The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 4
A Map With No North
The Crome Publishing House occupied a Georgian townhouse on Aldiss Street — the name was coincidental, or perhaps not — and Vera Crome received them in a first-floor study lined floor to ceiling with books that had the look of objects acquired not for reading but for the statement they made about the person who owned them. She was seventy years old, precise in her dress and manner, with the particular quality of alertness that wealthy women of a certain generation develop as a form of self-protection.
She offered them tea. Nadia accepted. Bryn did not, which was their standard arrangement: Bryn declining was a small social friction that sometimes made people talk more to compensate.
“Edmund was a careful man,” Vera said, when they had settled. “Not careful enough, apparently.” She said it without grief. A statement of fact, or of judgment.
“You authorized his access to the Concordance,” Nadia said. “Alone. Without the other board members.”
“Marguerite died last spring. And Aldous Petric the younger hasn’t answered a telephone in six months. I didn’t feel I had the luxury of waiting.”
“The luxury. What were you afraid of losing?”
She set down her teacup with a very small sound. “There is a manuscript in the Concordance,” she said. “Not formally catalogued. I’ve known about it for thirty years — Petric senior told me before he died. He said it was the reason the Society sealed the collection. He said it was the reason the Society dissolved.”
“What manuscript?”
She looked at Nadia for a long moment. “I don’t know what it is. That’s why I sent Castor. He was the best appraiser in the country. If anyone could identify it and determine its value — its nature — it was him.”
“Did he find it?”
“I don’t know. He was supposed to meet me yesterday evening and did not. And now you’re here.”
She picked up her tea again. Her hands were steady. People who had spent decades in publishing were accustomed to bad news, Nadia reflected — the sort of people who had learned to receive catastrophe with composure because catastrophe, in their world, was always financial and financial catastrophe was always recoverable if you kept your head.
But a man was dead.
“Mrs. Crome,” Bryn said, from his position by the window where he had been examining the street, “did Edmund Castor have enemies in the book trade?”
She gave a thin sound that might have been a laugh. “Edmund Castor had nothing but enemies in the book trade. He had exposed four forgeries in the last decade. Three dealers lost everything. One” — she paused — “one lost more than money.”
“A name,” Nadia said.
Vera Crome looked at the bookshelf. Then at the window. Then at Nadia. “Sable Harmon,” she said. “He exposed her in 2019. She had been selling forged first editions for eight years. Very good forgeries. Castor found them anyway.”
She set down her cup. “She swore she would ruin him. Those were her exact words, at the tribunal. I will ruin him if it takes me the rest of my life.” A pause. “She was released from prison fourteen months ago.”