第19章 The Price of Refusal

The things that came for a man who refuses to sign did not come at once. They came in the post, and they came on Thursdays, and they were courteous. The first was a letter from his landlady at Averholt informing him that his room had been let to a clerk of the district office, and that his trunk was at the district store, and that she was sorry. The second was a district sheet announcing his stand-down in its fifth week. The third was a letter from the mother of a boy at the ward school in Averholt, which made no sense at all until Nyle read it twice and understood that she had mistaken him for somebody who could do something about a class of forty. Jory Ardlewood's reassignment came on the ninth day. A posting to a coastal town with a small roll and a school, effective immediately, and it arrived by the fast post with a covering note from the district secretary that described it as a development opportunity, which is what they call it when they have decided a young man has spent too long near a difficult file. Jory came to the Room over the chandler's before he went, and he brought the exhibit register. "I am not permitted to take it," he said. "It is district property. I have brought it so that you can see that I have not looked at it since the Tuesday, and you can send it to the warden with my compliments and my mark on the flyleaf saying I last had it in my hands on the fourth of the month." That was good work. Nyle looked at the flyleaf and saw the date and the initials, and he had to put the register down. "They will send you somewhere quiet," he said. "They will send me somewhere with forty returns a year and no file." Jory sat down. "Inspector, I have not worked out what I believe yet. I have got as far as knowing that the thing I believed when I started, which was that the Office would be interested, was the only thing in this that is not true." "Write to me," Nyle said. "Once a month, on the first. Tell me the numbers in your coastal returns and I will tell you the numbers in mine, and in three years one of us will have a series that somebody in Marnhull will have to read." "How long is the referral?" "Six months, with luck. Four years without." "That is a poor exchange rate." He stood up and put the register on the table. "Do you still have the finding?" "I have it." "Do you have the signature block?" "It is blank." "Then you are carrying fourteen hundred words that no man in the kingdom is obliged to read." Jory paused at the door. "That is not a hearing, Inspector. That is a piece of paper in a coat." "It is what there is," Nyle said. "I am going to make it larger. Send me your numbers." He went south on the Friday. The South Ward guarantee had been suspended for nine days and the notice had been up on the ward door since the Tuesday, and the people at the rate board had stopped coming to the market, and the market on the Thursday was a third of what it had been. Enid Scarfe was not at the board. She was at her own door with her hour-marked stick beside her, and she had done her sums, and she did not need to be told what had happened. "Suspended," she said. "Until the file is closed." "Yes." "And the file will be closed when somebody signs." "When somebody signs, or when the standing committee sits and declines to make it worse." "The fourth month." "The fourth month." She nodded at that for a while. "Then it will be January," she said. "And there is no coal in January either, Inspector. Whatever the committee decides, I have burnt what I had in the first week, and my arm is at nineteen, and the winter is eleven weeks long." Nyle had no answer to that. He had brought two hundred and forty pounds of nothing to a door in the South Ward and there was no line in any of his schedules for a woman of fifty-one with nineteen hours and eleven weeks to get through. He wrote to the Ministry's fuel office again. The letter asked one question: whether an individual household drawing on a levy that is under investigation could be paid from the reserve. The reply came in nine days and it was two sentences long. *The reserve is a municipal fund and may not be applied to a suspended guarantee. The ward will be advised when the file is closed.* He read it three times and then wrote it out in longhand into the finding, in the margin of page nine, with the date and the reference, because item three of the four lines he had written to himself in the tally-clerk's house said that this fact would go in the finding in his hand and in his name, and he had written it down for exactly this week. Then he did the arithmetic of his own position, which he had been avoiding since the Thursday. Ferrick had been removed from the Reckoner's office and from the ward tally-clerkship he had held for eleven years before it, and had gone to a brother's address outside the district, which is where a man in this kingdom goes when there is nothing left to attend to. The press books were in Cray's building and Cray had countersigned their removal, which meant Cray had to be asked for them, which meant Cray would know on what grounds. Jory was in a coastal town with no file. The landlady had his trunk. His band stood at one hundred and eighty-one hours and there was no post to credit to it. And in eleven weeks the Register of Attainment would verify Brackmoor's counts for the year and seal them for five years, and after that there would be no copy of the forty-four anywhere in the kingdom except the one his file had already copied. He sat at the table in the Room over the chandler's and put the finding in front of him, and read the signature block, and thought about the word *unclosed* in a red hand, and about the shelf in the outer room with the varnished plate on the front of it. He did not sign it. Instead he wrote on the flyleaf, in his own hand, with the date and the hour: *This finding is transmitted without the inspector's signature, in the form of an unclosed exception, under Rule Nine of the Standing Orders of the Office of the Rolls. The inspector is not in possession of a warrant and has not had one since the eleventh of the month. It is sent to the Register of Attainment at the Ministry of Hours, marked for the verification of the eleventh month, and to no other desk.* Then he posted it registered, with a return receipt, to Marnhull. That was the price. Everything after it was just the invoice coming in. ---