The Inkwell Murders – Chapter 8
Forty-Four Steps
Nadia went back to the Archive.
The building, sealed for investigation, had a different quality now — the particular silence of a place that has had secrets revealed in it and is absorbing the aftermath. Hilde Roos, who had taken to arriving at seven-thirty each morning to assist the investigation with an earnestness that Nadia found both touching and useful, met her at the door.
“The index,” Nadia said. “The Inkwell bequest index. I want to look at the original, not the copy.”
The original index was a leather-bound ledger, handwritten, maintained from the time of the bequest through the Archive’s management of it. Hilde brought it to the reading room — Reading Room A, not C, which remained sealed — and set it on the table and stood back.
Nadia opened it. The entries were in multiple hands, spanning decades of archivists. Most were in the careful, slightly formal cursive of institutional record-keeping. But near the back — the entries from 1988, the year the Society finally dissolved — the handwriting changed. The entries for that year were in a different hand: smaller, more urgent, the letters pressed harder into the page as if written under some pressure.
And there, on the last page of entries for November 1988, a single line in that pressed, urgent script: See note — R. has moved the principal document. Stairwell. 44 steps.
Nadia read it twice. “Stairwell,” she said. “Forty-four steps.”
“The Archive has two staircases,” Hilde said. “The main one and the back service stairs.”
“How many steps does the main one have?”
Hilde thought. “Thirty-six. It goes up three floors.”
“And the back stairs?”
A pause. “More. I’ve never counted.”
They went to the back stairs together — a narrow limestone staircase at the rear of the building, lit by a single high window, smelling of stone and the particular cold that accumulates in spaces rarely visited. Nadia counted as she descended: twelve steps to the first landing, twelve more to the ground floor, then continuing below, into the building’s basement, which housed the climate-controlled storage vaults.
Thirty-six at the basement level. She kept going. Forty-four steps below the ground floor, there was a door she had not seen on any of the building’s maps — a low iron door, set into the stone, with a latch and no lock.
She opened it.
Inside: a sub-basement room. Stone walls, stone floor, a single bare bulb on a pull-string that still worked. Shelving along three walls, empty except for one thing: a flat wooden box, the size of a large book, wrapped in oilskin and tied with cord that had darkened with age. On the oilskin, in faded ink: The Reckoning. Property of the Inkwell Society. DO NOT OPEN.
She did not open it. She called Bryn.