THE FOURTH ARM

The receiver went back into the cradle at nine minutes past eleven, and Eleanor Whitcombe did not move for some time after that.

She is seventy-four. She has held the chair for forty-one years, in a farmhouse of 1710 that has belonged to the chair since 1889 — which is not the same as belonging to a family, and the chair takes the distinction seriously.

In forty-one years she has been handed nine items the register could not account for. Eight were transcription errors, two of them hers. This is the ninth.

Voss-1950-A has three sub-files at Basel. It has had three there since 1950.

She said it out loud, into a telephone, in a dark room, to a woman four thousand miles away — and the saying of it was the first time in forty-one years that she had stated a fact about the register in order to find out whether it was true.

It was not.

THE FOURTH ARM ends the sequence, and it changes what the first four were about. The Nine were never a family. They were an office, filling itself by merit, out of the general population of a country, for three hundred and seventy-one years — which is either the most reassuring fact in these five books or the most frightening one, and the answer depends entirely on what you think merit is for.

It is also the only book in the sequence where people pay. A woman spends her own money. A man loses his directorate. And an old woman in Kent gives up the one thing she has done every morning for four decades.

Book Four of THE NINE, and the end of the sequence — four contemporary novels and one history, all of them available now.