Chapter Seven: Placement

Mira came in before Hollis did. It took some doing.

She sat in her office with the lamp off and a stack of placement slips in front of her, in case anybody asked what she was doing there. Nobody asked.

The cardigan's slip was on top. Under Preferences it said, somewhere with a cat. Mira had written it under Preferences, in small letters, and the more she looked at it the smaller the letters seemed. She copied it out again on the porters' sheet, in capitals, and underlined it.

Then she heard the trolley.

It came along the corridor slowly, one wheel squeaking on every turn, the way it always did. It stopped outside her door. Through the frosted glass she could see the shape of him, narrow, standing very still. He was looking in at her desk. At the blotter, where nothing lay now.

He stood there for a long moment. Then the trolley went on.

Mira gave him to the end of the corridor and followed.

He did not go to Intake. He went down the back stairs, to the second floor, and past the archive counter, which was dark, and through a plain side door that Mira had walked past a thousand times without seeing. She waited, counting, and then opened it a crack.

It was a long room with a low ceiling, and it was full of books. Not the green effects ledgers. Thinner ones, bound in grey, row after row of them, every season the Office had ever had. At a small desk under a single lamp sat Hollis, with a ledger open on one side and a grey book on the other, copying. His pen moved steadily. His lips moved with it.

So this was the registry. Every page of every file, copied out by hand, for nobody.

She waited until he went back up with the empty trolley. Then she went in.

It took her a long time to find the right season. When she did, she found her mother's file almost at once, because it was the thickest thing on the shelf. The testimonies were all there, in Hollis's round, careful hand. The trustee. The neighbour. The woman from the council. Beside every entry was a small pencilled number, which she did not stop to wonder about.

Beside the words walk out into the night, in the margin, there was a tick.

A tiny one, in pencil, so light it was almost not there. And beside the next one, another. And the next. Every time those five words appeared, page after page, somebody had made a mark no bigger than an eyelash.

Mira sat down on the floor between the shelves, because her legs had decided to.

Somebody else had seen it. Four years ago, somebody had read her mother's file and seen what she had only seen last week, and had said nothing at all.

At the front of the file was the intake record, copied like everything else. Name. Classification. Term. Remarks. Under Remarks, the intake officer had written a single line, and Hollis had copied it faithfully. It read: Deceased states she once wrote it down, for her daughter. Not pursued.

Underneath it, in pencil, a short straight line.

"You're not supposed to be in here, miss."

Hollis was in the doorway. He had come back without the trolley, and without it he did not seem to know what to do with his hands.

"Neither are the ticks," said Mira. She held up the book. "You saw it. All of it. Four years ago."

"I copy," he said. "Clerks copy. We don't read."

"Then what are these?" She tapped the margin.

He looked at the pencil marks the way you might look at a stain you had tried very hard to get out. "Please don't ask me that."

"Somebody brought a letter across, Hollis. Three times somebody went across, and the Boundary Section thinks it was me." She heard her own voice go hard, and did not stop it. "You're in before anyone. You go in and out of the archive every day. You stopped at my door that morning and looked at my desk before I'd even seen what was on it."

"I never crossed anything, miss." He said it quickly, and his voice cracked in the middle. "I've never been anywhere. I've never been anywhere in my life, or after it." He swallowed. "That's true. You can ask anyone. Nobody would ever believe I'd been anywhere."

And the trouble was that she did believe him. About that, at least.

"Then who did?"

He shook his head. He did not say he didn't know. Mira noticed that. Then he went away down the corridor, very fast, and she let him go.

The porters came at eleven, for the cardigan.

"Somewhere with a cat," the older one read off the sheet, and looked up at her over it. "Preferences. Nobody's filled one of those in for years."

"Does anybody read them?"

"I do, miss." He folded the cardigan as though it were still warm, and laid it on the blankets. "Can't always do anything about it. But I read them. Most of them would only say somewhere nice, if anybody asked." He tucked a corner in. "Hardly anyone asks."

When they had gone, Mira looked at the shelf. The diary. The sugar bowl. The clock, humming faintly to itself. All of them waiting to be taken somewhere, and none of them able to say where.

In the afternoon she went down to the basement.

The corridor was swept. Room nine was shut. Under the door was a line of lamplight, and from behind it came a small, regular sound, a pen moving across paper and stopping, and moving again. Crane, being a wall.

She had a name now. Not the right one, perhaps. But a name was what Article Nine wanted, and she could give him one. A clerk who had read a file he wasn't meant to read, and who could not look her in the eye. Crane would take it. He would be careful, and fair, and he would take it.

Mira stood outside room nine with her hand raised to knock.

Hollis had never been anywhere. She knew that the way she knew a good testimony from a bad one. If she gave Crane his name, the inquiry would close on a lie, and the person who had really gone across, three times, would be free to never say a word about it. And a frightened man who copied things out for nobody would pay for it.

She had spent three years helping cases close quietly. She knew what it looked like when one closed on the wrong person.

She put her hand down. She went back up the stairs.

The archive counter was open again by the end of the day. The counter clerk looked at her over her half-moon glasses, the way she had looked at her the first time.

"The register," said Mira. "The old key register. I want to see it."

"No."

"I'm not asking about crossings. Things that don't happen. I'm asking about a book."

"You're asking about the Keeper's book." The counter clerk took her glasses off, which made her look older, and much less like a card that had been laminated. "I've worked this counter for longer than you've been dead, Mira. I've watched a great many people come down here wanting something from the Keeper. Not one of them ever asked what it would cost him."

"Then tell me where to find him."

"Ask the Keeper yourself," said the counter clerk, and put her glasses back on. "If you can find his door."

She rang the brass bell. There was still nobody behind Mira.

Mira walked back up the stairs slowly. The Keeper of the Archive. A door you had to find. A room full of other people's things, and a man who always knew who was knocking before they said a word.

She did not let herself finish the thought. Not yet. She would go and look at the book first. Tonight, when the counter was dark and nobody was minding anybody's business but their own.