The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 19
Underground
The address was in the Tangle — Nadia’s own neighbourhood, or what had been her neighbourhood when she was a child. The streets down here were narrow and named after no one famous, the buildings modest and close, and the woman who opened the door was seventy-eight years old and had the particular quality of someone who has been expecting a knock for a very long time and has spent the interval preparing exactly what to say.
Her name was Liese Maren-Vane. She was small, wiry, and moved with the efficiency of someone who had never had space to waste. She brought Nadia inside to a kitchen that smelled of good bread and old books and sat her down with coffee and a tin of biscuits and said: “My grandmother knew about the fire.”
Nadia drank her coffee. “Tell me.”
The original L. Maren — Liese Maren, who had been the only woman at the Society’s founding in 1871 — had known Frederick Hartwell. Had worked for him, briefly, as a bookkeeper at the printing house. Had been let go six weeks before the fire, in a round of dismissals that had seemed, at the time, like ordinary economies. Had later understood, when the fire came, that the dismissals had not been random — that Hartwell had been reducing the number of people who knew the state of the building, removing witnesses by the simple mechanism of removing them from the premises.
Liese Maren had not been in the building when it burned. She had survived. She had joined the Inkwell Society two years later, at Crome’s invitation, because she was a poet of considerable ability — and because she knew that G. W. Crome, who had been her friend, was carrying a guilt he needed somewhere to put.
She had spent her life after the Society’s dissolution maintaining a private record. Not the Reckoning — she had not known where it was. But everything surrounding it: the names of the dead, their families, what became of them. She had passed this to her daughter, who had passed it to Liese Maren-Vane, who had spent twenty years trying to find a way to make it matter.
“I saw the auction listing,” she said. “I recognized the description. I bought it before anyone else could — before the Hartwells could destroy it or anyone else could weaponize it.”
“You’ve had it for twenty years,” Nadia said. “Why not come forward?”
Liese Maren-Vane looked at her for a moment with the patient eyes of an old woman who has lived in the Tangle for seven decades. “Come forward to whom?” she said. “The Hartwells have lawyers who have been dealing with things like this for generations. I am an old woman in the Tangle with a piece of paper. Who listens?”
Nadia had no answer to this that did not involve the phrase I’m sorry, which she said.
Liese Maren-Vane nodded. “The four men were named Thomas Burr, Patrick Fallow, Jem Aldecoa, and Solomon Roos,” she said. Steady, deliberate. She had waited a long time to say these names. “Aldecoa was twenty-six. Roos was twenty-two.”
Nadia wrote them down. Roos. She looked at the name. “Hilde Roos,” she said. “The junior archivist.”
Liese Maren-Vane looked at her steadily. “Solomon Roos’s great-granddaughter,” she said. “I know. I’ve known for years. I wondered whether she knew.”