Chapter 5
Twelve Chairs
At four o'clock the steel door at the side of the jury room opened by itself.
It did not swing. It slid back into the wall on a rail, with a long, low, mechanical sigh, and behind it was a corridor. They stood and stared. Nobody went through. It was Frank Ross who finally walked up and put his head round the edge, and looked left and looked right, and came back with a sour, closed face.
"There's three rooms," he said. "A lounge. A kitchen. A washroom. And a gate."
"What kind of gate?"
"Steel. Roll-down. Floor to ceiling. The kind they put on a shop." He sat heavily. "It's got a lock the size of my fist."
"So that's all of it," said Greg.
"That's all we've been given."
They went to see, in a bunch, close together, like people at a zoo. The corridor was short and wide, with a worn green-and-brown floor, and the same dull panelling. At the far end, thirty feet away, a rolling steel shutter had been pulled right down, with a padlock the size of a man's fist, and a camera over it in a little black dome. On the other side, they could see a thin line of dark. There was nothing else. A smell of dust and cold stone came under it.
The first door on the left was the lounge. It was a long, low room with a row of eight iron cots along one wall, each made up with a gray blanket and a folded pillow, and on the other wall a battered sofa and a table. Somebody had put a jug of water on the table and a stack of paper cups. The cots had been there, Tom said, in the days when a jury could be kept overnight. In a long trial, they used to be locked in. Tom had brought them breakfast.
The kitchen was an old staff cafeteria. It had a steel counter, a gas range, two refrigerators, and shelves of cans. Greg went straight into it and stood in the middle of the floor with his hands on his hips, turning slowly, the way a man turns when he has been shown a house he can afford.
"There's food," he said. "There's a lot of food."
"Don't," said Frank.
"Don't what?"
"Don't count it."
"I'm only looking!"
"You're counting," said Frank. "I watched your lips. Seven people, how many days? You were adding."
"I'm being practical."
"You're being a hog."
Greg's face went red to the ears. He opened his mouth, and shut it, and went out, and a moment later they heard the sound of a cot being sat on, hard.
They put Helen in the bed nearest the radiator.
She had a fever. Nora felt it with the back of her hand and took her pulse in the old way, with two fingers, watching the cheap wall clock. She did it for a full minute. Then she tucked the blanket around Helen's shoulders and said, in a low steady voice that Daniel had not heard her use before, "Rest. You need to sleep. I'll sit with you."
"I'm not dying, dear."
"I know."
"I've had worse than this on a Tuesday."
"I know. Rest."
Helen closed her eyes. Her breathing was loud and rough, with a catch at the top of each breath, as though something in her chest kept getting snagged. After a while she said, without opening them, "Mr. Wells."
"Yes."
"Don't brood. It was a vote."
"I'm not brooding."
"You've got the look," said Helen. "I defended men for twenty-six years. I know what it looks like when a person's decided that something is his fault."
He sat on the end of the next cot. There was nothing to say. Ray lay on the one beyond, flat on his back, with his hand propped on a pillow in a bowl of lukewarm water, and a face the color of tallow. He was asleep. His mouth hung open. He looked, in his sleep, about nine years old.
"His fingers," said Daniel.
"I'll know tomorrow," said Nora. "If the blood comes back. If it doesn't." She stopped. "It depends how deep it went."
"Will he lose them?"
"I don't know."
"Could you?"
"I'm not a doctor." She pushed the dark hair back from her forehead with the back of her wrist. She looked tired and young, with smudges under her eyes. "I did a class. I'm an aide. I turn people, and feed them, and take their temperatures. But I've seen what it does. It's not the cold that takes the finger. It's the thaw." She lowered her voice. "It's the next three days."
"I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault."
"It was my vote."
"It was everyone's," said Nora. "I said yes. I stood there and said it, and I thought, at least it isn't me. And then I felt like I'd been sick." She sat down on the next bed. She sat very straight with her hands between her knees. "I'd like to be the kind of person who says no. I'd like that a lot. I keep thinking about it. I keep thinking I would have, if it was my, if it was someone I knew."
"You'd have been the only one."
"That's not the same as right."
He looked at her. It was an odd moment, in a low gray room with five cots and a hissing radiator, with an old woman coughing and a man asleep with his hand in a bowl. She had a way of looking down while she talked, and then lifting her eyes all at once, as if she'd forgotten and been reminded.
"Tell me about your daughter," said Nora.
"What?"
"You haven't said anything about her. Except what they did." She did not smile. "Tell me what she's like."
He found, to his surprise, that he could.
It was only a few things. It came out slowly and then all at once. He told her about the braid, and the pancakes, which were cut into eight pieces and eaten in a secret order. He told her about the napkin with an L on it, and the Saturday puzzle, and the three fingers raised across the gym. He told her about June's way of narrowing her eyes at him when he said I don't play. It was not much. He heard it as he said it. A handful of small ordinary things, laid out on a cot in a condemned building like a few items from a lost wallet.
Nora listened without moving. At one point she put her hand over her mouth.
"What?" said Daniel.
"Nothing. She sounds like somebody I'd like." She lowered her hand. "I used to play. When I was little. A man taught me. Not a very good man, I mean, not very good at chess." She gave a short uneven laugh. "He used to say the knight was his favorite piece, because it was the only one that could jump over."
"What happened to him?"
"He died."
"I'm sorry."
"It was a long time ago." She pulled the blanket straight on the cot. "I haven't played since I was fourteen."
They had decided to call it the board.
It was Greg's word, in the end, though he did not like it. They sat round the oak table in the jury room at seven, with a pan of soup between them and bread from a tin, and they did what people do when they are frightened and have nowhere to go. They talked. Frank Ross had found a scrap of pencil in the kitchen, and a roll of brown paper, and at the end of the table he was writing, in large block capitals, a list.
"What do we have?" he said.
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning what do we have in common. That's how you start. There's always a link. I did thirty-one years. I never saw a bunch of people in one room who didn't have one." He wet the pencil on his tongue. "Names. Ages. Jobs. Where you live. Where you were nine years ago."
There was a short silence.
"Why nine?" said Helen.
She had refused to stay in bed. She sat wrapped in a gray blanket at the foot of the table, with Nora beside her and a mug of soup between both hands. Her face was the color of an old candle. Her eyes were sharp.
"I don't know," said Frank. He lowered the pencil. "I don't know why I said that."
"It's the date on the card," said Daniel.
He had not meant to. He had been trying very hard to say nothing. But there were seven people at the table, and the pencil had stopped, and in the pause he heard his own voice reach across the oak. "The one in the, the verdict. It had a date on the back. March ninth. Nine years ago, I think it said."
"What card?" said Greg.
"The form I signed."
"I didn't see the back."
"It was small."
"What else did it say?" said Helen.
"Nothing. It was a date."
It was a lie, and a poor one, and he watched Helen listen to it. She did not move. She turned the mug, slowly, a quarter turn on the table, and put her eyes on the soup.
"All right," said Frank. "Let's do it by the book. Marlow County. Everybody here lives in the county?"
They did. Greg in the east end. Tom in a flat over a laundromat on Ridge Road. Ray in a rented room off Kestrel. Helen in a narrow house on the north side. Frank in a bungalow by the reservoir. Nora said she had a room at the hospital. Daniel said Alder Street.
"How long?"
"All my life."
"Born here," said Tom.
"Me too."
"Me," said Greg.
"Me."
They went round. It took ten minutes. They were all between forty and sixty-five, apart from Nora. They were all, one way or another, civil servants or tradespeople or men who dealt with the public. They had all come here on the same kind of letter, from the same kind of office, except for Daniel and the girl. Nobody had been in trouble. Nobody had a grudge that they could name. Nobody could think of an enemy.
"What've you got on the wall?" said Frank, impatiently.
"Names," said Tom. "And a bunch of dead ends."
"Right. Then let's try something else." He tapped the paper. "Is there anything, anything at all, that any of you did, in this county, in the last ten years, that you'd be, I won't say ashamed of, but that a person with a grudge might look at and say that's him?"
Nobody spoke.
Then Greg Pruitt gave a short, ugly laugh. "Oh, come on. That's everybody. That's everyone who's ever worked for a living. I sold a man a car in oh-nine that had a cracked block. I told him it was fine. He lost a transmission. Is that the one?"
"Probably not."
"I was twenty feet from it. It was a, I'd had a long day."
"Did he sue?"
"He moved to Texas."
"Then no," said Frank.
"What about you?"
"What about me?"
"You were a cop." He leaned forward. "A cop's got a whole career of, you've put people away. You must have, you must have a hundred people who'd like to see you in a freezer."
"A few."
"So it's you."
"Maybe."
"Then why are the rest of us here?"
"I don't know," said Frank, quietly. "I'd like to."
He looked down at the paper. He had written nothing on it for some time. He had drawn, in the margin, a small square, and he was going over and over its edges with the blunt end of the pencil, tracing it, as a man traces a thing he'd prefer not to think about.
Tom Rudd did not speak for most of the meal.
He sat at the corner of the table with his big hands round a mug, and ate slowly, and kept his eyes on the floor. He had been a bailiff for twenty-two years, he had said, in this building and the one before. He had stood at the door of two hundred courtrooms. Some men are made for it. They have a kind of slow, solid, patient kindness that people trust, and he had it, and he wore it like a coat that did not quite fit.
At nine, when Ray had been put to bed, and Greg had gone off to sulk, and Frank had gone to try the fuses, he got up and came and sat beside Daniel at the end of the table.
He did not say anything for a while.
"Mr. Wells," he said at last.
"Yes?"
"I wonder if I might ask you something."
"Go ahead."
"Have we met?"
Daniel looked at the soup. It had a skin on it. He found that he was holding his spoon still, and that he had stopped breathing, and that to start again he would have to decide to.
"I don't think so."
"No," said Tom. "I don't mean met. I mean, I've seen you. I never forget a, I'm good with faces. It was my job. I stood at a door for twenty years and said this way, please to people. I'd get a hundred a month. I could tell you, in a crowd, which ones were the witnesses and which were the jurors and which were the family." He shook his head. "You've got a face I've seen. I can't, it's not quite, it's your mouth. The way you press it."
"I have one of those faces."
"I don't think so."
"Everybody says it."
"Maybe." Tom was looking at him with great steadiness. There was not a trace of menace in it. It was a puzzled, honest, rather troubled look, such as a man gives a word he is trying to remember. "It's been bothering me since this afternoon. When you stood up. When you said the, when you voted. You had your hands on the table. Both of them, flat. And I thought, I know that. I know that exactly. And I couldn't think where."
"I'm sure it'll come to you."
"I'm sure it will." He stood, with a small grunt. He rested his hand on the back of Daniel's chair. It was a very large, warm, heavy hand, and it stayed there for rather longer than was comfortable. "I'm sorry. It's not, I'm not being, it's only that it's a small world. Marlow. Small enough that you stand in the wrong room and the whole thing falls on you."
He took his mug and went out.
Daniel sat in the empty jury room. Above him, in the strip light, the water stain on the ceiling spread its tea-colored boot. He did not look at it. He looked at the long oak table, at the circles on it, and the five empty chairs, and the twelfth one at the far end with its black king on its side.
It's a small world.
He thought of a heavy man in a gray uniform with a bunch of keys on his belt, holding a door open with his foot.
This way, please.
He closed his eyes.
He knows, he thought. Or he's about to.
June was beating him.
She did not say it aloud. She was careful, as she had learned to be. She sat at the metal desk with her chin on her fist and her eyes on the board and she thought: I am winning, and he is letting me.
It was a tablet. It stood in a little stand beside the board, and it showed a board of its own, a copy of hers, and a thin gray line down the side where moves appeared in neat small type. e4, e5. Nf3, Nc6. The moves came slowly. Sometimes the tablet sat quiet for five minutes while she thought, and sometimes it answered in a few seconds. It never made a sound. There was no face. There was only a voice, which came from a speaker on the shelf above the filing cabinets, and which she had decided, on the first day, was an old man.
"You take your time," said the voice.
"I'm thinking."
"I noticed. It's a good habit. Most children your age move the moment they see a move."
"I'm twelve."
"Twelve is a great age for a mistake."
She did not smile. She moved a bishop. She was trying not to look at the clock.
It sat at her elbow, on the right, a flat gray digital clock with big red numbers, the same kind they used at the club. It was not counting for her. She had worked that out the first night, lying on the cot in the corner with a blanket and a cardboard-tasting sandwich and her eyes on the ceiling. It was counting for something else. The voice had said it was her clock, but it didn't feel like hers. It felt like a thing someone had pinned to her.
Seventy-two forty-four, she thought. Seventy-two forty-three.
She had written it down.
She had a notebook. It was a small yellow one from her backpack, with a cat on the cover, and she kept it in her sock. She had been allowed to keep her pencil case, too, and her coat. They had taken nothing from her, and she supposed this was part of the plan. Nothing was locked. The door had a small gray box above it with a green light, and when she tried the handle the light flashed red. She had counted twenty-six steps from the desk to the window, and the window had a steel plate bolted over it on the outside. She had counted nineteen to the bathroom. There was a map on the wall beside the door, framed and behind glass, that said FIRE EVACUATION — 2ND FLOOR — CLERK OF COURT. She had looked at it for a long time.
"Mr. White," she said.
"Yes, June."
"Who's Black?"
There was a pause. It was a very small one. If she had not been listening for it she would have missed it.
"A man who isn't here," said the voice.
"Is he dead?"
"Why do you ask?"
"You said isn't. You didn't say wasn't." She moved a pawn. "People say isn't when they mean they don't want to say."
"You are an unusually observant child."
"My dad says that's what people say when they want you to stop."
"Your father is a wise man."
"He's all right," said June. She lifted her eyes. "Is he coming?"
"Your father is at a very important table," said White. "He is playing a game on your behalf. I don't want you to be afraid. I would not like you to think of yourself as a prisoner." There was a faint dry note, almost of regret. "I would like you to think of yourself as the reason."
She looked at the board for a long time.
"Check," she said, at last, and slid her queen across to the edge of the black king's file.
"So it is," said White. He sounded delighted. "So it is. Well done."
She sat very still.
She had learned something. It was a small thing, and she held it carefully, as you hold a piece you've just taken and are not sure of. He had not hesitated. He had not looked at the board, or thought, or paused to reconsider. He had said check a half-second before she did. He saw it coming, she thought. He saw it six moves ago. He let me.
It was not that he was bad at chess.
It was that, somewhere in the last hour, he had stopped trying to win.
She wrote it down in the cat notebook, in very small letters, in her sock-hidden hand. W lets me win. Why? And under it, because it seemed important, she added the time. 72:41.
On the shelf above her, in the dark, a small green light blinked, once, and went out.