Chapter 172: Four Letters

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 172: Four Letters

Skipping rhyme, collected in a Leeds playground, 1938. Variants recorded in forty-one counties.

Nothing is given, nothing is free,What you are holding, you hold for me —One for the asking, two for the lend,Three for the counting, and four for the end.

(Collector's note: the children could not say where they had learned it. Asked what it meant, one girl of eight replied: "It doesn't mean anything. It's for skipping.")

"No cameras," Halden said on the phone at six. "Not a bus stop, not a shop, not a doorbell. Somewhere the Ministry doesn't look."

It was Mrs. Adeyemi who solved it, because she was on the landing in her coat and hat at ten to seven on a Wednesday and heard him say it.

"Mine hasn't got a camera," she said.

"Your what?"

"My church, love. St. Anne's on Pargeter Street. It hasn't got a camera, it hasn't got heating, and it hasn't got more than nine of us on a good week." She buttoned her glove. "Half seven service, done by eight. Nobody from any ministry has set foot in it since the war. I'd put money on it."

St. Anne's was a small brick church squeezed between a tyre fitter and a closed-down pub, with a hand-painted board outside that said ALL WELCOME and a door that stuck.

Inside it was colder than the street.

Nine old women and one old man in coats, scattered across twelve rows of pews that had been built for three hundred. A vicar in his seventies with a cardigan under his surplice. Candles. The smell of damp hymn books.

Cole sat at the back with Halden, and Corvin, and Reeve, who had insisted, and Mrs. Adeyemi went up to the front and sat in what was very clearly her seat.

He wasn't listening to the service.

He was watching Halden, who had the brown envelope on her knees and had not opened it, and was holding it like something that might go off. So he nearly missed it.

It was at the end. The vicar lifted his hands for the grace — the old sing-song way that meant he'd said the same words ten thousand times — and nine old voices said it with him, without thinking, the way you'd say your own address:

"For all that is lent to us, we give thanks.For all we hold, we hold in trust.And when it is asked for, may we give it gladly."

"Amen," said nine people.

The mark under Cole's ear went cold.

Not hot — cold, all at once, like somebody had laid a coin against it. He sat in the back pew of a church that hadn't had heating since the war, not moving, and did not know why.

Reeve, beside him, had gone white.

"Did you hear that?" Reeve whispered. "Lent. Cole, they said lent—"

"I heard it."

"That's the — that's Elena's—"

"I know," Cole said. "Not here."

The vicar was coming down the aisle, collecting hymn books from the ends of the pews. He was slow about it, and he stopped at the back row, and looked at the four strangers in his church at half past seven on a Wednesday.

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His eyes went to Cole. Stayed there a moment. Then dropped, very briefly, to the side of Cole's neck — just below the left ear — and came back up.

"You're welcome any time," he said mildly. "We don't get many young people. The grace puts them off, I think. It's very old." He tucked the hymn books under his arm. "Older than the church. Older than the one that was here before it. Nobody's ever been able to tell me who wrote it."

He went on up the aisle, and did not look back.

The old women filed out. The vicar went into the vestry. Mrs. Adeyemi, at the door, looked back at them once and then went and stood outside on the step with her handbag, facing the street, like a woman keeping watch.

Halden opened the envelope.

She tipped the two torn halves of the Class One order out onto the pew between them, and slid the bottom half across so the second signature box was the right way up.

"There," she said.

Cole looked.

A neat, careful signature in black ink, the kind a man learns to do at school and never changes.

A. Bellamy.

Nobody spoke.

Corvin was the first to move. He held up his left hand, palm out, the way he'd held it up in the Chamber — the biro still faintly there, pressed into the skin, four letters where there had been seven or eight.

B E L L

"I thought it was him," Reeve said, very quietly. "The one on the bench. I've spent two days thinking it was Bell."

"So did I," said Corvin.

"It wasn't Bell." Halden's voice cracked. "It was never Bell. You wrote a man's name on your own hand and she rubbed off the end of it. Bellamy."

"That's not possible," Cole said.

"It's his signature."

"He's ours, Halden. He sat on the panel that made me Category Zero and leaned over my chair and told me not to trust anybody who wasn't in that room. He let me take four inches of wall out of his head in a café. He's got his name back." Cole could hear his own voice and didn't like it. "He's been writing things down every day since. Fragments. Dana's got them all—"

"He interviewed me," Halden said.

Cole stopped.

"In 2014. For the Compliance post. There were four people on the panel and he was the only one who asked me a question that wasn't on the sheet." She was looking at the signature. "He asked me why I wanted to spend my life checking other people's work. I said because somebody should. And he wrote something down, and he signed the letter that hired me a week later." Her hand was shaking. "It's the same signature, Cole. It's the same pen."

Corvin said, slowly: "The desk."

"What?"

"On Monday I found the desk. The one the order went across. I remember that much — I remember walking down a corridor on the fourth floor and finding the door, and there was a nameplate, and I thought oh, it's him, and I got the pen out of my pocket." He looked at his palm. "And then she came."

"Fourth floor," said Halden. "That's the panel floor."

Reeve had his phone out.

"Dana," he said, when she picked up. "Bellamy's notebook. The one you've been copying. When's the last entry?"

A pause. The sound of pages.

"Three weeks ago," Dana said. "I thought he'd just — he's seventy-three, Reeve, I thought he'd got tired."

"What does it say?"

A much longer pause.

"It's not a fragment," Dana said, and her voice had changed. "The others are all fragments. Colours, a corridor, a woman's laugh. This one's a sentence. It's in capitals and he's underlined it twice, and I copied it three weeks ago and didn't — I didn't read it properly, I was doing forty pages at once—"

"Dana. What does it say."

Dana read it out.

"THE TENTH HAS STARTED. IF I SIGN ANYTHING FROM NOW ON, IT IS NOT ME."

The church was completely silent.

Outside, on the step, Mrs. Adeyemi was humming something to herself, four notes, round and round.

Cole stood up.

"His flat," he said.

"Cole, if they've done a tenth pass, there's nothing—"

"His flat, Halden."

They were at Aldous Bellamy's front door in twenty minutes, and it was unlocked, and the flat behind it was perfectly tidy.

The bed was made. The kitchen had been wiped down. There was a single cup on the draining board, washed and turned upside down.

And on the table by the window, squared up neatly to the edge, lay a two-pound notebook from the Co-op — open, to a page Dana had never seen, because it had been written after she stopped copying.

One line. Not in capitals. In the careful, patient hand of a man who had worked in an office for forty years.

Gone to Room 4B. Back by teatime. — A.B.

It was dated today.

Halden read it over his shoulder and made a small sound.

"Room 4B," she said. "That's the review room. That's where—"

"Where he told me not to accept an evaluation from anyone who wasn't in the room." Cole put his finger on the date. "He's gone back in. Today. On his own."

"Or somebody's taken him in and let him write a nice note."

"Or that." Cole looked at the clock on Bellamy's kitchen wall. Twenty past nine. "Teatime," he said. "Whatever they're doing to him in there, he thinks he'll be back by teatime. That's the only thing on this page I'm sure he wrote himself."

[End of Chapter 172]