Chapter 18 Counsel for the Ministry

Sabin Merrowgate had been counsel at the Ministry of Hours for twenty-two years and had the particular stillness of a person who has never once needed to raise their voice in a room that contains a document. He came to the Room over the chandler's on a wet Tuesday and asked for the file, and Nyle gave it to him, and Merrowgate read all fourteen hundred words without moving, and then read the schedule, and then asked for the press books, which Nyle did not have, because they were in Cray's building under Cray's key and Cray had countersigned their removal to him and he no longer had a warrant. "You have lost the books." "I have never had them. The warden holds them and I was stood down on the Friday." "You wrote about sixty-one cuts in year thirty-two from a cellar you no longer have the right to enter." "I wrote about them from a cellar I had the right to enter on the Tuesday and quoted them from memory on the Friday, and I have said so in the exhibit register, in my own hand, with the date, because an inspector who writes down a number he copied out of his head without saying so is not an inspector, he is a rumour." Merrowgate put the file down. It was the first movement he had made. "Inspector Threshwick. I am going to tell you what your file is going to do, and then I am going to offer you something, and I am going to do both of these things in the same conversation so that you understand the second is the price of the first." "Please." "Your file has three parts. The variance of nine hours a year is lawful. Rule Fourteen Clause Three has been applied consistently for forty years and the Office has approved that consistency a number of times, and I have personally signed two of those approvals." He turned a page. "The assurance levy is a domestic charge of a city under its own charter. The Office has no competence over it except as it touches the civic account, and by your own admission it does not touch it, because the levy is struck and accounted in equal measure." "Then the second part." "The second part is that you cannot prove a levy of that kind is unlawful, only that it is enormous, continuous, and unexplained. Enormity is not illegality. Counsel at the Ministry of Hours wins cases on enormousity every year, and they are usually successful, because an unexplained levy is always explicable by somebody who is not you." He looked up. "You have a third part. You have a precise description of what happened to an old woman in the third street whose band was struck, and you have a thousand two hundred of those, and you have written them with genuine care, and none of them can be given to a jury without a competent witness." "You mean me." "I mean the Office." He closed the file. "There is no competent witness at the Office of the Rolls. There has not been one for sixty years. A city cannot be convicted of an accounting practice by a department that has never been asked to give evidence." Nyle sat quite still. "You came here," he said, "to tell me that in sixty years nobody has ever brought this." "I came here to tell you what your file is going to do, and then to offer you something." Merrowgate laid his hands flat on the table. "The finding will be referred. Not dismissed. Referred to the standing committee of the Ministry, which sits in the fourth month and takes whatever is put in front of it. If you sign an assurance of reconciliation, the referral does not happen, the variance is closed under Clause Three, and the levy continues, and the South Ward has its coal in December." "And if I do not sign?" "Then the referral happens, the standing committee sits in the fourth month, the file comes back to me in the sixth month, and by the sixth month the guarantee has already been suspended, because a guarantee may not be paid out of a levy that is under investigation." He said it without any relish whatever. "There is no version of your stubbornness in which those eleven hundred households have coal in December. The only question is whether the levy also survives, and on the evidence as it stands, in the fourth month, it does." Nyle took his time over it, because he had learned that the moment before an answer is the only part of a negotiation that belongs to the person being negotiated with. "Two things," he said. "First. Where is the copy of the south-ward assurance posting that I copied into the exhibit register?" "Kept in your file, which you have given me a copy of." "I copied a posting dated in the spring. That posting was chalked on a wall on the day I looked at it. There will be a second one next spring, or a wall with nothing on it. If the referral happens, will somebody look at the wall?" Merrowgate did not answer immediately. "Second thing," Nyle said. "The Register of Attainment. I asked for the Brackmoor returns for years twenty-nine to thirty-two and your office answered, in one morning, without any difficulty, which I did not expect. Why was that so easy?" "Because the Register answers everybody." Merrowgate put his thumbs together. "The Register is not secret. The Register verifies the counts every year in the eleventh month. That is its entire function. Any inspector of any city may request any return at any time and is answered, because the Register's purpose is to be answerable." The eleventh month. Nyle looked at the calendar in his head and found, with a small cold movement, that there were eleven weeks in it. "The eleventh month," he said. "The eleventh month, in which the whole kingdom's advancement counts are checked against the whole kingdom's bands. Brackmoor's forty-four for year thirty-two was checked in the eleventh month of the following year, as every count is checked, and it was found consistent, because the Register checks the city's return against the Register's own record and not against the city's books." He let that sit for a moment, deliberately. "You have until the eleventh month. After that, Brackmoor's year-thirty-two figures are sealed for a further five years, and no copy of them will be produced to anybody." Nyle looked at him for a long moment. "You have just told me there is a deadline." "I have told you the deadline exists. I have not told you it is any use to you, because in eleven weeks with no warrant, no exhibit books, no competent witness, and no band to put on the sixth line of a statement, you have very little." He stood up and put his coat on. "Sign the assurance," he said. "The coal is not worth your career and it is not worth a thousand two hundred bands. I have been doing this for twenty-two years and I have never yet seen an inspector win a levy case. I have seen inspectors lose them. I have seen them broken." "Then why did you come?" Merrowgate was at the door. "Because you have written about an old woman in the third street in a way that made me read it twice," he said, "and because in twenty-two years nobody has ever put the words *the ledger does not add up and nobody wants that written down* into a document that came to my desk, and I wanted to see who you were." The door shut. Nyle sat at the table with the rain coming off the eaves onto the flags and thought about eleven weeks, and about a wall with a posting on it that would be scrubbed off in the spring, and about the fact that he had made a lawfulness error early and had spent nine days being right about everything else. ---