Chapter 67 The Charge

They did not go down. That was the whole of the discipline, and it cost Margaret more than any fight would have. From the dark of the area gate they watched the basement light through frosted glass — two moving silhouettes now, one tall and deliberate, one smaller, quick, crossing and recrossing like a pendulum wound tight — and Brennan held her back from the steps with two fingers on her sleeve, and the fingers said what his voice could not risk saying: that whatever was happening below was happening on Sprott's schedule, in Sprott's cellar, with Sprott's exits, and that surprises belong to the side that arrives unannounced, not to the side that arrives angry. So they stood in a doorway across the street from eleven until three, in weather that could not decide between rain and sleet, and took turns pretending not to feel the cold. Twice the smaller silhouette crossed close to the frosted glass and paused there, head tipped as if listening upward through the floors to the sleeping city, and twice Margaret's hand found Brennan's sleeve before her mind had voted on the matter, and twice the shape moved away again and let the night resume. A milk float jingled past at two with its lamps hooded. Somewhere toward Holborn a raiders'-unknown siren wound itself down unfinished, an old dog barking at nothing. And at three the side door opened and the woman in green gloves came out alone, carrying a hat-box shaped like nothing that had ever held a hat. She turned east, walking unhurried. Brennan sent one of his river men after her, ghosting forty yards back, and settled again against the doorway to wait for morning. "Say it," he said, when she had shifted her weight for the fortieth time. "If I go down those steps now, we take him tonight and lose whatever he has already mailed." "That," Brennan said, "is the argument I would have made. You made it first and stayed anyway. That is the whole difference between us and them, Miss Chase — we pay for patience out of the same account everybody else buys bullets from." He turned his collar up against the sleet. "It does not make the waiting warmer." Sprott did not come out. At seven the day staff arrived and flowed around the building as though it were any Sunday-eve of any week, and the light in the basement burned on behind its frost, and the warrant that was supposed to have been signed on Friday sat unsigned in a tray in a department whose name Margaret still did not know. Sir Owen telephoned at nine on Sunday with the sound of a man speaking carefully around a stone. The operation was stood down. There had been, he said, developments at board level; certain interests preferred that Mr. Sprott's position be resolved administratively, with discretion, pension arrangements, references; the directorate was grateful for Miss Chase's assistance, which assistance would not, however, be required going forward. He hoped she would understand that institutions, like ships, survived by keeping their water tight. "Institutions survive by sinking other vessels," Margaret said. "Who does Sprott hold?" The silence on the line answered with unusual precision. She heard Sir Owen choose, consciously, to become a permanent secretary again. "Good morning, Miss Chase," he said, and rang off. The suspension was served at two that afternoon by a clerk with a bicycle and an envelope, and the envelope contained language drafted by somebody who understood that paperwork is the gentlest weapon ever invented: *relieved of duties pending inquiry; access privileges suspended; respectfully requested to refrain from contact with ministry personnel.* By four, Brennan had been required to hand over the red-bordered folder to a man from a committee whose members were anonymous even to each other, and he complied with such scrupulous correctness that Margaret, watching from the archive doorway, understood it as the loudest declaration of war available to a policeman off the clock. "They have it exactly backwards," he said afterward, turning his hat in his hands once, completely. "Sprott is theirs because he knows where every body in that building is filed — he countersigned half the sins in September '42 and has spent twenty years initialling the rest. Touch him and the whole shelf comes down. So they will pension him, and praise him, and bury the arithmetic, and call it resolution." He set the hat on. "Which leaves us where we usually are. Off the books, on the trail." Lindqvist's note reached her that evening, handed by a boy who would not say who paid him, written in ink so discreet it was nearly a rumour: *Your fourth desk is the desk that signs your warrant. Mind which government reaches it first. As for Mr. L.S.: he sails or he burns — the bookings suggest both. My employers cannot protect you from either event and would not dream of trying, free of charge. — K.* She read it three times, and the third time she read it aloud, testing the weight, because facts spoken were how she audited them. "He sails or he burns. Packing cases stencilled for export. A false-bottomed drawer. A bench cleared on a Saturday night, with help wearing gloves." She looked at the pinned pages on the archive wall — memoranda, money, ribbon, letters to two capitals — at the whole anatomy of the counting house laid out like a chart of currents. "Brennan. He is not waiting for April. April was always a decoy for us. He is closing the shop." "Then we close it first," Brennan said. "Off the books. Tonight." Vane, when they told her, was quiet for the length of a full minute, and then she said the thing that made it lawful, or as near lawful as their winter had taught them to steer. "The machine is ministry property," she said. "I am the only living soul able to certify whether it is safe, and I have been asked, in writing, to certify it. An inspection tonight requires no warrant at all — only my appointment book and a witness." She was already pinning on the brooch she saved for officials. "Fetch your coats, children. We are going farming." They went at eleven, three separate ways, and met in the street of the counting house under a sky the colour of wet slate, and the annex rose against it black and silent — except that the plate-room door stood ajar by six inches, breathing out into the stairwell a smell that stopped Margaret on the second step with her hand on the rail. Oil. Hot brass. And under both, sharp as a struck match remembered, the ghost of magnesium. Somewhere beneath them, down where fourteen Sundays of agriculture had been inspected, machinery was running with the door left open behind it, and nobody in the building was answering the telephone that began, just then, to ring.