Episodul 155 · What Matched

Tesa took her shoe away. The kitchen went quiet.

— Not the investigator, she said, and held it out.

Soles took it with his left hand.

— You wanted to observe the east wing, Tarn said.

— Yesterday you wanted us out of it.

— Yesterday there was somewhere you could stand. The pressure has reached the corridor. Nobody is going back into that room.

— Then get your people out.

— We have.

— How far?

The pause was short and very careful.

— Come to the gate. We’ll discuss what you can tell us.

The call ended. Soles looked at the drawing, at the mark that kept moving closer to the chair, and stood up.

— Now? Maxim asked.

— Now.

He said his people were out. He didn’t say how far.

On the drive, Soles turned the call over the way he would turn a part that had come back from a customer with no note. The agency had not called because it missed them. Yesterday the man had wanted a location; this morning he wanted an account, and he wanted it at a table outside the gate rather than in a room inside it. Something in that corridor had frightened them enough to ask. That gave the cohort a little weight on their side of the scale, and Soles meant to spend it carefully. Maxim, in the back, had worked out the same sum and was already spending it in his head on something unwise.

The road ran straight past the prison gate. Since yesterday someone had laid a line of cones across it twenty paces short of the gatehouse and moved the dark sedan behind them. On the near side stood a canvas shelter with a table in it; on the far side, the gate, and through it the strip of yard that led to the front offices. Anyone leaving the building had to walk that strip, through the gate and past the table. It was a good place to count people, Soles thought, if you wanted to know who was missing.

People were walking it now. A woman came through with a cardboard box against her chest, and the policeman took it from her and carried it to the shelter as if it were evidence.

Two more came behind her: a guard holding a ring of keys tight in his fist so they would not jingle, and a clerk in a cardigan with nothing in her hands at all. None of them looked back at the building. Soles had seen people leave a workshop like that once, after a boiler made a sound nobody could name. They walked at an ordinary pace and talked about ordinary things, and not one of them turned around.

Tarn came out to meet them, coat buttoned to the throat. The younger one followed with the briefcase. Neither of them had slept; it showed in the careful way they walked, as if the ground might have changed while they were inside.

— You said your people were out, Soles said.

— Out of the east wing.

— That wasn’t what I asked.

— It was what I could confirm. The front offices are being cleared.

Maxim looked at the table, then at the folding chairs, then at the man.

— Lovely. You’ve evacuated the furniture. Where are the people?

— You can remain by your vehicle, the younger agent said.

— I was asking about yours.

Soles touched Maxim’s sleeve, and they went to the table together. Tesa put a chair behind Maxim without asking him, which was the only way he ever accepted one. He sat down in it as if it had been his own idea all along.

The photographs came out of the briefcase in a fan. The washroom from the doorway, the ceiling down across the floor. Soles found the basin his hip had struck and looked away from it. In the next picture the pillar was far beyond the door, and a strip of tape crossed the corridor in the foreground.

— That’s where we stopped the last inspection, Tarn said.

There was a small pale piece in his ear. Soles had taken it yesterday for part of a wire going down into his collar. Now the man’s jaw moved once while nobody was speaking.

Someone else is at this table.

Which meant everything said here would be heard twice, once by the man in front of him and once by someone who did not have to watch his own face while he listened. Soles kept his left hand on the photograph and his right arm where it was.

— We need to understand what led to this, Tarn said. What happened beneath the garden.

So that was the price of the photographs. Soles had expected it, and he had decided on the drive what he would pay with: the things they had all seen, and nothing that had moved inside him.

He told them about the warm water. The people at the bank, the fighting, the opening that grew while they used their strength on each other. When he reached the cut, the younger agent asked him to repeat where the blade had gone.

— Into what was holding it open.

— You saw that?

— I felt where it was carrying the weight. Krista saw the carving.

Krista took a blank sheet from the folder and drew the tree from memory, the clean cut on the branch that stayed on the trunk. Tesa corrected where they had been standing. Maxim described the climb down from the bank with an ankle that had disagreed with every step.

— But you continued, the younger agent said.

— The alternative was staying there. Nobody was offering tea.

The younger agent wrote that down too. He wrote everything in the same small, upright hand and never looked back at what he had written; whoever read it later would have the words and none of the faces. Krista watched the pen move the way she watched a door she meant to remember. Later she would be able to say which words he had underlined.

Tarn let them finish. Then he drew one more photograph from the bottom of the folder and laid it on the table, face up, beside Krista’s drawing.

Mud. The third block on the bank, and beneath its edge the hole they had crawled through, dug wider with shovels. A drain climbing into the dark. Flashlight on a slab of stone with a carving in it, and a man in orange overalls crouched beside it with a crowbar across his knees, looking at the slab as if it had insulted him.

The carving in the photograph was the carving in Krista’s drawing. Every line of it was whole.

— We went down at six this morning, Tarn said. It didn’t open for us. It isn’t damaged either.

Krista’s pencil had stopped in the middle of a branch.

Soles had forgotten the slab entirely. That was the trouble with a lie told on your behalf: you never carried it, so you never felt it getting heavier. Six this morning. They had already inspected the garden before this meeting. Which meant Tarn had checked her story before he called, had called anyway, and had let them give the whole account of the water first, every true thing they were willing to part with, before he put this on the table. He had not been asking for an account. He had been measuring how much of it would match.

Tarn kept his voice level; he had no need to raise it. He turned the photograph a little, so that it faced her squarely, and the jaw under the earpiece moved once more.

— You lied to a state investigation.