Chapter Five: Lost Correspondence

The woman on the other side of Mira's desk was becoming a diary.

A small one, with a leather cover and a brass lock, and she was taking it rather well. She was in her seventies, with very straight posture and a blouse buttoned all the way to the top, and when Mira read out the classification she only nodded, as though she had been expecting the post.

"Locked, I suppose," she said.

"Locked," said Mira. "People remember you as private. Hard to know. One testimony says you never once told anyone what you were thinking, in sixty years."

"That's not true. I told the cat."

"Cats don't testify."

"More's the pity." The woman folded her hands. "Can I appeal?"

"Everyone can." Mira reached for a form. "Tell me why diary's wrong."

The woman opened her mouth, and then shut it again, and Mira watched her think about it. Watched her imagine the hearing, the clerk reading out the reasons, the three blank faces weighing up whether she had been as closed as everybody said, and whether, if she hadn't been, she ought to explain what she had been instead.

"Actually," the woman said, "I think I'd rather keep it to myself."

Mira put the form back in the drawer. "That's allowed too."

She meant it. Some people wanted the door opened, and some people wanted to be left with the key. Her mother had understood that better than anyone. Mira was only just beginning to.

She logged the diary and put it on the shelf beside the teapot, and then, because there were no more intakes until after lunch, she shut her door and took out the letter.

She had decided to treat it like a case. That was the only way she could look at it for long without her hands doing that thing again. A case had facts. Facts could be listed.

The paper was good, heavy cream stock, the kind sold in proper stationers in the living world, in boxes of fifty with matching envelopes. When she held it up to the lamp she could see a watermark, a little crown above a word too faint to read. Her mother had bought a box of exactly that paper the Christmas before she died and had made a joke about it being too good to write on. That was a fact, though not one the panel would accept.

The smell was a fact. Lavender and old wood. The bureau drawer.

The missing stamp was the most important fact of all.

Then she did something she had not done in a long time. She took out her mother's whole case file, the thick one, and read the testimonies again. This time she was not looking for hope. She was looking for the shape of the thing.

There were forty-one of them. She had read them so often over three years that she had stopped really seeing them, the way you stop seeing the pattern on your own wallpaper. A trustee of the shelter. A neighbour. A woman from the council. A man who had sat on a committee with Elin once. A former volunteer. Each of them a short paragraph, a fragment of memory, the residue that her mother had left in other people's heads.

Halfway through, Mira slowed down.

The trustee remembered that Elin had let a vulnerable woman walk out into the night. The neighbour remembered hearing the back door, and thinking, as she put it, that somebody had let a vulnerable woman walk out into the night. The woman from the council remembered the night a vulnerable woman was allowed to walk out. The former volunteer remembered reading about it.

Walk out into the night. Walk out into the night. Again and again, in different handwriting, in different voices, the same five words.

People do not remember things in the same five words. Mira had processed thousands of testimonies. Real memories were messy. They got the day wrong and the weather wrong, and they remembered what somebody was wearing and forgot what they had said. Real memories did not rhyme.

She wrote the phrase on a scrap of paper and underlined it twice, and did not yet know what it meant. She put it in her pocket with the other things she was keeping to understand later.

After lunch she went down to the archive.

It was on the second floor, below the supervisor's office and under his authority, though he rarely came down. The public counter was a long wooden desk with a brass bell on it and a sign that said Lost Correspondence and Unclaimed Effects. Behind the desk sat the counter clerk, a woman with half-moon glasses and the expression of someone who had been asked stupid questions since before Mira was born.

"I'd like to see the crossing records," said Mira.

The counter clerk looked at her over the glasses.

"The record of anything brought across from the living world," Mira said. "Letters. Objects. Anything that came in by an irregular route."

"There are no crossing records," said the counter clerk.

"Because they're sealed?"

"Because there are no crossings. Crossings do not happen. Things that do not happen are not a matter of record." She said it with the calm of someone reading from a card that had been laminated a long time ago. "Is there anything else?"

"Somebody brought a letter across last week," said Mira.

"Then somebody did something that does not happen," said the counter clerk, "and you'll want the Boundary Section, not me."

"Then who keeps the archive's own records? The old ones. The ones behind you."

For the first time, the counter clerk's eyes left her face. They went up, very briefly, to the ceiling, the way you glance towards a room where someone is asleep.

"The Keeper keeps the Keeper's records," she said. "And the Keeper's records are the Keeper's business." She said it a little too fondly, the way you would defend an old dog that had bitten somebody. Then she rang the little brass bell, although there was nobody waiting behind Mira. "Next."

Mira went back upstairs with nothing, except the feeling that she had just been told to mind her own business by someone who was minding somebody else's very carefully.

There was an envelope on her desk when she got there. Grey, this time. Stamped in the corner with the Office seal and the date, the way everything was supposed to be. For a ridiculous moment she was almost glad to see something that had come the proper way.

Then she opened it.

Notice of inquiry, it said. The Boundary Section of the Office has opened a formal inquiry into a suspected breach of the boundary between the worlds, in connection with the appeal of Elin, deceased. The appellant is required to attend for interview. It gave a room number in the basement and a time the next morning. It was signed in very neat, very small handwriting. Crane, Inspector.

Mira read it twice. Then she sat down slowly.

She had been treating the letter as a case. Somebody else had just started treating her as one.

She thought about going up to the third floor. Come to me first, the supervisor had said, once you find out where it came from. But she hadn't found out anything. All she had was a smell, a missing stamp, and five words that too many people had used.

So she did what she always did. She said nothing to anyone, and folded the notice into her pocket next to the scrap of paper, and went back to work, and processed eleven more souls that afternoon with perfect, careful kindness, while the basement waited for her underneath the floor.