood outside." He let her take it. "Tromsø, 1971. Lisbon, 1980. And one I am not going to write down tonight, because I want somebody in this room to tell me first whether you actually want it, and I want you to take an hour over the answer."

"Why?"

"Because the other two are four decades old and eleven hundred miles away," Ivor said, "and the third one is a ninety-minute drive from where I am sitting, and I have known that since Thursday morning, and I have been trying since Thursday morning to find a version of this conversation in which I do not tell you."

Nobody said anything.

Thessaly, from the door: "Did you find one?"

"No."

"Then say it."

"In an hour," Ivor said. "I meant the hour. I'm four hundred years old and I have watched a great many people agree to things at midnight, and I am not going to be the man who let a room of tired people do that."

He got up, put his coat on, and went and stood in the hallway to wait out sixty minutes in somebody else's building rather than say it early.

Mia, who had been on the stairs for most of it, went and sat with him, and neither of them said anything for the whole hour, and at one o'clock exactly she came back in and said, "He wants to know if you're sure."

[End of Chapter 137]