Chapter 9
What Daniel Wouldn't Say
They put Ray in the Pen.
It was Tom's idea, and nobody had a better one. It was the only cold place in the building. They carried him up from the lower basement on a door that Frank had taken off its hinges, and laid him on the bench inside, and covered him with a gray blanket. Nora folded his hands. She had found a pair of clean socks in the lounge and put them on his bare feet, carefully, one at a time, as if he might feel the cold. Then she stood by the door of the Pen with her fists pressed to her mouth until Helen put an arm round her and led her out.
Daniel did not go in. He stood in the doorway of the jury room and watched them go past him, the way you watch a procession from the curb.
Edwin's here, he thought. Tell her.
He had said he would go himself. It was easy to say. He sat down, in the end, on the floor of the corridor, with his back to the panelling and his splinted foot stuck out in front of him, and put his head against the wall. He did not cry. He felt as if he had been scooped out with a spoon.
It was a quarter past eleven on Friday morning.
They had been told nothing.
That was almost the worst of it. The speakers had been silent since the water. The little screen in the table had stayed shut. The clock on the wall of the jury room ran on at its brisk, wrong pace, and people looked at it and away. At noon there was a meal on the kitchen counter, sandwiches and a pot of tea, and nobody could eat. They sat in the lounge in a rough ring on cots and chairs, as people sit in a hospital corridor, and they did what people do when they have each seen the same dreadful thing and cannot say so.
They looked at Frank Ross.
He sat apart, at the end of the sofa, with his heavy forearms on his knees. He had changed into a dry shirt from the kitchen stores. He had not shaved. He was looking at the floor between his boots, and he had not spoken since the evidence room. Nobody had asked him anything. It was as if a large dog had come into the room and lain down, and everyone had agreed, without a word, not to wake it.
It was Greg Pruitt who couldn't stand it.
"I think we ought to talk about it," he said.
"Don't," said Helen.
"I'm not going to shout. I only think we should, somebody ought to say. About what Ray said." He had gone a curious color, a sort of mottled pink. He looked round the circle, brightly, like a man taking a poll. "He said a lineup. He said somebody held his arm. He said he picked a man, and the man was innocent."
"He said he thought so."
"He said I think I got a man put away."
"Greg."
"It's a perfectly, I'm only saying it. It's a fact. We all heard it." He turned his head toward the end of the sofa. "Frank. That's, that was you."
Frank did not raise his head.
"Wasn't it?"
"I was a detective for thirty-one years," said Frank, to the floor. "I did a hundred lineups."
"He said a big man, with a gray, with a kind face."
"A lot of men have kind faces."
"He said he squeezed his arm."
"You want to hear what I did in the lineups?" said Frank. He raised his eyes. They were red at the rims, and flat. "I'll tell you. I stood beside the witness and said, take your time. I said, which one of them looks like him? I did it a hundred times. I never said a word to any one of them about who to choose." He drew a breath. "I might have touched an elbow."
"So you did it."
"I might have."
"And the man was innocent."
"I don't know that."
"Ray thought so."
"Ray," said Frank, and his voice cracked, once, down the middle, like a plate, "was a decent man who got frightened in a room. I'm sorry he's dead. I'm more sorry than you know." He looked at Daniel, then, directly, for the first time since the cages. "I'm sorry you had to choose. You chose right. I'll say that."
"I didn't."
"You did. It was a trade."
"I didn't choose right. I chose you."
"It's the same thing."
"It's not," said Daniel. It came out hoarse. "It's not the same thing at all."
Frank held his eye a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, very slightly, as a man nods who has been hit and has decided to say nothing about it, and went back to studying his boots.
It was past one when they came for him.
There was not a plan. It simply happened, the way a shift in the weather happens, when the wind goes round and the air changes. Daniel had gone back into the jury room to be alone. He was sitting at the head of the oak table with his hands flat on it and his eyes on the water stain. He had the form against his chest, under the bandage, and he could feel it with every breath. It had made a small sharp crease in his skin.
The door slid open.
Greg Pruitt came in first, and Frank behind him. Tom stood in the doorway with his arms folded, looking uncomfortable. The two women did not come.
"We want a word," said Greg.
"I don't have anything to say."
"That's, no. I'd say you've got a hell of a lot to say." He walked round the table. He had put his hands in his pockets, and he moved with a loose, bouncing, unpleasant ease, like a man who has made a decision and is surprised how good it feels. "Ray's dead. Helen's sick. We've got a clock that's down to twenty-five hours, and a man on the wall who keeps talking about what you've got. A tin. A paper. The foreman."
"I'm not the foreman."
"You signed it."
"Because it was put in front of me."
"Because somebody knew you'd sign it. He had your name typed on it before we got here." He stopped, a yard away. "You told us, in the Pen, it was only a title. You said it was just where you sat. But you read that card like you'd done it a hundred times. You had a voice. Like a man who'd read out a verdict."
"I haven't."
"Then what's in your shirt?"
The room went very quiet.
He had not moved his hand. He had not let himself. He sat with his palms on the oak, flat, as he had sat in the Pen, and he could feel the corner of the folded paper against his ribs, like a small cold fingernail.
"Nothing."
"I saw you take it. In the cellar. You went under the bench."
"I picked up a rag."
"You didn't."
"Mr. Pruitt," said Daniel. "I'd like you to go out."
"I'd like you to show me."
"No."
"Show me or I'll."
"Greg," said Tom, from the door.
"Stay out of it."
"Greg. That's enough."
"It's not enough! He's hiding something, and it's got us killed. It's got Ray killed!" His voice had risen to a thin, hysterical pitch. "Whatever it is, it's his. It's his, and he's sitting there like a, you don't know. You don't know what it is. It could be, it could be the only way out!"
He lunged.
It was clumsy. He grabbed for the front of Daniel's shirt with one hand, a big pink hand with a gold ring on the finger, and caught the collar, and tore. The shirt came open. The bandage under it shifted. And a pain went through Daniel's ribs like a hot bar, so sudden and so complete that for a moment he saw nothing at all but a white light, and heard a distant voice, calm, say oh.
He was on the floor.
He did not remember getting there. He lay with his face against the carpet, which smelled of dust and old coffee, with something heavy across his legs. He could not breathe. He tried and tried. It would not come. Overhead, a blur, a ring of faces. A man shouting.
"Get off him!"
It was Tom. He had pulled Greg back by the belt, bodily, and thrown him against the wall like a sack. Greg bounced. He slid down it and sat, staring, with his mouth open.
"You fool," said Tom. "He's got broken ribs."
"He's, he's got a, look at him! Look!"
Something had fallen out.
It lay on the carpet, a foot from Daniel's face, in the strip light. It was a small, flat, folded square of yellow paper. It had fallen from the torn shirt when he hit the floor. It had opened, a little way, at one corner, like a small bird deciding to fly.
Frank Ross bent down.
He did it with great slowness. His big gnarled hand came down and closed over the paper, and drew it toward him across the nap of the carpet, and he stood up and turned it over once in his fingers and looked at it.
"Don't," said Daniel.
It was a whisper. It was all he had.
"Frank. Please."
Frank did not unfold it. He stood with the thing in his palm. His face, in the glare, had gone as still and gray as the stone of the stair. He did not open it. He looked at the small white fold, and then at the man on the floor, and then, with a strangeness that Daniel did not understand until much later, at the water stain, on the ceiling, in the shape of a boot.
"I know what this is," said Frank, very low.
"Then give it back."
"I know the form. It's MC-J-417."
"Frank, for God's sake."
"Is it yours?"
"It was in the cage."
"Is it yours?"
Daniel closed his eyes.
"It's a verdict," said Frank, slowly. "It's an old one. I can see the, it's typed. It's the older printing." He was speaking as if to himself. "Why would a man have an old verdict form in the Marlow County Superior Court, in the month of March, with a name on it, and put it in his shirt, and not say what it was?"
Nobody answered.
"I won't open it," said Frank.
He knelt, with a small grunt. He laid the folded paper on Daniel's chest, on the open front of the torn shirt, as one lays a coin on a dead man's eyes. His hand hovered a moment. It was shaking.
"I don't want to know," said Frank Ross. "I think I know. I think if I read it I'll be sick. And I've been sick enough for one week." He stood. "You keep it. You keep it, son."
He turned. He walked out of the room.
Nobody spoke. After a moment Tom helped Greg to his feet and took him out, and the door slid shut behind them with a sigh. Daniel lay on the carpet and looked at the ceiling and counted the slow knocks of his own pulse.
He knows.
They all know something.
Nobody wants to be the first to say it.
He remembered it that afternoon, in bits.
He lay on the sofa in the lounge under a gray blanket with his eyes half shut and Nora's cool hand on his forehead, and it came, as fever comes, in waves, without order. Pieces. He had thought, for nine years, that they were gone. They were not gone. They had only been waiting behind a door, like patient animals, for someone to open it.
A radiator. A hissing, clanking, scalding one, under a window that would not open. A room that smelled of wet wool and instant coffee. The same hard chair, under him, and then a different one, and then the first again. A man's laugh, loud, close. Let's get this over with, folks. Somebody's elbow. The long oak table, and twelve places, and a plastic jug of water that nobody drank.
Seven, he thought. I was number seven. It was on my badge.
A woman across the table.
She sat at the far end, three places down. She did not belong to any picture he had. He could see only the outline of her. A green cardigan, of the kind teachers wear. A sleeve with a smudge of white on it. Chalk, or something like it. Gray hair tied up with a pencil. She had a pencil in her hand. She was always writing. She wrote everything, in a small neat square script, in a notebook with a cardboard cover, and when she was asked a question she would look up with a pair of very pale clear eyes and consider it, and say, Let me see.
Nine, he thought. She was Nine.
She wore the number on the front of her cardigan, pinned on with a safety pin, crooked.
He could not see her face. It was like a face on a coin worn smooth. He could see her hands, brown and clever, with the knuckles a little swollen. He could see the pencil. He could hear her say, I'm sorry. I'd like to look at that again.
I'd like to look at that again.
Please.
A telephone, on a wall. A nurse's voice, thin and far off, with a sound of traffic behind it. Mr. Wells? I think you should come. She's been asking. The flat gray green of a hospital corridor. The words a good day, a bad day, which meant nothing. A little girl in a red coat on somebody's knee, in a waiting room, with her thumb in her mouth.
Hurry, he thought. Hurry. We have to finish.
Let's all just agree.
"Daniel," said Nora. "You're talking."
"Am I?"
"You said hurry."
"I'm sorry."
"It's all right. It's the fever. You're hot." Her voice was low and gentle in the dark. "Who's Nine?"
He opened his eyes.
She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, with a wet cloth in her hand. The lamp was off. There was only the thin yellow light from the strip in the corridor, and by it her face was a pale oval, with her eyes in shadow.
"I don't know," he said.
"You said, she was Nine."
"Did I?"
"Yes."
"I don't remember," said Daniel.
It was a lie. He felt it go out of him, like a coin dropped down a drain. And in the dark, near, he heard the quiet rise and fall of her breathing, very slow and even, as if she were holding it. She did not say anything. She wrung out the cloth. She laid it on his forehead. It was perfectly cool.
"Sleep," said Nora.
"I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"For the beam."
"I know," she said. "Sleep."
June had her ear to the floor.
It was a thing she'd found by accident. She had dropped her pencil on the second night, and it had rolled under the cot, and when she lay down to reach it she had felt, against her cheek, a small steady flow of warm air. There was a grille in the floor. It was a brass grate, a hand wide, set into the boards beside the wall, with a pattern of little diamonds in it. It had been painted over so many times that it was nearly sealed. She had picked at it with a pin from her braid.
It was a heating register. It went down.
She lay on her stomach on the cold boards with the cat notebook under her chin. It was Friday afternoon, as near as she could tell. The red numbers on the clock said 22:12. She had been listening for an hour. She did not know why. She only knew that for the first time in four days, something in the building had made a sound that was not the voice on the speaker.
It was very faint. It came up through the grille like a sound from the bottom of a well. A murmur. A shifting. The creak of a chair.
Somebody's down there.
She held her breath. She put her mouth to the brass, and then thought better of it, and moved her ear. It was a long way down. There was a room under hers, a big one. She had known that, in a way. She had felt it, when she crossed the floor, the dead hollow space beneath her feet. She had counted her steps on the boards, and the number had come out the same every time, and it had been the same as the number of tiles in the corridor on the evacuation map.
Forty.
The corridor's forty tiles.
A voice came up.
It was a man's. It was low and cracked and tired, and the words were gone, but not the sound of it. She knew the sound. She had known it for twelve years. It had read her Goodnight Moon in a house with a yellow kitchen. It had said eight pieces, no more, no less. It had said, a long time ago, a thing she had almost forgotten, in a room full of white, to a woman on a bed. I won't let her be scared.
She put her hand over her mouth.
She did not make a sound. She was very good at it. She had learned in the last four days to take a thing like that, and fold it up, and put it somewhere small. She lay on the boards with her cheek on the brass and her eyes shut, and the tears ran sideways across her nose and into the grille, and she let them.
Dad, she thought.
Dad. I'm here. I'm just up the, I'm right.
I'm right above you.
She could not call. She knew it. The tablet on the shelf had a little black eye, and she knew what it did. She turned her head away from it, and lay still, and listened.
Foreman, said a voice, thin and dry, through the floor.
It was the old man. It was the voice from the speaker. It was not talking to her. It was somewhere else, in some other room, in the dark, to someone else. It said the word once, very clearly, and then there was a pause, and it said, like a man reading from a list, Foreman. Seven.
She scrambled for the notebook.
Foreman, she wrote, and under it, 7. And she held the pencil over the page for a long time, with her braid in her mouth, before she wrote, in smaller letters than before, the question that she would put to the voice in the morning.
What did Dad do?
At six in the evening the speakers woke.
It was Friday, the eighth of March, and they had lost the thread of the day. He had slept. He had not thought he would. He woke on the sofa with a stiff neck and a mouth full of ashes and the sound of a woman coughing. It was not Helen. It was a lower, wetter, more terrible sound. He sat up, and the room swam.
"Nora."
"Here."
"What time is it?"
"A quarter to six, in the evening." She was on her feet. She had a candle stub in a saucer and a face as white as milk. "Daniel, it's Helen. She's, I can't wake her properly. Her breathing's wrong. She's burning."
He got up.
It was a bad moment, and then a worse one. Somebody had put the lights on. Tom was standing in the doorway of the lounge, wringing his hands. Greg was at the kitchen end of the corridor, with his back against the wall. And on the nearest cot, in a gray blanket, with a damp cloth on her forehead and her hair stuck to her face in dark wet strands, lay Helen Marsh.
Her eyes were half open. They moved. They found him, and she tried to smile.
"Mr. Wells," she said. "I think I've caught something."
"Helen."
"It's pneumonia. I know the sound." Each word was a separate, careful effort. "I've, I had it twice. It's, I'd need, there are pills."
"Don't talk."
"There's a cabinet, I think. I saw it on the, on the way. By the washroom." Her fingers closed round his sleeve. They were hot and dry, and very light. "I'd like to tell you something, if I may. In case."
"Not now."
"It's about a sentence."
"Helen."
"Just one," she said. "A very good one. A lawyer's one. It's, I'd like you to have it. It's the only thing I know that's any use."
The speakers clicked.
"Good evening," said White, softly. "For the record, it is five minutes to six on Friday evening, the eighth of March. I hope that everyone rested. I am sorry to hear that Miss Marsh is unwell." There was a pause. "I have been listening to your afternoon. I have decided that the third game is overdue, and that it should not be delayed."
Nobody spoke.
"It is called the Price," said the voice. "It is not complicated. It concerns Mr. Wells. It concerns a thing that he has always said he would give."
Daniel stood in the dim lounge with an old woman's fingers wound in his sleeve, and the small bright knife of every breath going through his side, and he understood, with perfect clarity, that this was the game that had been made for him. The others had been tests. This was the one the whole building had been waiting for. He was not afraid. It was a strange feeling. It was a kind of relief, like a man who has been standing in a doorway for an hour, and sees the first step of a very long stair.
"In the infirmary," said White, "there is a cabinet."