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Chapter Ten: The Card In The Gutter
Winifred never got to finish. She had barely said his father's name before her breathing began to catch, and the clinic doctor took one look at the monitor and sent Wyatt out into the corridor."Tomorrow," the old woman managed as the door swung shut. "Come back tomorrow."He didn't wait for tomorrow. Whatever she had been trying to tell him, one other person in Highmoor knew it, and Wyatt had spent too many years being hurt by surprise.At eight the next morning he walked into the Rank Office alone and climbed to the top floor, where no E-rank had any business being. The guards let him pass without a word, as though they had been told to expect him. The Assessor's office was large and almost bare. The map of Highmoor from the night of the trace was pinned to the wall now, its pencil lines still running down into the Lowside. Dermot Lowry sat behind the desk with his tinted glasses folded in front of him and his cane hooked over the arm of his chair."Son," he said."You went to Humph
Chapter Nine: Winifred Wakes
Winifred Whitcombe opened her eyes at twenty to five in the morning, and the first thing she asked for was a judge.The night nurse at the clinic nearly dropped her tray. For three days the old woman had lain in that quiet room with no name on the door, breathing more easily on clean fluids, the color slowly returning to her face, but she hadn't moved or spoken once. Now she was staring at the ceiling with sharp, tired eyes, her fingers plucking at the blanket as if she were already late for something.Odessa Rhodes arrived within the hour. She brought Judge Okonjo with her, a dark coat thrown over what were very obviously pyjamas. Okonjo was the only judge in Highmoor who had already defied House Varley once, in a courtroom full of people who had wanted her to look away. She pulled a chair up to the bed, took out a notebook and uncapped her pen."Mrs. Whitcombe," she said gently. "Your granddaughter's husband has been charged with poisoning you."Winifred's voice was thin, but every
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 g
Chapter Seven: Zero's Mercy
The Council had given Zero thirty days to show its face. Wyatt answered them before the sun came up, the only way Zero could.He wrote the orders at the cellar table a little after three in the morning, under the bare bulb, while Verity and Elsie slept on the mattress in the corner. He didn't write them in anger. He had been angry for days, and anger made careless orders. He wrote them the way Winifred had taught him, slowly, reading every line back as if the person it touched were standing in front of him. There were two orders. He checked each of them three times, sent them to Odessa and sat in the dark, waiting for the city to wake.At six, a bus driver at the Lowside depot tapped his card on the reader, and the screen flashed green with a letter he had never seen beside his name. He tapped it again. He took it to his supervisor. By half past six there was a queue of drivers outside the depot office, all holding their cards up to the light like men checking banknotes for forgeries.
Chapter Six: Mind The Lowest Step
By noon, the Whitcombes' servant was the most wanted man in Highmoor, and he was sitting in a cellar in the Lowside eating cold toast.The room lay beneath a shuttered print shop at the very bottom of the district, with one bare bulb and a single barred window at the level of the pavement. The flat above the laundry was the first place the police would look, so Odessa Rhodes had found them this instead. Elsie sat cross-legged on a mattress in the corner, pretending to read. Verity sat at the table across from Wyatt, and between them lay the paper Odessa had brought from the court that morning.It was the official copy of Zero's order, the one that had voided Elsie's proxy contract and put Peregrine Varley in the dock. The black seal sat at the top, the judge's stamp at the bottom and three lines of formal text in between. Under the seal, in faded blue ink, someone had written a single line by hand.Mind the lowest step.Verity hadn't moved since she read it.Her grandmother had said t
Chapter Five: The Servant's Stairs
The servants' door at Whitcombe House had never been locked in Verity's lifetime, because nobody who mattered ever used it.She slipped through it a little after ten with her hood up and climbed the back stairs in her socks. Wyatt couldn't come. The guards had orders to call the police the moment they saw him, and the Assessor's people were still in and out of the library. But he had told her about the teacup, the one that had been on her grandmother's bedside table and then simply wasn't, and Verity hadn't slept properly since.Her grandmother's room smelled of antiseptic and lilies. Winifred lay very small in the middle of the bed, wired to a monitor that beeped softly and steadily, a clear drip bag hanging on a stand beside her. Her hand was cool and papery when Verity took it."I left, Gran," she whispered. "I climbed the garden wall like I used to when I was twelve. You'd have been furious." She swallowed. "You told me to marry him, and I didn't speak to you properly for a year.
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