Episode 221 · Inspection Pending

Soles put both phones away, lifted the bag and left the factory by the loading door.

The foreman waited beside the agency car on the road. The driver stood at the open passenger door, phone in hand.

— Is it done? the foreman asked.

— The opening is gone.

— Can I go in?

— Have someone check the doorframe first. Keep everybody out until then.

— But the other thing’s finished.

— Yes.

The foreman rubbed his key with his thumb. He had kept it in his hand through everything. He went a few paces up the road to call someone about the press.

Soles sat on the low boundary wall. The driver gave him a bottle of water and made his own call. Soles heard the location, then the words completed and no additional team.

When he came back, he held out the phone.

Completion acknowledged.

Below it was a box headed Site clear. The driver’s name was already under it.

— I need that one confirmed.

— The breach is closed. The building still needs checking.

— I can put the damage in the notes.

His thumb hovered above the box. When the foreman came back past the car, still on his call, the driver drew the phone in against his coat. Once the man had gone a few paces into the yard, he offered the screen again.

Soles had seen the same movement at the port: the paper held out, withdrawn when someone came close, held out again. He had spent two years finding out who could sign for a load and who could only carry the form. He read the man’s thumb before he read the screen. His answer was ready before he had decided to give it.

— Put that I confirmed closure. Maintenance inspection pending. Send it back with your part filled in.

— They might send it back again.

— Then they’ll have to tell you who’s inspecting it.

The driver’s shoulders eased as he entered the words.

— Right. Good. That’s good.

Soles had meant to correct the report. He had also given the man exactly what he needed to stop asking. The ease of it stayed with him longer than the conversation.

The foreman came back through the gate.

— They want photographs of the frame. Could you come in with me?

He could. He knew where the crack was and how to reach the yard without forcing anything.

— Wait for the inspection, Soles said.

He got into the car. On the agency phone, his account had become three short lines: access cleared, breach closed, maintenance inspection pending. Every line was true.

His own phone was still in the bag. He left it there.

The car brought him back to the base as the yard lights came on. Across the service yard, the office windows were lit. So was his own, on the first floor above the training building.

He had left it dark.

The door stood open a hand’s width. It was not the first time he had come up to find it that way. A shirt on the floor, the locker shut on a different hook. Nobody had ever been there when he came in.

He pushed the door with the bag.

Bull sat on the second bed, the one nobody had made in three months, with his boots on the bare mattress. The locker stood open beside him. He was holding the release sheet up to the ceiling light, as if checking a banknote.

— Tomorrow, he said. They spelled your name right.

Soles put the bag down between his own bed and the window.

— That’s mine.

— Says so. I got a sheet too. This morning.

He did not show it. He folded Soles’s down the middle, then again, and ran his thumbnail along the crease.

— Transport, nine o’clock. They haven’t even written where. I was cleaning for them before you could lift a box, and they fit me on half a page. You do three months and they send a car.

The sheet on Soles’s first Sunday had said the locker could be searched. He had read it twice. It had not said by whom.

— Give it back.

— Come and get it.

Bull did not get up. He wanted Soles to cross the room and put his hand out. He had done it with the case under the bench, with the hand on the shoulder, with every joke he let his men finish. There had always been an officer passing in the corridor.

Tonight the corridor was empty.

Soles looked past him, through the window. In the office across the yard, a man stood with a cup, half turned from the glass. From here Soles could not tell whether he was watching the room or his own reflection.

He stayed where he was.

— Keep it. They’ll print another.

For a moment Bull only looked at him. Then he stood, and the room became smaller. He came close enough for Soles to smell the canteen on him and pushed the folded sheet into his coat pocket, flat-handed, against his chest. It was harder than putting something away.

The readiness came down Soles’s arms, the way it did on the mats. He kept his hands open and took the push on his feet.

— You’ll be home by Sunday, Bull said. Somebody should tell you what it cost.

At the door he turned.

— Sleep well. I know where your bed is.

He left the door open.

Soles closed it. He took the sheet out and smoothed it on the locker shelf. The crease went straight through the date.

He took his own phone out of the bag. Maxim’s photograph from the morning was still at the top: Mina asleep against Lucky’s back. Under it, the question about when he was coming home.

He typed Tomorrow.

Then he thought of Maxim hearing something in his voice and asking what it was, and of the steps in the corridor while he tried to answer. He deleted it and put the phone face down on the shelf, beside the sheet.

He lay down in his clothes without turning off the light. Each time someone walked the corridor, he listened for the steps to stop outside his door. None of them did. That did not help.

Across the yard, the office light went out a little after midnight.