The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 11
The Broken Seal
The name on the prepaid phone account was Hartwell. Not a first name — the account was registered to a trust called Hartwell & Sons Legacy Trust, which had been operating in Veldmoor for generations. The Hartwells were among the founding families of the Inkwell Society: Frederick Hartwell had been one of its six male founders, a shipping magnate who had written two largely unread novels and had funded the Society’s premises for its first decade. His descendants still ran the largest shipping concern in the Veldmoor port. Their name was on a building at the university and a wing of the hospital and a fountain in the north quarter that had not worked in fifteen years.
The current head of the Hartwell family was a man named Julian Hartwell, fifty-eight, who sat on three civic boards and served as a patron of the Veldmoor Arts Council. Nadia knew his face from charity pages in the local papers — the kind of man who appeared at ribbon-cuttings looking appropriately distinguished. She had never had reason to speak with him before.
She brought Bryn and called ahead. Julian Hartwell’s secretary informed them, with the particular inflection of a person who has been trained to decline on behalf of powerful people, that Mr. Hartwell was occupied with meetings all day. Nadia told the secretary to tell Mr. Hartwell that the meetings could continue through the afternoon and she would speak with him that evening at the station, or he could meet her at his offices within the hour. The secretary put her on hold. When she came back, Mr. Hartwell had a window at two.
He received them in a corner office with a view of the harbour — the kind of view that functioned as a declaration of position, the city’s waterfront spread below like something owned. He was a trim man with a disciplined quality about him, the sort of man who ran in the mornings and read briefings over breakfast and had very few illusions about the relationship between power and effort. He looked at Nadia and at Bryn and did not offer his hand.
“I’ll say at the outset,” he said, before she could speak, “that I’m prepared to cooperate fully.”
Nadia sat. “Then you know why we’re here.”
“I know a man has died. I know it involves the Archive.”
“A phone linked to your family trust was used to interfere with the Archive’s security system on the day Edmund Castor died.”
He absorbed this without visible reaction. “The trust has several authorized users,” he said. “I am one. There are others.”
“Names.”
He picked up a pen from the desk, which he did not write with, which was a gesture of controlled thought. “My sister. My nephew. Our solicitor’s firm.” He set the pen down. “My nephew’s name,” he said, “is Kieran Elias Hartwell.”
A silence settled in the room that had the quality of a door closing.
“K. E.,” Bryn said, from his chair.
“Yes,” Julian said. He looked at the harbour. “I did not know about Castor. I want that to be on record. I did not know what Kieran was doing. I knew about the Reckoning — my father told me, as his father told him, generation to generation, always the same instruction: leave it alone, let it stay hidden, what it contains does not need to come to light.”
“But Kieran disagreed.”
He looked at her. “Kieran is thirty-one. He has spent three years researching our family history. He is not motivated by the same things I am.” A pause. “He wants to know what Frederick Hartwell did in 1887.”