Methinks there’s a connection. It’s you, Skay. Prentice snatched Lawrence into his Value System out of spite. I’m convinced of it, otherwise it does not make sense. Maybe he was behind what happened to Lawrence and you in Oban. Who can say what goes on at that level?
I know there’s been a lot of talk about senior glory officers all being criminals. Lawrence comes across as hard as hell, but dead straight. I don’t believe he was involved in any of that. He’s had a brutal time and I hope you two can help him find a safe situation until things settle down. [signed] Bartram.
Sarah-Kelly returned to her desk a few minutes later hugging a stack of files, which she deposited with a thump and a sigh on her desk. She had been exhorting Atrocity Commission teams in asylums south of the Central Enclave.
“We need to talk,” Donald said in a low voice.
“Oh, not now Donald. I’m up to my ears. I’ll have to go into town again. It’ll take all night.”
“This is important.”
“This is important.”
“Bartram sent a note in response to ours. You need to read it.”
As he edged back to his own desk, he glanced up to see Andrew Kalchelik staring at him from the doorway of the office. Donald ambled his way out to the corridor and followed Kalchelik into an empty meeting room. He shut the door.
“It’s about your brother, Lawrence,” Kalchelik said. He passed over a couple of sheets filled with closely-spaced handwriting. Donald merely skim-read the contents, his heart starting to thump and a quailing, shivery feebleness coming over his whole body. The sheets themselves were visibly shaking by the time he passed them back.
“Thank you for showing me. I see the statement was made by a sergeant. Have you seen his service record? The last statement I saw was by a character sought for petty theft and desertion—not really the most credible of witnesses.”
“This person has a sound record.”
“He could still be lying—anyone could make this stuff up from the rumours that are flying about now.”
“There’s details that ring with the first statement. And it’s not a small thing to sign off a statement for the Atrocity Commission—there’s no way back. We tell witnesses in the strongest terms they’re going to be put up in a public box like a preacher and they’re going to have all manner of questions fired at them.”
Donald overcame what came perilously close to an outburst of temper. After calming himself, he said:
“I owe you for this, Andrew, and I will not forget your help.”
In making his way back to the cabinet office, he waded against the unbearable destruction of what had been a slowly rising confidence that Lawrence was one of the good guys. If the statements were true—and he scarcely credited them—then the glory trusts must possess some kind of diabolical power that transformed normally decent people into killers. In that case, the man he met at 5 pm—if that man was crazy enough to present himself to the Atrocity Commission—would be a complete stranger.
Facts beat wishful thinking, at least in the mind of a rationalist like Donald. The scepticism faded. He no longer had to meet Lawrence to know that the last ten years had indeed transformed him from the rebellious layabout he was at seventeen. Lawrence had somehow been changed into a brutally efficient officer who committed appalling crimes out of sight of decent society. However hard it was to accept that a member of his own family could have become such an individual, it simply was not possible to ignore Turner’s implied meanings and Haighman’s implied meanings and the quite frankly-stated actions in the witness statements.
Donald then experienced a peculiar sensation of contemplating himself from a distance. To a stranger viewing the evidence, Minister for Trade Donald Aldingford was a traitor who had chosen the wrong side and now was cornered by his own disloyalty. Yet, he had never set out to betray anyone, nor had he ever held much sympathy for the National Party. Quite simply, he was in a bloody mess through no fault of his own. Might the same not be true of Lawrence? By the evidence, Lawrence was a top killer, a mass-murderer. Could it not be that beneath the damning statements there existed a different Lawrence, horrified at his life, well aware he was in a desperate mess and just as aware there was no way out?
For some minutes, Donald sat amidst jangling phones, bustling postal staff, lofty tones of other cabinet members dictating communiqués to their secretaries and occasional barks of laughter. Complete disorientation paralysed him. His brother was a top killer and Donald himself served a rebellion led by top killers because he had nowhere else to go.
He slumped at his desk, his head down as exhaustion dragged him towards the floor. This was not how a minister was supposed to appear in public. He screwed up his strength, straightened his back and forced his mind to the rapidly accumulating tasks of his portfolio. It had only taken a few hours for the Party bureaucracy to react to his appointment with an increasing flood of reports, committee minutes and official communiqués. Any notion that a senior post in a rebellion was glamorous rapidly dissipated in this storm of pompous, arse-covering paper. Fortunately his years as a legal counsel had prepared him well for speed-reading inches thick piles and sieving from their scores of thousands of words the essentials. There was no doubt the campaign to confiscate gold and silver would begin in the next few days. Already Yelcho was assigning officers to liaison duties and requesting the minister for trade nominate his own corresponding officials.
The paralysis returned. Donald knew that if he robbed his fellow professionals of their gold and silver, he was a dead man. It was a crime that would never be forgiven. If he responded to Yelcho’s demands, he would be signing his
