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, the door pushed to. She called for backup and then went in anyway because waiting was not something she was capable of in this particular moment.
The stairwell. The forty-four steps. The sub-basement room.
The wooden box was on the floor. Its lid was open. The oilskin wrapping had been cut away. The Reckoning was gone.
Vera Crome was seated against the far wall of the sub-basement room with her back to the stone and her legs straight out in front of her and a cut on her temple that had bled down the side of her face and dried there. She was breathing. Nadia crouched beside her and said her name and she opened her eyes.
“He was here already,” she said. Her voice was steady despite everything. “I came to — I wanted to see it. Before anyone else did. I’ve been wondering about that confession for thirty years.”
“Who was here?”
“He came from behind. I didn’t see his face. Younger than me — I could tell from the way he moved. He hit me with something and took the box and ran.”
Backup arrived. The paramedics came. Nadia stood in the sub-basement room with the empty box and the cut oilskin and thought about the shape of what had happened.
Kieran Hartwell was in custody. He had not done this. Someone else had come for the Reckoning — someone who knew where it was, because the only people who knew were Nadia, Bryn, Hilde Roos, the conservator, and whoever else they had told or who had been told by them.
Nadia walked back up the forty-four steps and stood in the stairwell and reviewed every conversation she had had since opening the box. Every person she had called. Every person in that room. The conservator’s name was Dr. Aldous Marrin — a fact she had registered and then filed away because the name Aldous was not uncommon and because she had been focused on the document and not the person.
Aldous.
The last executor before Vera Crome’s board had been Aldous Petric. Who had a son. Aldous Petric the younger — unreachable for six months. Who had, presumably, a reason for being unreachable.
The conservator was in his fifties. She did the arithmetic.
She called the Archive’s HR records. Dr. Aldous Marrin had been employed at the Archive for nine years. His previous employment: the private collection department of the Veldmoor Museum. His academic credentials: postgraduate from the University of Cray.
The university that had closed in 2004.
The university that had published a scholarly history of the Inkwell Society with a footnote about the Reckoning.
She ran for her car.