Chapter 143: Which Time

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 143: Which Time

Trina made the tea anyway.

That was what everybody remembered afterward — that she finished making two cups of tea for two people while her brother stood in the doorway of her flat waiting for her to answer, and that nobody stopped her, because it was clearly the only thing holding her upright.

Then she put them on the table, and sat down, and said: "Three times."

"Nine, eleven, and fourteen," she said. "Six weeks the first time. Four months the second. The last one was nine days and they sent you home on a Friday and Mum cried in the car park and I didn't know why."

"I don't—"

"You don't remember any of them. I know." Trina had both hands round a cup she wasn't drinking from. "You didn't remember the second one during the third one. I worked that out when you were fourteen. I asked you what the ward smelled like and you said what ward."

Dov sat down.

He did it carefully, like a man whose legs had been told to do it by somebody else, and he sat there for about a minute without saying anything.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I was twelve, and then I was fourteen, and then I was seventeen and Mum was dead and I had a brother who was fine." Trina's voice had gone somewhere flat. "You were fine, Dov. You were at school. You had mates. You played football badly. And I had a choice between letting you have that or handing you three holes and no explanation, and I've made that choice every single day since I was twelve and I have never once been sure about it."

"That wasn't yours to—"

"I know." She put the cup down. "I know it wasn't. I'm not defending it. You asked me why and that's the why, and it's a bad why, and I've had eleven years of knowing it's a bad why."

"When I was in the ward this year," Dov said. "Eight months. You came every second Sunday."

"Yes."

"Did you tell them I'd been before?"

Trina did not answer.

"Trina."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because they didn't ask," she said, "and because I sat in that waiting room the first Sunday and worked out that if I told them, they'd have a history — and a history means a pattern and a pattern means a programme." Her voice went and she got it back. "So I said nothing for eight months. That's not the same as the door and I'd like you to be angry about it separately."

Dov looked at his sister for a long moment.

"I'm not angry."

"You should be."

"Probably." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I've been awake for most of eight months, Trina. I had a lot of time to work out what you'd been doing, and I got most of the way there and stopped, because I didn't want to be right."

Cole did not say anything for the entire exchange, which Dana noticed.

He was standing by the door with the photocopy in his hand and he was reading Trina Vossberg, and what he got was not what he'd expected.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Not guilt. There was guilt in there, and it was old and worn smooth from handling.

Underneath it: If I let go of this, nobody is holding it.

He had read that shape before, in a kitchen, in his own sister, about him.

Dana asked the useful question because somebody had to.

"Trina. Who took him?"

"Mum did. The first time." Trina's head came up. "That's the bit nobody ever believes. Nobody came for him. He got ill — properly ill, a temperature, not eating, saying things — and Mum took him to A and E at two in the morning like anybody would, and they referred him, and the referral went to Fairhaven."

"And the second time?"

"Mum again. It was — " She stopped. "They wrote to her. There was a letter saying he was due a review and could she bring him in, and she brought him in, because there was a letter."

Dana had gone very still.

"Do you have it?"

"No."

"Trina—"

"I don't have it because I burned it," Trina said. "In 2019, on the balcony, in a saucepan, when Mum died and I went through her things and found four years of letters about my brother that I'd never seen." Her jaw was tight. "I was seventeen. I'd like somebody in this room to tell me what a seventeen-year-old should have done with those, because I've been asking myself since and I've never got an answer I liked."

"What did they say?"

"I read two of them." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, briskly. "The first one was ordinary. Review, appointment, bring his card.

"The second one had a line at the bottom that I've thought about every week for six years."

Nobody moved.

"We would be grateful if he could attend without company," Trina said. "And Mum took him anyway and sat in the car park for four hours because she wasn't allowed up, and then she drove him home and made him fish fingers."

Dov had not spoken for five minutes.

"Trina."

"Yes."

"The visitor." He was looking at the photocopy on the table. "It says one visitor signed out at quarter past two. If Mum was in the car park, who was upstairs with me?"

Trina looked at the sheet.

She turned it round and read it properly for the first time, and her face did something that made Dana step forward without meaning to.

"That's the third one," she said. "That's — that date's the third one. The nine days."

"Trina, who was the visitor?"

"I don't know. I was seventeen and I was at college." Her hands had started to shake. "But there was a man."

"What man?"

"I don't know his name. He came to the flat twice that year and he sat on our sofa and talked to Mum about arrangements, and I was doing coursework in the next room and I heard about a third of it." Trina's voice had thinned right out. "And when Dov came home on the Friday, Mum stopped answering the door for about two months."

Cole put the photocopy in his pocket and said the first thing he'd said since they came in.

"What did he look like?"

"Ordinary. Fifties. Coat." Trina shook her head. "I'm sorry, I genuinely — he wasn't memorable. That's the whole thing about him. I've tried."

"Did he ever say anything to you?"

"Once. He was leaving and I was in the hall and he stopped." She frowned. "He said — God, this is going to sound like nothing."

"Say it anyway."

"He said, you're a good sister," Trina said. "And then he said, don't let them tell you the terms twice."

Dana got her notebook out and did not open it.

"Trina. That last bit. Say it exactly."

"Don't let them tell you the terms twice."

"You're sure about the word."

"I'm sure because I didn't understand it," Trina said. "I was seventeen and a man in a coat said something about terms on his way out of my mum's flat and I thought he meant the tenancy."

Nobody said anything.

Then Dov stood up, and went to the window, and stood with his back to the room for about a minute, and when he turned round he was speaking a language none of them had ever heard.

Four words. Flat, fast, and unmistakably an answer to something.

Trina's cup went off the table.

"I know that," she said. "Dov — I know that. Mum used to say that. She said it when she was cross with the kettle."

Dana got to her first, because Dana was closest and because Trina had gone the colour of the wall.

"Say it back to him."

"I can't, I don't—"

"You've heard it your whole life. Don't think. Say it back."

And Trina Vossberg, twenty-three, who had never left this county, who had propped a fire door in January and had carried eleven years of her brother's missing months, opened her mouth in a kitchen at half past four in the afternoon and said six words in a language that had not been spoken on this planet in a very long time.

Dov answered her.

She answered him.

They went back and forth four times, getting faster, and neither of them was looking at the other one and neither of them seemed able to stop — and then Trina put both hands flat over her own mouth and held them there.

Cole was already moving.

Not toward them. To the window, because the light in the flat had changed, and because the mark under his ear had gone from nothing to hot in under a second for the first time since Barrowgate.

Across the road, in the doorway of a shuttered betting shop, a man in a coat was standing perfectly still and looking up at the third floor.

Ordinary. Fifties.

Not memorable at all.

[End of Chapter 143]