Episode 246 · Who Cut It

The doctor came back at eight to look at the hand, and stopped with the bandage half unwound.

He was the same man who had met them on the bank the night before, gray with sleep then and gray with something else now. He turned Tesa’s wrist toward the window.

— Move your fingers.

She moved them. Not much. Enough.

— Last night those knuckles were gravel, he said. I felt them.

— Maybe you were tired.

— I was. I’m not now.

The swelling had gone down by half. Under the purple there was a shape again, a hand’s shape, where yesterday there had been only damage. The doctor pressed along the bones with his thumb, slowly, and Tesa watched him do it with her jaw set.

— I’ll come back tomorrow, he said at last. Don’t use it. And don’t let anyone tell you it’s normal.

When he had gone, Krista wrote the time on the inside of her notebook cover and drew a line under it.

Soles knew what his own blade could give back and what it couldn’t. It had never closed a wound, not on him, not on anyone. Whatever was knitting Tesa’s hand, it had not come from him. His own palms, wrapped in strips of a pillowcase, stuck to the cloth every time he closed them. He put the thought where he kept things he could not use yet.

— Does it hurt? Soles asked.

— Less than it should.

She looked at the hand as if it belonged to someone she didn’t fully trust.

— That’s what bothers me.

Maxim had the length of pale rope across his knees. Soles had cut it below the splice on the way up, without quite knowing why; now Maxim was turning it in his fingers like a man reading a contract.

— Three-strand. Tarred core. Somebody’s paid good money for this.

He held it to the light.

— And there’s ink on the whipping. Lot number.

Tesa stayed at the house with the dogs. The doctor had said rest, and Mina settled it by lying across her feet. The others took the rope down to the detachment.

The detachment’s store was a cellar under the old customs post, cold enough to keep meat, smelling of oil and hemp. The storekeeper sat at a table by the stairs with a ledger, a lamp and the air of a man who had been told to give nobody anything.

Maxim walked along the racks without asking. He stopped at the third coil, lifted the tag, and laid the cut end beside it.

Same weave. Same tar. Same lot.

— Lovely rope, he said. Who’s had it?

The storekeeper put his hand flat on the ledger.

Krista smiled at him. It was a very good smile, polite and a little tired, the smile of someone doing an errand she found as boring as he did.

— The chief wants the store entries copied into the pilot report, she said. Everything since the autumn. He said you’d know which ones and we shouldn’t keep you.

It came out of her without a seam. Soles had heard her lie before, small kind lies to old men about photographs. This was different. This was beautiful, and it was not hers.

The storekeeper looked at her face, which gave him nothing to argue with, and turned the ledger round.

— He doesn’t usually send anyone, he said.

— He’s busy, Krista said. You know how he is.

The man plainly did. He let her read.

She found it in four pages. A requisition for thirty meters of new line, for the survey rope at the mill. Signed.

Soles knew the name. He had seen it at the bottom of both survey sheets, and on the board in the briefing room, with no time beside it in the out column.

The date was nine days after the man had gone down.

Krista put her finger beside the signature without touching it.

— Same loop, she said quietly. Not the hand on the survey sheets. Whoever did this presses at the bottom of the loop. He never did. He lifts.

She photographed the page, thanked the storekeeper, and went up the stairs ahead of them. On the landing she stopped and leaned her shoulder against the wall for a moment, eyes closed.

— You all right? Maxim asked.

— I’m fine.

She opened her eyes.

— I’m very good at that. I don’t like how good.

The chief was in the briefing room, under the map and the standing orders and the seven pages Krista had pinned there. On the back row, the cleaners were eating bread from paper. Corvin sat at the end with the case on his knees.

Soles laid the rope on the table. Krista laid her phone beside it, the requisition on the screen.

The chief looked at both. He did not look surprised.

— The old line was replaced after the frost, he said. Routine repair. The surveyor signed the order before he went down; the clerk put the date in late. It happens. Paperwork in this building is a disgrace, you’ve seen the desk I gave you.

It was a good answer. It had been ready.

Krista was watching his hands. His thumb had gone to the cap of his pen and was turning it, a quarter turn, back, a quarter turn.

Soles did not argue. He had learned something from the man in gray after all.

— Then you’ll want it in the report, he said. All of it. The splice, the spacing, the lot number and the date. Every finding in it.

He nodded at the wall, at the seven pages.

The pen cap stopped.

— And who gave you my store ledger?

— Access through the detachment to whatever the mission requires, Krista said. Page four. You were here when I pinned it.

The chief looked at the wall. Then at the bench, where his men had stopped pretending not to listen.

— Leave it with me.

— We’ll leave you a copy, Krista said. The original goes out tonight. Three days early.

On the back row nobody was eating any more.

They went out into the corridor. Behind them, a chair scraped. Corvin came out with the case under his arm and fell into step beside Soles as if they had always walked together.

He did not look at him. He spoke to the corridor in front of them.

— The man whose name is on that slip isn’t dead, he said. I saw him last week. In town. He saw me too.

Then he turned down the stairs to the yard, and was gone before Soles had decided whether to stop him.

Soles stood in the corridor with the cold coming up the stairwell. In a town this size, a man did not stay hidden for three weeks on his own. Somebody was keeping him.