The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 5
The Second Victim
Sable Harmon was not difficult to find. She had returned to Veldmoor after her release and was operating a small print-restoration shop in the old warehouse district near the south docks, which was either a demonstration of extraordinary nerve or extraordinary innocence, depending on your disposition. Nadia and Bryn went there the morning after their visit to Vera Crome.
They found the shop shuttered. A hand-lettered card in the window read: Closed — Family Matter. A neighbour — an elderly ceramicist in the adjacent unit — told them she had not seen Sable since Sunday and that the light in the back room, which usually burned until midnight, had been dark for three days.
They requested a wellness check from the local constables and got into Bryn’s car and drove back toward the Archive. Nadia was looking at the photographs of the papers from Reading Room C on her phone when Bryn’s radio crackled.
The wellness check had found the back room of the print shop unlocked.
Inside: Sable Harmon, age fifty-three, formerly of one of Veldmoor’s finest forging operations, seated in a wooden chair at her work table. Not dead — this was the word Nadia held onto when they turned around and drove back, fast — not dead. But unconscious, her breathing shallow, her lips faintly blue, an empty mug at her elbow with the ghost of a smell that Nadia recognized from Edmund Castor’s teacup in Reading Room C.
The same smell. The same method, abandoned partway through — or interrupted, or insufficient for this particular body.
They took her to hospital. The toxicology team went to work. Nadia stood in the corridor of the emergency wing and thought about what it meant: two victims, same delivery mechanism, one dead and one alive. Either the dosage had been miscalculated for Sable Harmon — she was a larger woman, and the drug, whatever it was, may have needed more — or the killer had not intended her to die. Had intended her only to sleep.
Had intended to search her shop while she slept.
Nadia called Constable Fitch and told him to get a team to the print shop before anything was moved or touched. Then she called the forensic team and told them to look for signs that the space had been searched. Then she stood in the corridor and looked at the wall and tried to understand what both Edmund Castor and Sable Harmon could possibly have that someone was willing to kill and drug and search for.
The answer came to her in the form of a question: what was in the Concordance?
And then, immediately after: had Castor found it before he died?
She called the Archive. She asked Hilde Roos to check whether anything had been removed from the Inkwell Society collection. There was a long pause, the sound of footsteps on stone floors, the opening and closing of doors.
“Detective,” Hilde said, when she came back, and her voice had changed — tightened into the register of someone who has just found the thing they were afraid to find. “The Concordance box. It’s been opened.”
“And?”
“It’s mostly intact. But there’s a document missing. The log says it was pulled on Friday, the day before Castor arrived. It wasn’t Castor. The access record has a different name.”
A pause.
“What name?” Nadia said.
“K. E. Ramos.”
Nadia looked at the ceiling. K. E. R. Three letters in spilled ink. Not a random pattern. Not a dying message from Edmund Castor — or not only that. A name. A warning, or an accusation, written in the last ink of a man who had known, even as the drug began its work, what had been done to him and who had done it.