The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 15
What the Clockmaker Saw
There was still something that didn’t fit.
Nadia had learned, early in her career, to distrust the neatly solved case. Not because cases were never neat — some were, surprisingly — but because the instinct for neatness was dangerous. The mind closed around a satisfying explanation the way a fist closes around something it doesn’t want to drop, and the pressure of the grip was exactly sufficient to obscure the details that hadn’t been explained.
The detail that hadn’t been explained was Sable Harmon’s shop.
Kieran Hartwell had gone to Sable Harmon’s shop to look for a provenance document. He had found her alone, he had added aconitine to her tea, and he had — by his own account — left before she fell unconscious, taking nothing because he hadn’t found what he was looking for. The forensic team had found evidence of the shop having been searched, but Kieran hadn’t done that searching: he’d been in Dune Cray by then.
Someone else had searched Sable Harmon’s shop. Someone who knew she had been incapacitated and had used the window.
She went back to the print shop alone. It was a Tuesday, the same day of the week as the morning Hilde had found Castor, which felt irrelevant and which she noted anyway. The shop was still sealed. She let herself in with the forensic access key and stood in Sable’s workspace — the long table, the equipment, the careful organization of a woman who had spent decades working with paper and had arranged her tools with the precision of long habit.
The shop occupied the ground floor of an old warehouse. Beside it, sharing a wall, was the studio of the ceramicist who had told them about the closed light. His name, she now knew, was Piet Garve, and he had mentioned, in his initial statement, that he had seen a car parked outside Sable’s shop in the early hours of Monday morning. He hadn’t thought much of it. He was often there late, and the neighbourhood had variable hours.
She found Piet in his studio. He was a large man with a corona of white hair and the focused, absent quality of someone continuously in the middle of a thought. When she asked him about the car, he put down his tool and thought carefully.
“Black, or very dark blue. Newer model. The plates—” he began, and then stopped, and said: “There was a sticker. On the rear windscreen. A small oval, white. Like an association sticker, you know the type.”
“What did it say?”
He thought for a long moment. “CPH,” he said. “I remember because I thought: Copenhagen. But it’s probably not Copenhagen.”
CPH. Nadia turned the letters over. Not Copenhagen. Crome Publishing House.
She sat with this for a moment. Then she picked up her phone and called Vera Crome.
No answer.
She called the publishing house’s main line. A receptionist informed her that Mrs. Crome had left for the day. She called Vera Crome’s personal line again. This time it went directly to voicemail, as if the phone had been switched off.
She looked at Piet Garve. “The car — which way did it go when it left?”
He pointed north. Toward the old quarter. Toward the Archive.