The E-Rank Husband

Chapter Eight: The Man With The Cane

They came for Elsie at ten past nine, in the middle of her first lesson at the academy that had turned down her application in the spring because of the E on her card.

She had begged to go. With a C on her card, she was allowed through the front gate for the first time, and Wyatt hadn't had the heart to say no. Four police officers walked into her classroom, every one of them A-rank, and walked her out between them while thirty children watched in silence.

Twenty minutes later, a message arrived on Verity's phone from a number none of them knew. It was a photograph of Elsie in the back of a police car, her school bag clutched on her knees, and under it a single line.

The servant comes in. The girl goes home.

Wyatt was already reaching for his jacket.

"They'll charge you with anything they like," Verity said. "You know that."

"I know." He took the old phone out of his pocket and slipped it into hers. "That's why this stays with you."

The station sat on the edge of the upper city, all glass doors and polished stone. Wyatt walked up the steps alone and held out his wrists at the front desk. The custody sergeant took a call before he had finished the paperwork, and Wyatt heard him say, "Yes, Mr. Varley," twice, very respectfully. Every officer in the building was A-rank, and every one of them knew who paid for their pensions.

They kept their side of the bargain, at least. Elsie came out through a side door, white-faced and furious, and ran straight into Verity's arms on the pavement.

Then they read the charges. Wyatt Lowry, E-rank, accused of the kidnapping of Winifred Whitcombe and of administering poison to her with intent to kill.

He was being walked down the corridor in handcuffs when the cameras started flashing outside. Through the glass doors, he could see a crowd of reporters on the station steps, and in the middle of them, in a dark coat, stood Humphrey Whitcombe.

"I always knew the servant was dangerous," Humphrey was saying, in the grave voice he used at funerals. "My mother was too kind to see it. She took that boy in off the street, and this is how he repaid her."

Verity tried to follow her husband inside. The officer at the door glanced at the C-rank card hanging around her neck and put his arm across the doorway.

"Visitors are B-rank and above," he said. "You can wait outside."

So she waited outside. She sat down on the pavement opposite the station doors with Elsie wrapped in her coat beside her, and she was still there when the streetlamps came on, and still there when they went off again in the cold small hours before dawn.

Inside, Wyatt sat alone in the interrogation room for most of the night.

It was a bare grey box with a metal table, two chairs and a mirror along one wall that he assumed had someone behind it. Nobody came. Nobody brought water. He counted the ceiling tiles twice and thought about Verity on the pavement, and about the old phone in her coat pocket, and about how long thirty days really was.

At a quarter past three, the door opened.

The Assessor came in alone. He moved slowly, leaning on his cane, and he didn't look at Wyatt until he had lowered himself into the chair across the table. Then he hooked the cane over the back of the chair, reached up with both hands and took off his tinted glasses.

Wyatt was looking at his father.

He had known, in some locked room at the back of his mind, since the night he stood at the window above the laundry and watched that man tip his head back in the rain. Knowing it and seeing it were different things. Dermot Lowry was older, greyer and thinner in the face, and there were deep lines around the mouth that had once called him useless, called his sister a burden, called their mother things Wyatt had spent years trying to forget. The eyes hadn't changed at all.

For ten years Wyatt had assumed his father drank himself into a Lowside grave. He had pictured it often, on bad nights, and felt nothing. But Dermot hadn't died. He had climbed. He had sold out a neighbor for a D, an employer for a C, a friend for a B, one betrayal at a time, every rung a person he had stepped on, until the Council looked at him and saw exactly what they needed. A man with no loyalties at all. They had made him the one who decided who fell.

"Hello, son," Dermot said.

Wyatt said nothing.

"I knew it was you the moment Zero saved your sister." Dermot smiled, and it was the same smile, the one that used to come right before the bottle. "Nobody else in this city would have spent the seat on a Lowside girl. You always did give back things you should have kept."

He took a folded sheet of paper from his inside pocket, smoothed it flat and slid it across the table.

It was a confession, already typed. It said that Wyatt Lowry had poisoned Winifred Whitcombe, and below that was a blank space for the name of the person who ran Zero's sealed desk.

"Zero is a man and a desk," Dermot said. "I have the man. Give me the desk, sign for the old woman, and your sister and your wife keep their pretty new ranks. I'll even see that they're left alone."

"And if I don't?"

Dermot leaned back. "Then I strip them. Not to E. Past it." He let the word sit there before he said it. "Unranked. No card, no school, no hospital, no bank, no name on any register in Highmoor. Legally, they won't exist. Anyone could do anything to them, and no court would ever hear about it." He picked up his glasses and turned them over in his fingers. "You remember how cold the Lowside gets at night, Wyatt. Imagine it with nowhere at all to go."

He put the glasses back on and stood, lifting the cane from the chair.

"Take the night," he said. "You always did like to think things over."

The door closed behind him. The paper lay on the table under the hard white light, and somewhere outside, across the road, Verity was still sitting on the cold pavement with Rank Zero in her pocket.

For the first time in five years, Wyatt had nothing he could send.