The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 12
A Name in the Margins
Kieran Elias Hartwell was not at the family address, not at his registered apartment in the new quarter, and not responding to his phone. He had last used his bank card three days earlier at a petrol station forty miles east of Veldmoor on the estuary road. He was, in the language of police reports, not locatable — which was different from being missing, though in Nadia’s experience the difference was usually a matter of timing.
While Bryn coordinated the search, Nadia opened the Reckoning.
She did it properly: with gloves, with the Archive’s head conservator present, with a forensic camera recording the process and the document photographed at each stage. The oilskin wrapping had preserved it well. Inside the wooden box: a manuscript of forty-one pages, handwritten on paper that the conservator dated, preliminarily, to the late nineteenth century. The ink was brown with age but legible. The hand was precise and formal — the hand of a man accustomed to writing and to the weight of what he was writing.
On the first page, a title: A Confession in Full. Written by G. W. Crome, 7th November 1888. To be kept sealed until the named parties are dead, and then to be kept sealed thereafter, for the record of truth and for the sake of conscience.
G. W. Crome. Great-grandfather, perhaps great-great-grandfather, of Vera Crome. A founder of the Society. And the writer of a confession that had been sealed for a hundred and thirty-seven years.
Nadia read it sitting at the table in the sub-basement room with the single bare bulb, the conservator reading over her shoulder, neither of them speaking. It took her forty minutes. When she finished she sat for a moment with her hands flat on the table.
“Good God,” the conservator said quietly.
“Yes,” Nadia agreed.
The confession concerned an incident in 1887: a fire at a printing house on Marsh Street — the same street where the Archive now stood — that had killed four workers. The fire had been ruled accidental. The coroner’s finding had been clear. The newspapers had reported it and moved on. The families of the four dead workers had received modest compensation from the printing house’s owner and had been grateful for it.
The printing house’s owner had been Frederick Hartwell.
And the fire, according to G. W. Crome’s confession, had not been accidental. Frederick Hartwell had known that the building was unsafe — had been told by his own engineer that the boiler was defective and likely to fail. He had not repaired it. He had not evacuated his workers. He had, instead, insured the building three weeks before it burned, at a premium that suggested he expected to collect.
Four men had died. Frederick Hartwell had collected the insurance, rebuilt the printing house, and continued his life. G. W. Crome, who had been present at the engineer’s briefing, had written his confession and given it to the Society, unable to stay silent entirely but unable, it seemed, to speak.
In the margins of the last page, in a different ink, a different hand — later, much later — three words had been added: The Hartwells know.