When the alarm goes, everybody goes to the muster point in the yard and taps their badge on a tablet, and the tablet checks them off against who clocked in, and the fire marshal reads the number of people who are not accounted for. Ours reads zero. Then it reads minus one. Somebody has tapped in at the muster point who never clocked in, and the tablet shows the badge, and the badge is the same every drill, and the photo on it is burned.
I am the fire marshal at a warehouse and the roll call tablet is the thing I hold while the building empties.
How it works.
The alarm goes. Everybody walks to the muster point in the yard. There is a tablet on a post and each person taps their badge on it, and it ticks them off against the clocking system's list of who is inside, and the number at the top of the screen is how many are still unaccounted for, and my job is to get that number to zero and tell the fire brigade it is zero.
It goes to zero. Then it goes to minus one.
Minus one.
One more badge has tapped than there were people inside. The tablet lists it. The badge number is old format. The name is a man's. The photo, which the tablet shows for every tap so I can put faces to names, is a man in his thirties in a uniform I do not recognise, and the photo is damaged. Brown along one edge. The edge curled. The face is fine and the rest of the picture is burned, the way a photograph is burned, and it is a file on a server and it is burned.
Nobody at the muster point has tapped twice. I have watched. The tap comes in about two minutes after the last real one, when everybody is standing about, and nobody is at the tablet, and the tablet beeps, and it is him.
What has been checked.
The tablet, replaced. The badge database, searched, and he is not in it. The tablet reads his badge from a database that does not have him and shows a photo that is not on any server we own.
The yard camera. Shows the muster point, the tablet on its post, the staff standing in their groups, and at the moment of the beep nobody within ten feet of the post.
The drills. Every one. Twelve a year, for the four years I have been marshal, and, my predecessor says, for the ten before that. Minus one. Every time.
Who.
The building was a factory before it was a warehouse and the factory burned in 1971, and the list of the men who did not get out is in the council's records, and his name is on it, and the list has a note against each man of where he was found, and his was found in the yard.
In the yard. Not in the building. He had got out, the note says, and gone back in for somebody, and come out again, and been found in the yard at the spot where the men had been told to muster, and had died there, of the smoke, having reached the muster point.
He got out. He mustered. Nobody counted him, because there was no count, because that was 1971 and the count is the thing we learned.
What is done about it.
The minus one is logged on every drill as a tablet error and the drill is signed off as all accounted for, which it is, and one more.
What I do.
I run the drills.
I changed what I say. The procedure is that when the number is zero I say, all accounted for, and the drill is done. I used to say it and then the tablet would go to minus one and I would ignore it.
I wait for it now. I stand at the post with the tablet and the staff in their groups and the number at zero, and I wait the two minutes, and the tablet beeps, and his face comes up, and I say his name. Out loud, the way I say the name of anybody whose badge I cannot put a face to in the crowd, so that they will put their hand up. I say his name and I say, are you here, and I wait.
Nobody puts their hand up. Nobody ever will. But the first time I did it the tablet, which had been on minus one, went to zero. It counted him. It took him off the list and the number was right and the drill was done and I said all accounted for and it was true.
It does that every drill now. Minus one, his face, his name, are you here, zero. I have not told the staff why I do it. They think it is a tablet glitch I have found a way round, and I have let them, because if I told them that there is a man in the yard at every drill who got out in 1971 and has been waiting fifty years for somebody to count him, they would look at the post, and I do not want them to look at the post, because I have, and he is standing exactly where a man who had done everything right would stand, with his hand up.