The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 10
Poison & Paper
The toxicology report came through on Thursday afternoon. The substance in Edmund Castor’s teacup — and, in smaller concentration, in Sable Harmon’s mug — was aconitine, derived from monkshood: an alkaloid poison rare enough to require specialist knowledge, effective enough in the right dose to kill without obvious signs of trauma. The medical examiner placed Castor’s manner of death as cardiac arrest induced by the toxin. The small comfort, if it could be called that, was that aconitine worked quickly. He would not have suffered long.
The question was how it had reached his cup. Reading Room C had been locked from the inside when Hilde found it. The windows were barred — Victorian iron bars, original to the building, not decorative. There was no other access.
Bryn had spent two days on this problem and had arrived at a theory. He presented it to Nadia in the car, driving back from the medical examiner’s office, in the measured tone he used for ideas he was not yet certain of.
“The room wasn’t locked when the killer left. The room was locked when Castor arrived.”
Nadia looked at him. “Explain.”
“The tea. Hilde brings a tray with a pot and cups to any researcher who requests it — it’s an Archive service, she mentioned it. The tray is prepared in the small kitchen on the ground floor and left outside the reading room door. Castor would have brought it in himself when he arrived, locked the door behind him — he was dealing with restricted materials, locking the door is standard practice — and made himself a cup.”
“The poison was in the pot. Already in the pot when he collected it.”
“Yes. He poisoned himself without knowing it. The killer never needed to enter the room.”
Nadia leaned back. “So we’re looking for someone with access to the Archive’s kitchen.”
“Or someone who could get to the tray in the time between it being prepared and Castor collecting it. The tray sits outside the room for up to twenty minutes. The corridor has no camera — the Archive’s surveillance is only at entrances and exits.”
She was quiet for a moment. “The access log. Someone using the name Ramos entered the Archive the day before Castor’s appointment. Signed in, spent two hours in a public reading room, signed out.”
“Long enough to familiarize themselves with the layout. The kitchen, the corridor, the timing.”
“They came back the next day — the day of Castor’s appointment — and poisoned the tray.”
“And we have no image of Ramos because—”
“The entrance camera was reported faulty on both days,” Bryn said. “Reported by the Archive’s maintenance service. I’ve been looking into the maintenance service.” He paused with the timing of a man who has learned to let pauses do work. “The technician who reported the fault and the technician who should have repaired it — neither of them have a record of attending those jobs. Someone called the faults in to dispatch and then cancelled the repair. The call came from a prepaid phone. But the dispatch records show a reference number.”
“And?”
He handed her a printout. At the top: a reference number. And beside it, in the dispatch system’s automatic field: the subscriber account the prepaid phone had been purchased against, which should have been anonymous but which, through some small administrative error that the killer had apparently not anticipated, had been logged against a real name.
Not K. E. Ramos.
A real name. A Veldmoor name. A name that, when Nadia read it, made her understand why the city’s old families were involved, and why the Reckoning had stayed hidden for a hundred and fifty years, and what it was going to cost someone to keep it hidden now.