The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 17
Confessions in Candlelight
Aldous Marrin lived in a flat in the old quarter, six blocks from the Archive. Nadia did not call ahead. She arrived at the building and pressed his buzzer and said her name and he let her in without hesitation, which told her either that he was very calm or that he had been expecting this.
His flat was not what she had expected. It was a scholar’s flat — books everywhere, paper everywhere, three different projects apparently in simultaneous progress on a long workbench along one wall. In the middle of the chaos: a small clear space, and on it, the Reckoning. He had been reading it. He had, she saw, been weeping.
He did not run. He did not lie. He sat at his workbench and looked at her with red eyes and said: “I’ve waited nine years to find it.”
“You’re Petric’s son.”
“Yes.”
“You got the job at the Archive to find it.”
“I changed my name when I was twenty-two. My father and I — we had a complicated relationship. But before he died, he told me about the box. About what it contained. About what he had done, hiding it — and then not being brave enough to bring it out.” He looked at the document. “He spent his life regretting it. He spent his life knowing what the Hartwells had done and knowing that the document that proved it was sitting in a box under a building, and doing nothing.”
“So you did something.”
“I got a job. I waited. I thought — I thought if I found it legitimately, as an archivist, I could bring it out through proper channels. That it could go to the historians, to the press.” He spread his hands. “And then someone authorized Castor’s access, and then Castor died, and I knew someone was going to find it before I did and make it disappear.”
“So you took it.”
“Yes.” He looked at the Reckoning. “And I hit Mrs. Crome, which I — I did not intend to hurt her. I panicked.”
“Mr. Marrin—”
“I know,” he said quietly. “I know what happens next. I’m not going to resist.” He picked up the Reckoning — carefully, with both hands, the hands of a man who had spent his career caring for old documents. “I just want you to promise me one thing.”
“I can’t promise anything.”
“That it doesn’t disappear. Whatever else happens — trials, whatever — that this document goes into the public record. That someone reads it.”
He held it out to her. She took it.
“The four men who died,” he said. “They had families. Names. Someone should know them.”
She looked at him. He was not a murderer. He was not Kieran Hartwell, who had misjudged a dose and killed a man. He was a man who had spent nine years in careful proximity to a truth that he had not yet managed to set free, and who had, at the end, done the thing that many people do at the end: acted badly in the service of something he believed was right.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said. It was not a promise. It was what it was.