The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 23 The Confession The trial of Kieran Elias Hartwell ran for eleven days in January. It was held in the city’s central court — a Victorian building on Hartwell Road, a name that nobody thought to change during the trial and which the journalist from the Courier noted, in a … Read more
The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 22 What Was Buried In December, a historian named Professor Yael Stein published the first scholarly article about the Reckoning in a journal of social history. She had been granted access to the document through the court system, and she wrote with precision and without sensation: the names of the … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 18 The Auction While Nadia had been finding bodies and tracing family histories through document boxes, another story had been running in parallel — one she had only partly noticed and now found herself standing at the edge of. On the same week Edmund Castor had died, a private auction … Read more
The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 17 Confessions in Candlelight Aldous Marrin lived in a flat in the old quarter, six blocks from the Archive. Nadia did not call ahead. She arrived at the building and pressed his buzzer and said her name and he let her in without hesitation, which told her either that he … Read more
The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 16 The Third Body She drove too fast and knew she was driving too fast and did not slow down. The Archive was locked — sealed for the investigation — but the seal on the rear delivery entrance had been cut. She found it hanging loose, the forensic tape broken, … Read more
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 … Read more
The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 14 Rain on the Estuary They drove back to Veldmoor in the rain. Kieran Hartwell was in the back of a constable’s car behind them and the rain came in from the sea in grey curtains and the estuary road was dark and slick and Bryn drove with the careful … Read more
