Chapter 13 The Man Who Signs the File

Kerrin Drennick did not telephone. He came, which was worse in a way that took Nyle a day to understand. He came on the eleven o'clock packet, with one clerk, and he walked up the middle terrace in a coat that had been made in Marnhull, and he did not look at the mill or the quay or the river. He looked at the numbers. He stood in the outer room of the Hourhouse for forty minutes and read the exhibit register and the schedule and the draft finding, in that order, without sitting down, and he made no notes, and when he had finished he asked one question. "How many of these cuts reached a person." "All of them." "Meaning." "Meaning there is no cut in that book that was not struck through a living band." Nyle had the answer ready and had been holding it for two days. "There is no account where the levy is modelled rather than charged. The levy was taken, one person at a time, off the arms of people in the South Ward, and then it was written up as a single line." Drennick looked at him. He was sixty or near it and had been an inspector-general for nine years and had the smooth, unhurried attention of a man who decides things early and then listens for confirmation. "You have verified that a levy of this kind is unlawful." "No." "That is the first thing I asked." "You asked whether it is unlawful. I am telling you I have not established it, because the levy is a domestic charge and the Office has no competence over a domestic charge, and if I had said yes you would have been within an inch of telling me that I had exceeded my warrant." Nyle put his hands flat on the table. "What I have established is that the levy is unlawful in the only sense available to me. It was not accounted to anybody. The Returns show twenty-four thousand hours struck in the South Ward and twenty-four thousand hours accounted, and no name anywhere in the file has ever been checked against the book the hours actually went into, because the book is the wardens' and the wardens' books do not travel." "That is a bookkeeping complaint." "It is a bookkeeping complaint with sixty-one people in it." Drennick turned the exhibit register round and looked at the last page, which was the assurance posting, dated and copied, with the hours it claimed to buy. "If the levy stopped," he said, "what happens to them?" "To the people in the South Ward? They lose the fuel." "How many." "About eleven hundred households. The winter guarantee is six hours a household." "Mm." "It is the reason I have not filed, inspector-general. It is the reason the finding has been sitting in a satchel for six days. If I file, eleven hundred households have no coal in December, and the file takes four years to come back, and by the time it comes back the people who could be hurt by the finding have been hurt by it and the finding will be about money." Drennick nodded slowly, and something in the room changed, and Nyle understood with a cold drop what it was. He had handed the inspector-general the reason to close the file, and the inspector-general had accepted it, and neither of them had gained anything by the exchange except a delay. "You have done the right thing," Drennick said. "Holding it. A file that takes a winter is not a file. Sign the assurance, note the variance under Rule Fourteen Clause Three, and come back in the spring with the register books and the Register of Attainment answer, and if you still have a finding then, I will read it myself and I will put it in front of the Ministry myself." "And if I do not sign?" "Then you remain in Brackmoor indefinitely, at the salary of an inspector, on a file that no senior desk has asked for, and the South Ward is warm this winter, and in three years you will be teaching at a ward school in a town with no rolls worth teaching." Nyle went to the shelf and took his finding out of the satchel, and he laid it on the table with the fourteen hundred words uppermost, and he read the signature block at the foot of it, and he thought about the word *unclosed* written in a red hand. He did not sign. He took a pencil, wrote one line in the margin beside the finding — *the levy is unaccounted; the file is not closed; the variance remains* — and dated it, and initialled it, and left the signature itself blank. "You have just cost yourself a promotion," Drennick said. "I have cost myself a winter," Nyle said. "You may have the promotion if you can find somebody else who will pay for it." The inspector-general took his coat off the hook, and paused, and looked at the schedule still pinned to the baize where Nyle had left it, and for the first time in the entire forty minutes he said something that was not a question. "Sixty-one people," he said. "Sixty-one in that year." "You are certain the Register of Attainment has none of them." "I am waiting on the answer. It came back this morning." Nyle slid the post receipt across the table. "Brackmoor's year-thirty-two return lists forty-four advancements. The levy book lists sixty-one south-ward cuts. Seventeen of them are cuts for a rank that does not exist anywhere on earth, taken from people who were told nothing, and paid for by a levy that bought them coal." "Seventeen, not sixty-one." "Seventeen are provable from the return alone. The other forty-four cannot be proved or disproved from Marnhull, because forty-four is what the city says it lodged and the Register has always accepted forty-four." Nyle did not let him move past it. "That is the whole of the difficulty in one line, inspector-general, and you may take it or leave it. Sixty-one went out. Forty-four came back. The seventeen that are missing are the only part anybody outside this room can put a name to, and every one of the seventeen is a person who paid twenty-four hours in March and got nothing in May." Drennick read the receipt. He put it down. He put his coat on. "Forty-four and sixty-one," he said. "And the nine." "And the nine, every year, for forty years, so that the forty-four would balance against the ceiling and nobody would ever count the difference twice." The inspector-general went out to the top of the middle terrace and stood for a moment with his hands behind his back, looking at the Hourhouse and the river and the whole small solvent city of Brackmoor, and Nyle watched him do it and understood that the man was not admiring it. He was costing it. ---