The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 7
The Manuscript
Sable Harmon woke on the second day. She woke slowly, the way people do when their body has been somewhere dark and is not entirely certain the light is trustworthy. Nadia was at the hospital when she came around, seated in the corner of the private room, and she waited while the nurse did what nurses do and then she moved her chair closer to the bed and said nothing.
It was Sable who spoke first. “Castor’s dead,” she said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“And they came to my shop.”
“Yes. What were they looking for?”
Sable had a broad, weathered face, the face of a woman who had done work with her hands for many years. She stared at the ceiling. “When I was inside,” she said — she did not say in prison, she said inside, the careful euphemism of someone who has reconfigured their relationship with the word — “I had a lot of time. I read. I always read. And one of the books I read was a scholarly history of the Inkwell Society, published in the nineties by a professor at Cray University.”
Nadia’s attention sharpened. “Cray University,” she said.
“Yes. Small institution. Closed down in 2004, I think. The book was privately published, low print run, almost no circulation. It mentioned in a footnote — a footnote — that the Society had in its possession at the time of dissolution a sealed document known internally as the Reckoning. That’s what the founding members called it. A document that contained, in the professor’s words, ‘material of significant legal and moral consequence to several families of the Veldmoor establishment.'”
“You wrote to Castor about it.”
Sable looked at her. “I knew Edmund,” she said. Flat. Not warm, but not without history. “Before the tribunal, before everything. He was the best in the business. If there was a document of historical value and uncertain provenance, he was the man to find it.”
“Even after what he did to you?”
Sable was quiet for a moment. “He found the forgeries because they were forgeries,” she said. “I was angry for a long time. But he was right.” A pause. “I wrote to him six months ago. Told him about the Reckoning. He wrote back to say he was already looking.”
Nadia leaned forward. “Already looking. Who sent him? Vera Crome?”
“He didn’t say. But he said he’d had a visit from someone — someone who claimed to represent a private collector. Someone who wanted the Reckoning and was offering a great deal of money for it. Edmund told the man no. He said the document wasn’t his to sell. And then—” she paused — “he said the man smiled and said: It will be, eventually. Everything is, eventually.”
She looked at the ceiling again. “Three weeks later, Edmund was dead.”
Nadia sat back. The manuscript existed. Someone had already stolen one document from the Concordance — but not the Reckoning itself, which had not been in the box. Because it had never been there. Because someone in 1988, or earlier, had moved it.
Or because it had never been in the Archive at all.“