Chapter Eight: A Clean Provenance

It came to her in the bath, which was where most of Mira's worst ideas came from.

The bath in her flat was short and the water was never more than lukewarm. She had been lying in it for an hour, staring at a crack in the ceiling, going round and round the same three facts like a dog that can't settle. Crane needed a name. The supervisor had given her one. She was not going to use it.

So she needed the letter never to have crossed at all.

She sat up so fast that water went over the side.

The dead did not arrive empty-handed. Whatever they had in their pockets when they died came with them, more often than people expected. Keys, mostly. Coins. Receipts. Once, memorably, a live hamster. Intake recorded all of it in the effects ledgers, the big green books the clerk pushed up and down the corridor every morning. Anything nobody claimed was sent to the archive counter, Lost Correspondence and Unclaimed Effects, and sat there until somebody remembered it.

And effects were not stamped. Mira knew that the way she knew all the small rules. They were too small and too many. They were logged, by hand, in the green books, and that was all.

The letter had no stamp. Crane had made a great deal of that. But a letter that had come over in a dead woman's pocket four years ago, been logged, been misfiled, and turned up last week in the archive would not have a stamp either. It would have exactly the history it had. A smell of the drawer it came from. No Office seal. And no crossing, because it had never crossed.

The ring Crane had heard eight nights ago would just be a ring. Something else, going somewhere else. He would never be able to prove otherwise. Article Nine needed a trafficker, and there would not be one, because there would not have been any trafficking. Her mother's appeal would stand on its own feet. Nobody's name would be given to anyone.

All it needed was one line in a green book, four years old.

She got out of the bath.

It took her three days. She was very good at it. That was the part she thought about afterwards, more than the rest. Not that she had done it, but how easy it had been, how naturally her hands had known what to do.

The effects ledgers for past years were kept in a storeroom behind Intake, on metal shelves, in date order. Nobody went in there. Mira went in on the first evening with a cup of tea, as though she had come to look something up, and found the book for the season her mother had died. She found the page. The entry said: Elin, deceased. Classified, chair. Effects: reading glasses, one pair. Door keys, a ring of four. Handkerchief.

Her mother had always had a handkerchief. Mira looked at the word for a long time.

On the second day she studied the hand of the intake officer who had written the page, a man who had since retired into whatever retired reapers became. He made his capital letters very large and his small ones very small. He crossed his sevens. She practised on scrap paper at her kitchen table until she could do it without thinking. She found an old bottle of the ink they had used then, in the back of a supply cupboard, gone a little thick.

On the third evening she went back into the storeroom and added one line under the handkerchief. It said: Letter, one, handwritten, folded. Unclaimed. To archive.

It looked as though it had always been there. She blotted it, and put the book back exactly where it had been, and went upstairs and wrote out a notice of correction to the panel, in her own hand and her own name. The appellant wishes to inform the panel that the origin of the document has been established. It appears in the effects of the deceased, recorded at intake, and was subsequently misplaced. No crossing took place.

She dropped it in the panel's tray at the end of the day. The clerk on duty glanced at it, stamped it, and put it in the pile for review. Just like that.

She was halfway down the corridor when the supervisor fell into step beside her.

"You've filed something," he said quietly.

"I've filed a correction."

"Mira." He did not raise his voice. He never did. "Whatever you've done, take it back. There is still time. Let me carry this."

"You've carried enough."

"That isn't your decision to make."

"I'm making it anyway." She did not stop walking. "Nobody needs your name now. Nobody needs anybody's name. The letter came over in her pocket and got lost in your own archive. Nobody broke anything. You get to keep your key and your shelf and your sister, and I get my mother back, and Crane gets to listen to his glass ring. Everyone wins."

"That's not how it works," said the supervisor. "Somebody always pays for the version where everyone wins. Usually it's the person who wasn't asked."

She did stop then, and turned to him. "Then don't ask," she said. "Just let me do this."

He looked at her with those pale, unageing eyes. Then he stepped back, out of her way, the way you step back from a door that someone has decided to close.

That night she sat down on the floor beside the chair, the way she always did, and leaned her head back against the cushion.

It was cold.

It was the temperature of the room, the temperature of any old cushion on any old chair. Mira sat very still. In three years it had never once been cold. It had been warm when she came home late, and warm when she came home angry, and warm on the nights she came home and said nothing at all.

She waited.

It warmed, eventually. Slowly, a little at a time, as though it was making up its mind. By the time she fell asleep there on the floor it was almost as warm as usual.

Almost.

She told herself it was the weather.