RM · P05

The white line

Two people die in this novel. Only one of them has a killer.

A journalist is killed in a narrow street off the Gran Via in Barcelona. The car is not going fast. It comes up the street at the pace of a car looking for an address, and at the bottom it indicates, and turns towards the Rambla, and the students on the corner have not stopped talking.

That one has an author. A lawyer in a grey suit who went to Milan in June with an offer and an unstated alternative. A traced payment. Two witnesses who refused for a year and then stopped refusing. Twenty-two years, and the conviction is entirely sound, and Isabel wins it.

The other one has nothing.

A beech comes down in a forecast wind and a farmer telephones about it, as he has since 1979. A commune clerk enters the closure in nine minutes, which is fast; before she fought for the tablet in 2021 it took thirty-eight. A routing system offers a shorter road, correctly, because the only weather station is eleven kilometres away and four hundred metres lower. A camber was relaid in the spring and the drainage channel is scheduled for September, because the budget is annual and the machine is hired for six weeks a year. A firmware update moved an intervention threshold by three per cent, in the direction of safety, saving between nine and fourteen lives a year across eleven thousand cars.

Every one of those decisions was correct. Isabel spends four months and eleven binders proving it, and interviews every person in the chain, and finds that each of them is decent and each of them will carry it privately for the rest of their life and none of them will ever be asked to account for it.

At the end she has a sheet of paper with the elements of the offence on it and a gap where the first word should be. A person, who, by an act or omission — she has drafted that opening in nineteen jurisdictions and has never once had trouble with it.

There is a register in Rome with a single ruled line through one entry, and there will be a table of road fatalities for the canton of Vaud with a name in it and nothing beside the name, because there is no column for what happened.

That is the white line. It is not drawn to keep anybody out. It is drawn through.

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