Chapter 10 The Second Signature

To see the press books Nyle needed the Reckoner's papers requisitioned, and a requisition was not a request. The form was eleven lines long and the eleventh line was the one that mattered: an undertaking that the requisitioning officer would carry the cost of any exposure arising from the removal of the papers. It was a form for men who understood that they were about to end somebody's career, and it asked them to sign their name first. He filled it out in the outer room of the Hourhouse at ten past ten in the morning and sent it in to Halla Cray by a boy. She came out at eleven with the form in one hand and a pen in the other, and she had read every line of it, which was obvious because she had countersigned it in the correct place without a second reading. "You have requisitioned the press books for eleven years," she said. "Years twenty-two to thirty-two." "Twenty-two is before my tenure." "It is, and you will countersign it anyway, because the cellar key is the warden's and the books under it are the warden's, and if you refuse, the Office will send a second inspector and a second inspector does not come alone. I would rather it were me." "You would rather it were you because you can see what happens if it is not." Cray did not raise her voice. "Let me tell you what happens if it is not. The requisition goes back up to the district. The district sends a clerk with a power to take, and a clerk with a power to take opens my cellar and empties it onto the floor of the outer room in front of two hundred people, and every plate in it is a citizen's property, and there is no form in the kingdom for giving a citizen back a plate that has been stacked in the open." "So it is about the plates." "It is about the plates. It has never once been about the plates with you." She turned the form over and looked at the back of it, which was blank, as requisitions are. "I have countersigned eleven of these in nineteen years. Do you know how many wardens refuse?" "None." "Two. Both refused, both lost the office, both within a year, and one of them was a good warden and the other was better than me." She put the form down. "I do not want my books on a floor, Inspector, and I have decided I can live with them going out of the building in your satchel, because a satchel has a number on it and a floor has a hundred witnesses, and a number can be produced again and a witness cannot." Nyle looked at her for a moment and had to revise a figure he had carried since the first morning. "Order the years," he said. "Years twenty-two to thirty-two, then the Register volume, then the pressing ledgers for the same years. The ledgers are my predecessor's and mine. Mine are in the press room and they go in a satchel as well, and I will carry them out myself, because I have decided that if a sack of my books is going to be stolen by the one honest man in this building then I would rather see his back than his face when he does it." "I am not stealing them, warden." "No. You are taking them, which is a different word, and the difference is that a theft is for your own use and a taking is for the record." She picked up her pen. "I will countersign at eleven because the clerk brings the tray at eleven, and if the tray is early today then you will have a thing to add to your notebook, and I have not decided yet whether I want you to have it." Cray set the pen down on the table between them, parallel to the edge. "Mr Ferrick countersigned the requisition this morning at eight. Before I countersigned it. He did not have to. The Reckoner's line can be given after the fact." "Before," Nyle agreed. "You understand what you have just done to him." "I understand what you have been doing to him for nineteen years." He heard his own voice go flat and made himself stop. "That was badly put. Warden's line: I requisition the books. I do not require the Reckoner to sign before. After is the ordinary course and he has chosen otherwise." Cray picked the pen up again. "He is forty-four years old. He has a band with two rows on it and a house on the Quay Ward hill he has been paying for since he was thirty-one. If you take the books, he will not be a Reckoner at the end of it." "Then he will be a man who did not sign the books," Nyle said. "Which is a different and survivable sentence." He left before she could answer. She had wanted him to go, and he wanted to go, and the arrangement worked for both of them, and neither of them mentioned it. Ferrick was in the doorway of the tally-clerk's house at noon with his coat on, which Nyle understood at once to mean a man who had decided to stand in a doorway. "I signed before she did." "I know." "You know it because I told the boy." "I know it because requisitions are stamped when they are received, and the stamp on yours is eight o'clock, and hers is eleven." Nyle stopped at the step. "Wend. Say the rest of it." Ferrick looked at the lane. A cart went past with a load of turnips and neither of them watched it. "The stamp on mine is eight because the clerk comes in at half past seven," he said. "It is not because I was here at eight. It is a coincidence, and I could have let you think it was a decision, and I have decided that I am not going to spend the last thing I have on being clever at eleven o'clock in the morning." "That was the whole of your message." "The whole of my message is that I signed, and the hour of it is a fact about a stamp." He took his hands out of his pockets. "Say what you actually came down here to say." "I came to ask you for the books." "You came to ask me for the books and to watch my face while you asked, and I have been asked that question by four inspectors in nineteen years and three of them were doing exactly what you were doing." Ferrick did not look away from it. "The difference is that you told me afterwards that you had read the number off a stamp, which means you know I could tell the difference, and you wanted me to know you knew. That is either honour or technique and I have not decided which, and I would rather decide it later than not at all." "The books are in my hand," he said. "Not all of them. Years thirty-one and thirty-two, the South Ward columns. That is all I am saying. That is more than I said out loud and I would like it written down that I said it." "Written where?" "In the schedule. As a statement by a witness with a band and a house, on his own word, in his own office." His jaw worked. "You will not believe a word of it. You will put it beside the plates and it will be a clerk defending himself and it will weigh nothing." "It will weigh nothing for about four seconds," Nyle said, "and then a reviewer in Marnhull will read the plates again and realise that I found them in eleven days and that the Reckoner told me about them before he was asked, and after that it will be the only sentence in the file that nobody can explain away." Ferrick laughed once, without any humour in it at all. "You are a very cold man," he said. "I have a schedule." "You have a schedule and you have just told a man you are going to ruin that he is grateful. Do you know what the last inspector who did that was called afterwards?" He came down the step. "He was called the man who thanks you. It is not a compliment and it is not a punishment. It just means you were never on the same side as anybody." They walked up the middle terrace together, and it was the first time Nyle had walked anywhere in Brackmoor beside another man rather than behind one. "The weather line," Nyle said, after a while. "Year twenty-three. The mill." "I will tell you on a day when it costs me something to tell you." Ferrick kept his eyes on the bank. "Pick the day. I would rather be asked than watched for it." ---