Chapter Six: The Boundary Section

The porters came round early that morning, before her interview, the way they did once a week, or whenever the Office decided a week had gone by.

There were two of them, in canvas aprons, with a trolley lined with old blankets. They read the tags on her shelf out loud to each other, like a shopping list.

"Teapot," said the older one. "Coat rack. Those two are ours. The clock's not ready yet." He lifted the teapot down with both hands and wrapped it in a blanket. Then, without seeming to think about it, he gave the lid a little pat. "This one won't take long."

"Where does it go?" Mira asked. She had asked before. She asked every season.

"Out, miss. Somewhere it's wanted." He tucked the blanket in round the spout. "Kitchens, mostly, for a teapot. You'd be surprised how many people still make it properly."

Mira signed the slips. The diary stayed where it was, beside the gap where the teapot had been, its little brass lock catching the light. Nobody would ever come for the chair in her flat, unless somebody looked closely at a form she had filled in very carefully when she was new.

She watched the trolley go. Then she went down to the basement.

The basement of the Office was colder than the rest of the building, and tidier than anywhere Mira had ever been.

The corridor was swept. The doors were numbered in black paint, every number the same height. Room nine had a table with nothing on it, two chairs, and a lamp that hung from the ceiling on a chain and did not swing. Crane was already sitting in one of the chairs. He had taken off one grey glove and laid it on the table, perfectly flat, and kept the other one on.

"Thank you for coming," he said, as though she had had a choice. "Sit down, please."

She sat. He did not open a file. He did not have to. Mira had the feeling that everything he knew about her was arranged inside his head in the same way the basement was, swept and numbered.

"I want to begin," Crane said, "by telling you what this Section is for. People get it wrong. They think we're a sort of police. We're not. We're a sort of wall."

"A wall." She didn't make it a question.

"Between the living and the dead. It isn't a very thick one. It never has been." He turned the loose glove a quarter turn on the table, squaring it. "The whole of this Office runs on one idea. That the dead are judged by how they are remembered, and that the memories are fixed. Finished. Nobody gets to add to them afterwards. That is what makes judgement possible at all."

"I know how judgement works, Inspector. I do it eighteen times a day."

"Then you know what happens if the living can write to us." For the first time something moved in his face. It was not anger. It looked, oddly, like fear. "Every family on earth with a pen. Every widow who wants her husband remembered as a better man than he was. Every son who wants his father remembered as a worse one. Letters, and then parcels, and then lawyers. Every sentence in this building turned into a negotiation that never ends. We would drown, Mira. Not slowly. All at once."

She had not expected him to sound sincere. It was harder to dislike a man who sounded sincere.

"I didn't write the letter," she said. "My mother did. Four years ago. While she was alive."

"I know. I've no doubt it's hers. That isn't the question." He took a small card from his inside pocket and laid it next to the glove. "Are you familiar with Article Nine?"

"Contraband," said Mira.

"Contraband," Crane agreed. "Anything brought across the boundary by an unlawful route. Article Nine is very short, and I'm very fond of it. It says that contraband taints the appeal of whoever trafficked it, but not the evidence itself. The evidence stays what it is. But if the person who brought it across is the person who benefits from it, their appeal is void. Struck. As though it had never been filed."

Mira kept her face still. "I didn't bring it across."

"And Article Nine has a second sentence," Crane said. "Where the trafficker is unknown, the beneficiary is presumed to be the trafficker unless another is shown."

There it was. She felt it land somewhere under her ribs, cold and exact, like the lamp above them.

"So unless I can show who did bring it," she said slowly, "you'll assume it was me."

"The Article will assume it was you. I don't assume anything. I'm very careful about that." He turned the card over. On the back was a small drawing of a key, the long old-fashioned kind, with a ring at one end. "I'll tell you something else, because I think you'll find out anyway, and I would rather you heard it accurately. The boundary isn't silent. When something crosses it, the boundary rings. Very faintly, like a wet finger on the rim of a glass. This Section listens for it."

"And it rang."

"Three times." Crane laid one finger on the drawing. "Fourteen nights ago. Eleven nights ago. And eight nights ago, which was the night before your letter appeared. People don't go back twice for a stranger, in my experience. It is not a comfortable thing to do even once. There were once a number of crossing keys in this Office. From the old days, when reapers still went across to collect the dead in person, before the procedure was changed. Every one of them was recalled and destroyed a long time ago. The archive keeps the register. I have read it. Every key is marked destroyed."

"Then it couldn't have been one of those."

"The ring had a particular note," said Crane. "Each key has its own. All three times, it was the same one. It matches a key the register says was melted down two hundred years ago."

Mira said nothing. She was thinking about the archive counter, and the brass bell, and the woman with the half-moon glasses saying crossings do not happen.

"You see my difficulty," Crane said. "Every line in that register is signed by the Keeper of the Archive. I have asked the Keeper. The Keeper says every key was destroyed, and has said so for two hundred years, and there is nothing in this building to show otherwise. I can't give Article Nine a man for having good handwriting. So. Someone in this building has a key that does not exist, and used it to bring you something. Either that someone is you, or it is somebody who cares a great deal about you. In my experience there aren't many of those in this Office. People don't usually come here to make friends."

"I don't have a key."

"Then find me who does. Before the season turns." He put his glove back on, finger by finger. "The inquiry closes then. If I have a name, I'll deal with that person, and your appeal stands or falls on the evidence. If I have no name, Article Nine will deal with you. I'm not your enemy, Mira. I'm a wall. Walls don't have opinions."

"Walls have people standing behind them," she said.

He looked at her for a moment, then inclined his head, as if conceding a small point in a game he was still going to win. "Good afternoon."

Out in the corridor, climbing the stairs back into the warmer air, Mira went through it the way she would go through a file.

Someone with access to the archive's old register. Someone who knew the letter existed, and where it was, and which drawer stuck. Someone who could leave it on her desk without being seen. Someone in the building early, before the morning files came up.

The clerk with ink on his cuffs came round the corner with his trolley and nearly ran into her.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry, miss." He had the effects ledgers on the trolley today, the big green books where Intake recorded whatever the dead had in their pockets when they arrived. He pushed them up and down this corridor every morning, between Intake and the archive. Early. Before anyone else was in.

He had been the one who told her about the Boundary Section's lights.

Mira stood aside and let him pass. "Morning, Hollis."

"Morning, miss." He did not look at her. He looked at the ledgers, very hard, as if one of them might fall off.

She watched him go. He was in the building before anyone else. He went in and out of the archive every day with a trolley that nobody ever searched. He had stopped at her door, the morning of the letter, and looked straight at her blotter before she had said a word. He had held on to her folders as though he wanted to say something, and then had not said it.

She felt the shape of a suspicion settle on him, the way a coat settles on a hook. It fitted. That was the trouble with it. A narrow, nervous man who apologised to doors was exactly the kind of man nobody ever searched. And he was in the building every morning before anyone else, with a trolley, and a reason to be everywhere.