The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 21
A Locked Room
The case, at this point, had two accused: Kieran Elias Hartwell, charged with the murder of Edmund Castor and the attempted murder of Sable Harmon, and Aldous Marrin — Petric — charged with assault causing bodily harm to Vera Crome and theft of the Reckoning from evidence. Both had solicitors. Both had made their positions clear, in different ways: Kieran was contrite and broken; Aldous was cooperative and, in the assessment of his arresting officers, at peace in a way that was either admirable or alarming depending on your disposition.
The case also had, as its background, the question of Julian Hartwell and the Hartwell family and what could or could not be done about an insurance fraud committed by a dead man in 1887. The answer, as the city’s lawyers worked through it, was: not much, legally. The statute of limitations on property fraud had long since expired. The dead could not be tried. The living Hartwells had not committed the original crime, whatever they had done to conceal knowledge of it.
What could be done was reputational. What could be done was historical. And what could be done was a formal acknowledgment from the Hartwell family — something Nadia had no power to compel but which, a week into the public emergence of the case, Julian Hartwell arranged a press conference to provide.
She watched it on the television in her office, standing up, with a cup of coffee. He was composed. He said the right things. He said that his family accepted responsibility for what Frederick Hartwell had done, that a charitable foundation would be established in the names of the four men who had died, that the Hartwell family would make reparations to the surviving descendants of Thomas Burr, Patrick Fallow, Jem Aldecoa, and Solomon Roos.
He said the names. All four. In order. Clearly, as if they had always been known.
Nadia turned off the television.
She was not satisfied. She was not unsatisfied. She was in the complicated middle place that she had learned, in eleven years, was where most honest conclusions lived. Things had happened that could not be undone. A man was dead. Truths that should have been spoken a hundred and fifty years ago had been hidden and had, in their hiding, cost more. The city would not be unmade by what had come out; it would absorb it, as cities absorb everything, and continue.
She sat at her desk and looked at the locked-room problem one more time. Not because it was still a problem — she had solved it, had understood the tea tray and the unlocked corridor and the forethought of a man who had studied the Archive’s layout for hours on a fabricated identity. It was solved.
She sat with it because she believed you should always sit with the thing after it was solved, and make sure you hadn’t missed anything. That the room was actually closed now, and not just appearing to be.
She went through it once more. She found nothing she had missed.
She closed the file.