Chapter 140: Somewhere With a Garden

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 140: Somewhere With a Garden

They buried him on the Thursday, in a plot Iris bought in four hours through a solicitor who did not ask a single question, in a churchyard outside a village where nobody had ever heard of Kaelmoor.

Eight people. No priest. A man called Nigel from the funeral director's who had been told it was a family matter and who stood at a respectful distance with his hands folded and did his job beautifully.

It rained.

Mia wrote the only thing anybody said out loud.

She would not let anybody read it first. She stood at the end of the grave with a piece of lined paper going soft in the rain and read four sentences off it.

"Aldric Vane was eighty-two. He spent forty-one years doing something terrible and eight months trying to stop. He found the bracket. He was useful."

She folded the paper up.

"That's it," she said. "He asked for one of those and I've given him two, and he'd have complained about the other two, so."

There were other things people did not say.

Dana did not say that she had spent four days trying to find a next of kin and had found a sister who died in 1984 and nobody else at all. Reeve did not say that he had been the one to go through the spare room and that Aldric had owned eleven things. Thessaly did not say anything whatsoever for the entire day.

Vesper did not say that she had gone back to the Barrowgate plant room alone on the Tuesday and stood in the doorway for a while and come away with nothing.

And nobody said the thing about the headstone, which was that they could not have one — not a real one, not with a name and two dates — because a man with no legal existence since 1984 cannot be issued a death certificate, and a plot without a certificate gets a number.

His is 114.

Mia found that out on the Wednesday from the solicitor and did not tell anybody until three weeks later, and when she did, she cried about it for the first and only time.

Ivor came, which surprised everybody.

He stood at the back in the same waxed jacket and did not come forward and did not speak to anyone, and when it was over he walked down the churchyard path with Cole and said one thing.

"I'd have liked to have known him."

"You'd have got on."

"No," Ivor said, mildly. "I don't think we would. He wanted to be forgiven and I stopped wanting that in about 1790, and men in those two positions tend to find each other unbearable." He put his gloves on. "But I'd have liked to have known him. Those are different sentences and I'd like you to hear the second one."

"How many of these have you been to?"

Ivor stopped on the path.

"That's the first question anybody's asked me in six weeks that I don't want to answer," he said, "and I'm going to answer it, because you asked it at a graveside and that's the only place it's a fair question."

"You don't have to."

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"Four hundred and six," Ivor said. "I keep a count. I've kept it since the 1700s and I'd like to tell you it's out of respect and it started out as bookkeeping and I've never been able to work out which it is now."

He walked on.

The wake, such as it was, happened in the flat that evening and ran on sandwiches Marek had made badly.

Nobody drank very much. Dov, who had never met Aldric properly, sat on the arm of the sofa and listened to eleven stories about a man he'd shared a kitchen with four times, and at one point asked, "Was he funny?" and Reeve said "No," and Mia said "Yes," and neither of them backed down.

Elena told the one about the honey shelf. Thessaly, unexpectedly, told one about the first week — how she'd spent two days deciding whether he was a liability and had settled it by watching him alphabetise a cupboard for forty minutes. "Nobody performs for a cupboard," she said, and then did not say anything else for another hour.

Marek's sandwiches were genuinely terrible and four separate people told him so and he ate six of them out of spite.

At about nine, Elena said the thing that changed the direction of the evening.

"He'd settled up."

Everyone looked at her.

"Sorry. That's — my grandmother used to say it." Elena had a mug she wasn't drinking from. "When somebody died and they'd made their peace. He'd settled up. I haven't thought about that phrase in twenty years and it's been in my head all day."

"That's a nice way to put it," Dana said.

"It isn't, though." Elena frowned at the mug. "That's what I keep catching on. It's not a nice phrase. It's an accounting phrase. Somebody owed something and now they don't."

Nobody said anything for a second.

"Ignore me," Elena said. "It's been a long day."

They ignored her.

The conversation moved on to whether Aldric's eleven possessions should go anywhere, and whether the phone he'd never learned to use should be wiped or kept, and Reeve got out the notebook Mia had bought him — the one full of fragments, the one he'd been filling since the crack opened in him — and put it on the table and said he couldn't decide what to do with it.

"It's his handwriting."

"It's evidence," Dana said, and then heard herself, and put her hand over her mouth.

"It's both," Cole said. "Dana, it's both, and you're allowed to have said that."

The last page had six words on it.

Aldric had written them on the Tuesday, two days before Barrowgate, in handwriting that had got steadier over eight months.

Ask Cole what a Conviction is.

Nobody could explain it. Dana went through the rest of the notebook twice looking for context and there wasn't any — it sat on its own at the bottom of a page about the northern facility's staff rota, with a line drawn under it.

"He never asked you," Reeve said.

"No."

"Would you have had an answer?"

Cole thought about a man eating chips on a wall outside a community centre, a hundred and eleven chapters of his life ago, asking exactly that and being disappointed with a wound.

"No," he said.

Ivor said the last useful thing of the night, on the landing, at half eleven, with his coat already on.

"There's a thing I ought to have mentioned and I've been putting it off because today wasn't the day, and now it's half eleven and today's nearly over, which is the coward's version of the right time."

"Go on."

"The room at Barrowgate. The one you put a wall through." He pulled his gloves on. "You told me it said something. He's a doorway. That's all a person ever is."

"Yeah."

"That's not a figure of speech."

Cole looked at him.

"I've heard it before," Ivor said. "Twice. Not that sentence — the idea, put in different words, by two different people about a hundred and forty years apart, and both of them were talking about something else entirely at the time and neither of them noticed they'd said it."

"What were they talking about?"

Ivor thought about it.

"Terms," he said. "Both of them. Different contracts, different centuries, same word."

"What kind of contracts?"

"Ordinary ones. That's what I'd like you to sit with." He buttoned his coat. "A land sale in 1812 and a partnership dissolution in 1954. Two men explaining perfectly mundane business to me, and both of them used the same word about a person, and I remember it because both times I thought: that's an odd thing to say."

"And now?"

"Now a room in a swimming pool has said it too, in a dead man's voice, and I've got three of them." Ivor started down the stairs and stopped two steps down. "I've never put those two conversations next to each other until tonight and I'd like to go home and not think about it, and I already know I'm not going to."

Cole stood on the landing for a while after he'd gone.

Down in the flat, somebody was washing up. Somebody else was arguing about the sandwiches.

In the kitchen window, the lamp was on.

It had been on for fifty-one days, and it was now on for a man who was in a churchyard forty miles away, which was not what a lamp in a window meant and which nobody had said out loud and which everybody had decided independently.

[End of Chapter 140]