The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 1
The Body in the Archive
The city of Veldmoor had a habit of keeping its secrets in paper. Every scandal, every swindle, every love letter and death threat composed in this waterlogged port town eventually found its way into the Municipal Archive — a vast limestone building at the edge of the old quarter where the streets smelled of brine and old money in approximately equal measure. The Archive had stood for a hundred and forty years. It had survived floods and fires and one particularly unfortunate episode involving a mayor and a missing census. It was considered, by the people who thought about such things, to be permanent.
Which made it all the more shocking when the body turned up in Reading Room C on a Tuesday morning in November.
The body belonged — or had belonged — to a man named Edmund Castor, age sixty-one, a rare-book appraiser of considerable reputation and, it would later emerge, considerably more secrets. He was found by Hilde Roos, the junior archivist who opened Reading Room C at eight each morning. Hilde was twenty-four years old and had been on the job for three months. She had expected to find the usual: the long oak table with its green-shaded lamps, the smell of paper and age, the hush that the room maintained with the authority of a cathedral.
Instead she found Edmund Castor face-down on the table, his right hand curled around a fountain pen that still leaked ink, his left arm hanging loose at his side. The papers in front of him were still neatly stacked. A teacup sat at his elbow, half-full and cold.
What made Hilde’s stomach drop — more than the body, more than the stillness — was the ink. It had pooled from the leaking pen and spread across the uppermost paper in a dark irregular stain, and in that stain, as clearly as if it had been written deliberately, three letters had formed: K. E. R.
She did not touch anything. She called the police at eight-seventeen and stood in the doorway with her hand pressed flat against the doorframe, staring at the letters until she heard footsteps in the hall.
The first officer on scene was a young constable named Fitch who looked at the body and then at the letters and then wrote both down in a notebook with the careful handwriting of a man who suspects that small details may later become important. He was right to suspect this. He simply had no idea how important, or how strange, the days ahead would become.
By nine o’clock, the Archive had been sealed. By nine-thirty, the medical examiner had arrived and confirmed what was already obvious: Edmund Castor was dead. By ten, the call had gone up to the city detective’s office, and the case had been assigned.
And at ten-fifteen, Detective Nadia Reyes walked through the front doors of the Municipal Archive and looked at the reading room and at the body and at the three letters in spilled ink and said, very quietly, “Well. Someone wanted this to be read.”