The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 2
Detective Reyes
Nadia Reyes was thirty-eight years old and had been a detective in Veldmoor for eleven years, which meant she had seen the city at its worst: its dockland murders, its domestic terrors, its elaborate financial crimes that unspooled over months in courtrooms that smelled of polished wood and suppressed panic. She was not a tall woman, but she had a quality of stillness in a crime scene that people sometimes mistook for coldness. It was not coldness. It was attention — the deep, total attention of someone who understood that a room could tell you what happened if you were willing to listen to it carefully enough.
She had grown up in the south of the city, in a neighbourhood that the north side of Veldmoor referred to as the Tangle, which was either a geographic description of its streets or a social judgment, depending on who was speaking. Her mother had run a seamstress shop. Her father had worked the estuary fishing boats until his back gave out, and then he had sat in a chair by the window for five years and read every book the public library would lend him. It was from him that Nadia had inherited her belief that most stories were true if you read them carefully enough, and most crimes were stories.
Her partner was a man named Odel Bryn — ten years her senior, grey at the temples, with the mild face of a man who everyone underestimated and who had long since stopped correcting them. He was already in the reading room when she arrived, speaking quietly with Constable Fitch, taking notes in the angular shorthand that only he could read.
“Edmund Castor,” he said when she approached. “Appraiser. Well-known in the rare book trade, apparently. Hilde Roos found him at eight. Medical examiner says he’s been dead since somewhere between midnight and three in the morning.”
“Cause?”
“Pending, but no visible trauma. She’s looking at the cup.”
Nadia crouched beside the table without touching it. The teacup sat in its saucer with the composed dignity of objects that have no idea what has happened around them. The tea inside was cold and brown and she could smell something beneath the tannin — faint, chemical, the ghost of something that did not belong in a cup of tea.
“The letters,” she said.
“Natural spread of the ink,” Fitch said, from behind her. “Could be coincidence.”
“Could be,” she agreed. She stood and looked at the stain. K. E. R. Three letters, clear as type. The ink had found them in the paper’s texture as if it knew where to go. “What was he reading?”
The papers under the stain were bagged for evidence, but Fitch had photographed them in situ. He showed her his camera screen. A letter — handwritten, old paper, the ink brown with age — and beneath it several pages of type that appeared to be a catalogue of some kind. Numbers, descriptions, what looked like provenance notes.
“He requested the materials on Friday,” Hilde Roos said from the doorway. She had recovered some composure. Her voice was steady, though her hands were not. “The Archive holds a private collection — the Inkwell Society bequest. He had permission to examine it.”
Nadia looked at her. “The Inkwell Society,” she repeated. “What is that?”
Hilde hesitated. “Was,” she said. “It was a literary society. Very old. Very private. They dissolved about thirty years ago.” She paused. “They left everything to the Archive when they closed. Their papers, their library, their correspondence.” Another pause. “Their secrets, I suppose. That’s what some of the other archivists call it. The secret collection.”
Nadia looked at the teacup. Looked at the letters in the ink. Looked at the door of Reading Room C, which had, she had already noted, a lock that required a key — and which had been found, that morning, locked from the inside.
“We’re going to need to know everything about the Inkwell Society,” she said.