The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 20
The Last Letter
She told Hilde Roos herself. She owed her that — or perhaps she owed it to Solomon Roos, or to the city that had buried four men for a hundred and fifty years under the convenient rubric of accident.
Hilde was at the Archive when Nadia found her, doing what Hilde Roos did: working. Cataloguing, cross-referencing, maintaining the meticulous index of other people’s histories. She was twenty-four years old and had been in this building for three months and had found a body on her second Tuesday and had handled it with a steadiness that Nadia now understood was not training. It was temperament. The temperament of a woman from a family that had learned, over generations, to keep going regardless.
They sat in Reading Room A. Not C — Reading Room C remained sealed, would remain so for months. Reading Room A had comfortable chairs and good light and no associations with death.
Nadia told her about Solomon Roos. About the fire. About what G. W. Crome had written, and what Liese Maren-Vane had kept, and what the Hartwells had hidden. She was careful. She told the facts in order. She watched Hilde’s face.
Hilde sat very still. The kind of stillness that is not absence of feeling but the opposite of it — feeling so full that any movement would displace it.
“My grandmother always said,” she said eventually, “that someone in our family had died badly, a long time ago. She didn’t know the details. It was just — a thing that was known. A shadow.”
“Now you know the details,” Nadia said.
Hilde looked at the table. “And the Reckoning — the confession — it’s real? It names Frederick Hartwell?”
“Clearly. In Crome’s own hand.”
Hilde was quiet for a long moment. “What happens to it?”
“It goes into the case file. It becomes a matter of public record when the case goes to trial. The prosecutor will likely use it as evidence of motive. And then” — Nadia chose her words — “I’m going to recommend it be made available to historians. And to journalists.”
Hilde looked at her. “You can do that?”
“I can recommend it very loudly to people who can.”
Hilde nodded slowly. She looked at the room around her — the shelves, the documents, the filing of a hundred years of the city’s life. “I work in a building that was hiding the truth about my family,” she said. Not quite a question.
“Yes.”
“And I found the body that started unburying it.”
“Yes.”
Hilde was quiet again. Then she said, in the voice of someone who has been thinking about a question for a long time and has arrived at an answer that is not satisfying but is true: “I think I would like to stay and work here. Even knowing. Maybe especially knowing.”
Nadia looked at her for a moment. “That seems like the right instinct,” she said.