Chapter 142: KF/7a

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 142: KF/7a

Dana found the earlier version of the form in a place nobody had thought to look, which was a hospital.

"Resonance care wards use Ministry stationery," she said. "They've used it since the eighties, and hospitals never throw anything away, and there is a storeroom at Fairhaven with four decades of obsolete forms in it because nobody's job it is to bin them."

"You went to Fairhaven."

"I went to Fairhaven and I told a man called Aziz that I was doing a records audit, and he said thank God, somebody finally is, and showed me a room."

She had three versions.

KF/7c — the one they knew. Eleven boxes, two struck through.

KF/7b, from 2009. Eleven boxes. Same two.

And KF/7a, from 1994, which had twelve.

The extra box was third from the top and it was not struck through.

It was ticked.

Offer declined — record and withdraw.

Nobody said anything for a while.

"That's a whole process," Reeve said eventually. "That's not a box, that's a — there's a procedure there. Somebody could say no and you'd write it down and go away."

"In 1994."

"And it's gone by 2009." Dana had the three sheets side by side. "Fifteen years. Somebody sat in a meeting and removed the ability to decline."

"How many of the '94 ones have it ticked?"

"I've got nine sheets from that storeroom." Dana laid them out like cards. "Four."

Marek did the arithmetic first and said it out loud before he'd decided whether to.

"Four out of nine people said no."

"Four out of nine in a sample of nine, which is not a statistic and I want that said." Dana did not look up. "But yes. In 1994, on this stationery, somebody could be asked and could refuse and be left alone, and it happened often enough that it needed its own box."

"And now?"

"And now it doesn't have a box," Dana said.

Vesper was the one who caught the detail that mattered.

"It's not removed."

"It's not on the '09 one."

"No — look at the numbering." She had 7a and 7b next to each other. "On '94 the boxes are numbered one to twelve. On '09 they're one to eleven, and box three is Consent — verbal." She tapped it. "They didn't delete a box. They renumbered everything below it and moved the two consent boxes up into the gap."

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"Which means?"

"Which means whoever did it wanted the form to look like it had never had twelve." Vesper put the sheet down. "You don't renumber a document unless you want it to be impossible to tell something's missing."

Cole took the '94 sheet outside and read it four times.

Offer declined — record and withdraw.

Offer. Not assessment. Not intervention. Not any of the eleven words the modern form used.

He sat on the fire escape in the cold for about twenty minutes, and at some point Mia came up and sat next to him with two mugs and did not ask.

"There's a word on this I don't like," he said, eventually.

"Which one?"

"Offer."

Mia read it over his shoulder.

"That's not a sinister word."

"No," Cole said. "That's what I don't like about it."

At eight the next morning Dana got an email from Aziz at Fairhaven.

It had no message in the body. It had a photograph of the storeroom door, which had been open when she was there on the Tuesday, and which was now boarded over with two batons and eleven screws.

And a second photograph, of a printed notice taped to the boards:

ARCHIVE CLOSED PENDING AUDIT. NO ACCESS.

Dated the Wednesday.

Dana called him.

The line rang out four times, and on the fifth attempt a woman picked up and said Aziz was not in today, and had not come in yesterday either, and could she take a message.

"Is he ill?"

"I don't know. I'm agency." A pause on the line. "Can I ask — are you the records lady?"

"Yes."

"He left an envelope on the desk with records lady written on it," the woman said. "It's got your name on the inside. I didn't read it, it's just that everybody's been asking whose it is."

Cole and Dana drove to Fairhaven and got there at half eleven.

The storeroom door was exactly as the photograph showed it. Two batons, eleven screws, a printed notice, and a smell of new sawdust in a corridor where nothing had been touched in forty years.

Dana stood in front of it for about a minute.

"Tuesday morning that was open," she said. "There was a chair wedging it. Aziz put the chair there himself because the closer's broken and he didn't want it swinging into people."

"And now there's a notice."

"There's a notice with a font on it." Dana photographed it. "Somebody made that. Somebody opened a document, typed four words, chose a size, printed it, walked down here with tape."

The envelope was at reception in a tray, under two bits of post and a parcel, exactly where the agency woman had left it.

Inside was a single sheet.

Not a form. A photocopy of a page from a ward day-book, dated eleven years ago, with a paragraph circled in biro and four words written in the margin in a hand that shook:

They came back for it.

The circled paragraph was ordinary.

14:20 — pt. D. Vossberg. Routine obs. No change. Visitor (1) departed 14:15, signed out.

"That's Dov," Dana said. "That's — no, wait, that's eleven years ago. Dov's twenty."

"He'd have been nine."

"Dov Vossberg was in a resonance care ward at nine years old."

She read it again.

"Visitor one," she said. "Singular. One visitor, signed out at quarter past two." Her thumb was on the line. "And Aziz has circled a routine obs entry, which means it isn't the obs he wanted us to see. It's the visitor."

They had Dov in the car park at Fairhaven in ninety minutes because he refused to do it on the phone.

He stood in the cold with the photocopy in both hands and read it four times, the way people do when they are hoping the fifth reading will change something.

"I don't remember any of this."

"Dov—"

"I don't remember being here. I remember being here — this year, eight months, the ward upstairs. I don't remember being nine." He looked up. "My sister would know. Trina would know, she'd have been — she was twelve."

"Do you want to call her?"

"No," Dov said. "I want to ask her in person and I want to watch her face, because if she knew, she's had eleven years of not telling me, and I'd like to see how she does it."

"That's a hard thing to do to somebody."

"Yes." He folded the sheet along the crease it already had. "She propped a door for a man who wanted to hurt you, and she did it because of me, and she's carried that since January and I've never once made her say it out loud."

"That's not the same."

"It's exactly the same," Dov said. "It's just my turn."

He got in the car.

They found Trina at the flat at four.

She was making tea. She turned round with two mugs in her hands and saw her brother's face and the photocopy in Cole's, and she put the mugs down on the counter very carefully, which is what people do when they already know.

"Trina," Dov said. "Was I in Fairhaven when I was nine?"

And Trina Vossberg said:

"Which time?"

[End of Chapter 142]