Aldric Vane’s Last Day
The last hours of a brave man tell the whole story.
Past || Death || Investigation || Courage
She reconstructed it from Seline Drath’s account, from the phone records she pulled through official channels with the justification of a homicide investigation — she had, by this point, formally opened a case on Aldric Vane’s death, filing the paperwork at 6 a.m. before the administrative day shift arrived, describing it as a suspicious drowning that required preliminary investigation, language bland enough to not attract attention at the senior level — and from the testimony of two people who had seen Vane in the Canal District in the hours before his death.
His last day had begun normally, with the practiced normalcy of a man who had spent years concealing the true nature of his work even from people close to him. He had gone to his office — a small engineering consultancy he ran as cover, in a building on the northern edge of the Canal District — at 8 a.m. He had taken two client calls and reviewed a set of drainage calculations that were genuine, the sort of legitimate work he maintained to sustain the cover. His assistant had noted nothing unusual. He had eaten lunch at his usual café. He had seemed, she told investigators, slightly distracted. She had attributed this to the weather, which had been particularly oppressive that day, the sky pressing down on the city like something about to break.
At 2 p.m. he had gone to the canal. Seline Drath had met him there, in the punt — the same punt that Mara had climbed down to the night she found the case. He had given Seline the case. He had told her: “If anything happens before I get back, find someone in the department who hasn’t been compromised and give them the location. Wait for someone who comes alone. Who comes at night.” He had seemed, Seline said, not frightened. He had seemed resolved. The distinction was important to Seline and she made it with precision: “Resolved. As if he had settled the argument with himself and the only thing left was the action.” He had told her three things she did not understand at the time and which she reported to Mara as accurately as she could. First: “The clock is already running.” Second: “The vault will be accessible within forty-eight hours regardless — the water is being pulled back.” Third: “They know that too. That’s why tonight matters.”
He had left Seline in the punt at 3 p.m. He had gone north, on foot, through the Canal District, toward the Ferren Quarter. Two witnesses — a woman hanging laundry on a third-floor fire escape above the waterline, and a canal maintenance worker on his afternoon round — reported seeing a man matching Vane’s description moving with purpose through the district, along the elevated walkways that connected the higher sections of the flooded neighborhood. Both described him as moving quickly. One described him as looking over his shoulder. The maintenance worker saw him turn onto the elevated path that ran along the embankment toward the park with the fence. That was the last sighting. He had been found under Ferren Bridge at dawn the following morning, face up, gold clock in his raised hand, eyes open. Cause of death: drowning. Water in his lungs consistent with canal water. No signs of struggle on his body. No marks. Nothing that said definitively: murder. Nothing that said definitively: accident. The precise ambiguity of someone who knew how to make a death look like what they wanted it to look like. “He was not drowned,” the index card had said. She believed it. She needed the science to prove it. And she needed to know what he had gone to the Ferren Quarter park to find or do, on the last afternoon of his life, when he knew — when he had told Seline with the calm of a man who has made peace — that they were coming.