Rain spattered the rented Corolla's windscreen in irregular bursts, each drop catching the sodium glare from the Continental Hotel's canopy before sliding off into the dark. Cassian Aldridge kept his lens capped, his body folded into the driver's seat with the patience of someone accustomed to long, quiet hours. The engine had been off for three hours now. The radio was off. Even the heater had surrendered to conserve fuel, leaving the cabin cold enough that his breath left faint ghosts against the windshield whenever he leaned forward.
He preferred the cold. Warmth made him drowsy. Drowsiness made him careless. Carelessness, in his line of work, cost clients money and, more often than not, dignity.
The Continental occupied the corner of Beaufort and Carlisle, four storeys of Georgian pretension rebranded as boutique accommodation. Its clientele skewed toward visiting professionals and couples seeking discretion, which made it, in Cassian's professional opinion, an uninspired choice for an affair. The man in Suite 214 had selected the least imaginative hotel in a six-block radius. One might have expected a touch more imagination from a chartered accountant with aspirations toward partnership.
Cassian glanced at the dashboard clock. The luminous digits read 11:47. Four hours and seventeen minutes since he had parked beneath the dripping limbs of the plane tree across the street. His target, a Mr. Darren Collier, had entered the lobby at 7:32 with a woman who was not his wife, a woman whose perfume Cassian had caught on the night air before the revolving door swallowed them both. Tuberose and something darker. Gardenia, perhaps. He had noted the observation in his mind, filed it under the heading of unnecessary detail, and let it rest.
He lifted the lens cap. The camera, a Leica Q2 with a fixed Summilux, sat on his lap beneath a folded copy of the Financial Times. The newspaper had been a nice touch, his way of signalling to anyone who glanced at the car that the driver inside was merely a tedious man reading about bond yields. In practice, the Times served to disguise the camera's telltale silhouette from the lobby's doorman, who had a habit of glancing at parked vehicles whenever a guest of particular note arrived.
The doorman in question, a grey-haired man in a brass-buttoned coat, emerged from beneath the canopy at 11:51 to smoke a cigarette in the rain. Cassian watched him through the corner of his eye. The man cupped the cigarette beneath his palm and drew on it with the practised stoicism of someone who had been ignoring his wife's entreaties about lung cancer for thirty years. His gaze drifted across the street, paused on the Corolla, and moved on. Cassian had parked three cars further from the entrance than instinct preferred, a concession to caution. The Times was a prop. The cautious parking was the real disguise.
He returned his attention to the third-floor windows. Suite 214 was the corner unit on the east elevation, its curtains drawn since 8:15. The light inside had changed twice in the intervening hours. Once when the main overhead fixture had been switched on, and once, around 10:30, when it had been extinguished in favour of the softer glow of a bedside lamp. Cassian had not needed to see the silhouettes behind the curtain to know what the lamp's appearance meant. He had watched enough infidelity cases to recognise the choreography of indiscretion. The overhead light belonged to the early stages of an evening, the conversation, the negotiation of terms. The bedside lamp belonged to what came after.
He did not require further evidence. He had his photograph already, taken at 8:22 as the couple emerged from the lift to cross the lobby toward the hotel's restaurant. He had framed them between two potted ferns, the woman laughing with her mouth open and Collier's hand resting with proprietary ease on the small of her back. It was, in Cassian's considered view, an unforgivable photograph. Collier's face was turned toward the woman with an expression of unalloyed delight that he had presumably never shown his wife of eleven years. The diamond on his wife's ring finger, which Cassian had noted during the initial briefing with the client, was worth rather more than the annual salary of the woman on Collier's arm.
The job, then, was done. The remaining hours had been a private indulgence, a kind of slow punctuation at the end of a tedious sentence. He could have left at 9:00. He could have left at 9:30. He stayed because the rain was good cover and because the case, however slight, had reminded him why he preferred this work to chambers.
The legal profession, the family inheritance, the gilded address in Kensington that he had surrendered with a kind of surgical relief, none of it had ever suited him. He had been a barrister for six years, called to the bar at twenty-seven, and during that time he had developed a reputation for meticulous cross-examination and an unhealthy disinterest in the theatre of advocacy. He did not enjoy winning. He did not enjoy the performance of winning. He enjoyed the architecture of an argument, the precise load-bearing structure of a fact placed against another fact, and the moment when a witness's careful story came apart along a seam they had not realised was visible.
That architecture was, he had come to understand, what he now applied to the work of watching strangers. The marriage of Mr. Darren Collier, forty-two, chartered accountant, residents of Surbiton, father of two, was a building with a single cracked foundation stone. The woman, whose name he had not been asked to learn, was the weight that had brought the crack into view. He had merely photographed the moment of structural failure.
He lifted the Leica and took two final frames of the empty street. Habit, more than necessity. The doorman finished his cigarette, ground the stub into the wet pavement, and retreated beneath the canopy. The rain continued its irregular percussion against the roof. Cassian reached for the ignition, then paused.
His phone, sitting in the cup holder, illuminated with a single notification. A message from a number he did not recognise, sent at 11:54, while the doorman had been enjoying his carcinogenic indulgence.
He picked up the device. The message was brief.
Mr Aldridge, my name is Margot Whitfield. I understand from your sister that you are the appropriate person to contact regarding a private matter. I would be grateful if you could call me at your earliest convenience. The matter is not one I would wish to put in writing.
Cassian read the message twice. He read it a third time. He set the phone down on the passenger seat, where its glow lingered against the leather like a small persistent star.
Iris. His sister. He had not spoken to Iris in eleven days, which was, by the standards of their recent estrangement, a mild interval of silence. Their last exchange had been a telephone call in which Iris had informed him, with the icy precision she deployed when she was most furious, that she considered his present profession a family embarrassment. He had replied that the family had had rather a lot of embarrassments lately and one more hardly registered. She had hung up. He had poured himself a whisky and thought about it for less time than was perhaps warranted.
Now, apparently, Iris had given his number to a stranger named Whitfield. The Whitfield name was not unknown to him. He had read the obituary in the Times eight months ago, the one that had run for half a column and included the curious detail that the deceased, a Berkshire financier named Edmund Whitfield, had died of a heart attack on the day his company was raided by the Serious Fraud Office. The paper had run the story on page three, beneath a photograph of a country house that had been in the Whitfield family since the reign of George II. Cassian had read it with professional interest and moved on.
The Whitfield Account. The phrase occurred to him now, unbidden, in a manner he distrusted. He had an instinct for the way certain names gathered weight before one understood why.
He started the engine. The Corolla coughed once, then settled into its usual grudging idle. He wound down the window an inch to clear the fog from the windscreen, and the night air entered with the smell of wet tarmac and the distant suggestion of someone frying something in a kitchen several streets away. He pulled away from the kerwell, signalled, and turned toward Beaufort Street.
The drive back to his office in Holborn would take thirty minutes at this hour. He would use the time to compose himself. The Collier case was closed. The envelope with the developed prints would be on the client's desk by morning, along with a bill for nine hundred pounds and a brief, professionally neutral report.
The Whitfield matter, whatever it was, would have to wait until he had slept. He did not take cases from strangers named in text messages at midnight. He did not, as a rule, take cases referred by his sister at all, because Iris's referrals tended to arrive in the same tone she used when informing him of family funerals: with the implication that attendance was obligatory and that absence would be remembered.
He drove through the wet streets, his mind tidying itself in the way his mind always tidied itself after a job well finished. The case was a closed parenthesis. The woman with the perfume was probably asleep now, her head on the shoulder of a man who had, by morning, every intention of returning to Surbiton and pretending the evening had never occurred. Collier would receive the photographs in a plain manila envelope and pay Cassian the agreed fee with the same expression he probably wore when paying a parking ticket. The affair would not survive the week. Few of them did. People who conducted themselves with such absence of imagination in the choice of venue rarely possessed the imaginative stamina required for sustained deception.
Cassian did not judge them. That was not, strictly speaking, his job. His job was to obtain the evidence, present it without embellishment, and accept the fee. The judgement, the fury, the late-night weeping, the kitchen-table confrontations, the awkward conversations with the children, all of that belonged to his clients. He had long ago trained himself to observe without inheriting.
The Holborn office occupied the second floor of a Georgian townhouse on a side street near Gray's Inn. He let himself in through the street door, climbed the stairs in the dark, and locked his own door behind him. The office smelled faintly of paper and cold coffee. He did not switch on the lights. He set the camera on the desk, placed the memory card in the safe, and stood for a moment in the dark with his hand resting on the back of his chair.
Then he took out his phone, opened the message from the number he did not recognise, and dialled.
The line rang four times. A woman's voice answered, low and unhurried, with the kind of clarity that suggested she had been awake for some time and expected the call.
"Mr Aldridge. I am relieved you rang. I was not certain you would."
"Margot Whitfield," Cassian said. "You mentioned my sister."
"I did. I apologise for the hour. I would not have contacted you if the matter were not pressing."
"Tell me the matter."
A pause. He heard her breathe.
"My father," she said. "Eight months ago the obituary said he died of a heart attack. Eight months ago I would have believed that. Eight months ago I came home from abroad to settle the estate, and I have been settling it ever since. Something has come to light, Mr Aldridge, and I am no longer certain the obituary was accurate."
Cassian stood very still in the dark office. The rain had begun again outside, tapping at the sash windows with renewed conviction.
"Go on," he said.
"There is something you need to see," Margot Whitfield said. "Documents I have only just obtained. I would rather show you than describe them over a telephone at half past eleven at night."
"Where are you?"
"Parked outside a hotel in Bloomsbury. I have been sitting in the car for the better part of an hour, trying to decide whether to ring you at all."
"Hollister Street," Cassian said. "Number fourteen. Second floor. The door will be open."
He heard her breath catch, a small involuntary sound that she recovered from almost immediately.
"I can be there in twelve minutes."
The line went dead. Cassian set the phone down on the desk and stood listening to the rain. He thought about the message she had sent, the one that had mentioned his sister, and he felt the old familiar tightening at the base of his skull that he had learned to associate with cases he ought to refuse. He switched on the desk lamp, pulled the green shade low, and went to put the kettle on.
The office was a single room with a sash window overlooking the street, a filing cabinet he had bought second-hand, and three chairs arranged around a table that had belonged to his grandfather. The walls held a framed certificate of his call to the bar, a photograph of the Inns of Court he had been too sentimental to throw away, and nothing else. He had never believed in decorating for the benefit of clients. Clients came to him because they wanted what he knew, not what his rooms looked like.
He made tea in a brown pot, set out two cups, and sat down to wait.
The town car was not difficult to identify. Cassian heard it before he saw it: the low, expensive murmur of a Continental engine idling at the kerb, the clunk of a door, then footsteps on the wet pavement. They were quick footsteps, the footsteps of a woman who had made up her mind. He went to the window and looked down.
A black Mercedes saloon had drawn up outside number twelve, blocking his own gate. The driver remained behind the wheel, a silhouette in a peaked cap. The woman who got out of the rear door was tall and straight-backed, wearing a dark coat buttoned to the throat. She did not look up at the window. She crossed the pavement with her head slightly lowered, as though against rain she could not feel, and disappeared beneath the street awning. A moment later he heard her on the stairs.
He left his own door ajar and went back to his chair.
She knocked twice, lightly. He said, "It is open."
Margot Whitfield stepped into the office and closed the door behind her with the care of someone who understood that sound carried in old buildings. The lamplight found her face, and Cassian understood at once why she had been described to him once, years ago, as the sort of woman who walked into rooms and altered their temperature.
She was perhaps thirty-four, with dark hair cut shorter than fashion currently favoured, and she had the Whitfield jaw, though her eyes were her mother's. She stood very still for a moment, taking in the room, the lamp, the two cups on the table, and him.
"Mr Aldridge."
"Mrs Whitfield."
He did not rise. He indicated the chair opposite, and she sat. Her hands, he noticed, were not yet trembling. They were folded in her lap with the practised composure of a woman who had learned to fold them that way.
"Thank you for seeing me at this hour," she said. "I am aware of what I am asking."
"You have not yet asked anything."
"No. I have not." She unclasped her handbag, a small black thing of good leather, and withdrew a cardboard folder. She set it on the table between them and did not open it. "I should like to begin by telling you what I have already told the police, and what they have done with it."
"That is usually the best place to begin."
"They have done nothing. That is the short version. I made a statement in March. I have heard nothing since, except to be told that the coroner has decided no inquest is required, which I am told is a formality. The file is, I am given to understand, still open. I have been patient. I have stopped being patient."
Cassian said nothing. He poured the tea and pushed a cup across the table.
She wrapped her hands around the cup and did not drink.
"My father," she said, "was Jonathan Whitfield. You may know the name. You may have read the obituary in the Times. Heart attack, the obituary said. He was found in the conservatory at Whitfield Park on the eleventh of September. He was sixty-eight. He had been in good health for a man of sixty-eight. He walked the grounds every morning before breakfast. He ate carefully. He was not, by any measure, a candidate for sudden collapse."
She paused. Cassian watched her throat move as she swallowed.
"The post-mortem was conducted by a pathologist of my father's own choosing, at a private mortuary in Warwickshire. The report was two pages long. I have a copy. The cause of death was given as ischaemic cardiac arrest. No toxicology was performed because no toxicology was requested."
"By whom?"
"By my father's solicitor. A man named Gerald Otte, who has acted for the family for thirty years and who, I should tell you, has been extraordinarily helpful in the settling of the estate. Extraordinarily helpful in ways I did not at first find suspicious, because I had no reason to suspect anything."
Cassian lifted his cup. The tea was still too hot. He waited.
"I came home in October," she said. "I had been in Kyoto for four years, teaching at the university there. I had not seen my father in eighteen months. I came home because I was told he was dead, and I came home to bury him, and I came home to honour the terms of his will. That is what an eldest daughter does. I sorted the household. I dismissed the gardener he had outgrown. I packed up my mother's clothes, which my father had been unable to bring himself to pack. I paid the bills. I signed the papers Gerald Otte put in front of me, because Gerald Otte is a man of considerable reputation and my father trusted him, and I was in no position to question trust I had inherited rather than earned."
She stopped. Her fingers tightened around the cup.
"The estate," she said, "was valued at eighty million pounds. That figure was in every newspaper. It was in Gerald's first letter to me. It was the figure I repeated to my brother when I telephoned him in Singapore, and to my sister in Edinburgh, and to my mother's sister, who is in a home in Henley and does not remember most days. Eighty million. It was the figure that let me sleep at night, because my father had been a careful man and I could believe he had left us something that would outlast us."
She opened the folder. The first page was a printout, the kind produced by a high-street bank, and she turned it so that he could see it.
"Whitfield Holdings," she said. "A limited company registered in my father's name. The principal asset of the estate. The company was, I was told, solvent, profitable, and the source of most of the eighty million. The shares were to be divided three ways, between my brother, my sister, and me. Gerald Otte had the transfer documents prepared. I signed them in November."
She turned to the second page.
"In March," she said, "I asked Gerald for a copy of the most recent audited accounts. He sent them within a week. They were two years old. I asked why. He said the audit had been delayed. I asked by whom. He said by the auditors. I accepted this. I should not have accepted this."
Cassian set down his cup. He had stopped hearing her as a bereaved daughter and had begun hearing her as a witness.
"Mrs Whitfield."
"Margot."
"Margot. The twelve million. Tell me about the twelve million."
She looked at him then, directly, and the composure that had held her face in place since she entered the room cracked along a single line, between her brows, and was gone.
"I obtained the current accounts," she said. "Through a contact in the city who owed me a favour and who agreed to look without using his firm's letterhead. Whitfield Holdings has, over the past eighteen months, transferred twelve million pounds to a company called Holloway Lane Trustees Limited, registered in Jersey, which in turn transferred the funds to a company called Broadwell Ventures Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands, which in turn transferred the funds to an account at a private bank in Geneva, at which point the trail, as far as my contact could determine, goes cold. The Jersey company is owned by a trust of which the named beneficiary is my father's widow."
"Your stepmother."
"Yes."
"How long have they been married?"
"Eleven years. She is forty-one."
Cassian was quiet for a moment. He heard the rain at the window. He heard the town car idling below, patient as a horse.
"Who controls Broadwell Ventures?"
"The directors are listed as a firm of nominee directors in Tortola, and a Mr David Hahn, of whom I can find no record beyond a forwarding address in Mayfair that does not, I am told, exist."
"Hahn."
"You know the name?"
"I have come across it," Cassian said, which was true, and which he would not enlarge upon. "Where is your stepmother now?"
"Whitfield Park. She has not left the house since the funeral. She receives visitors. She receives Gerald Otte twice a week."
"And your brother? Your sister?"
"My brother has signed whatever Gerald has put in front of him. My sister has not yet signed. She has been asking questions of her own. I telephoned her yesterday. She told me she had also been trying to reach you."
Cassian looked at her then. He looked at her hands, which had at last begun to tremble, a fine continuous motion in the fingers wrapped around the teacup, and he looked at her face, which had steadied itself again through an effort of will he could almost hear.
"Margot," he said. "Why did you mention my sister?"
She did not answer immediately. She set the cup down. She folded her hands again, and this time the trembling was visible.
"Because six months ago," she said, "a woman telephoned my father's house and asked for him by his first name, and my stepmother took the call and afterwards told my father there had been a wrong number, and my father went into his study and did not come out for the rest of the evening. Six months ago my father changed his will. Six months ago my father, who had never in his life employed a private investigator, asked Gerald Otte for the name of one. And the name Gerald Otte gave him was yours."
Cassian did not speak for a long moment. The clock on the mantel measured out the silence in small, indifferent ticks. Outside, the wind had shifted, and a branch tapped against the window with the regularity of a patient finger.
"Your sister," Margot said, and the word landed between them with the weight of something she had been carrying for hours. "I did not know how to tell you. I have been turning it over since yesterday, since I telephoned her and she told me she had been trying to reach you. I thought perhaps you already knew. I thought perhaps that was why you came."
Cassian set his cup down. The porcelain met the saucer with a sound that seemed to him too precise, too clean for the shape the conversation had taken.
"When did she telephone your father?" he asked.
"In April. I cannot give you the exact date. My stepmother would not say. But it was before Easter. I know because I was still in Geneva, and I remember thinking, when she told me afterwards, that it must have been a strange time of year for an old friend to ring."
"Did your stepmother recognize the voice?"
"She said she did not." Margot paused. "She also said she had not taken any call at all. The two statements did not, I thought, entirely agree."
Cassian looked at her. He had the particular expression he wore when a piece of evidence slotted into a sequence he had only half suspected, a quiet, inward illumination that changed nothing on the surface and rearranged everything beneath it.
"And the name," he said. "Gerald Otte gave my name to your father. Not a firm. Not an agency. My name."
"Yes."
"Otte and I have not spoken in seven years."
"I know."
Cassian was silent again. He thought of the letter that had arrived at his chambers on a Tuesday morning in April, the heavy cream paper, the careful hand, the single sentence inside: Mr. Whitfield requests the pleasure of your professional acquaintance. He had assumed at the time that the recommendation had come through one of the older clerks at his old chambers, a circuit of favours that moved like groundwater beneath the profession. He had not, until this moment, considered that it might have been routed through Gerald Otte.
"I am grateful to you," he said at last, and meant it in a way he did not entirely show. "For telling me. For not waiting."
"I nearly did wait," Margot said. "I nearly telephoned my sister and told her to make the arrangements through her. But you came to me first, and you came honestly, and I thought you deserved the same in return."
She stood. The chair made its small sound against the floorboards. She did not offer her hand, and he did not offer his; they had passed beyond that sort of formality some time ago, though neither of them could have said exactly when.
"You will read the documents," she said. It was not a question.
"Yes."
"And you will telephone me."
"I will."
She nodded. She gathered her coat from the back of the chair, and the wool made its soft sound against her sleeves. At the door she paused with her hand on the frame, and for a moment the corridor light behind her turned her into something less solid, a figure composed chiefly of outline and the memory of movement.
"Cassian," she said. "Whatever you find, I would rather know."
"I will tell you what I can."
"That is not the same thing."
"No," he said. "It is not."
She left. He listened to her footsteps descend the stairs, counted them out of habit, and then crossed to the window and watched her emerge onto the street below. The wind caught the hem of her coat and she put a hand to her hat and did not look up. A taxi passed. She did not take it. She turned the corner and was gone, and the street settled back into its long, patient emptiness.
Cassian stood at the window for longer than he intended. The room had cooled. He crossed to the hearth and laid another log, and then, because the act of waiting had become insupportable, he went into his study and closed the door behind him.
The documents were already on the desk. He had spread them there at half past nine, when the first reading had confirmed what Margot had told him and the second reading had begun to suggest something worse. Now, at a quarter past eleven, he laid them out again in the order he had been taught at his father's knee: chronologically, by hand, with the supporting schedules fanned to the left like the cards of a patience game he had not yet learned to win.
The estate of Harold Whitfield, late of Whitfield Park, deceased the fourteenth of September. The will, probated without contest, naming the widow and the three children in proportions that were not equal but were, on the face of it, defensible. The schedules of assets, attached as appendices, with the properties itemised and the securities listed and the cash holdings noted in a small, accountant's hand that pressed too hard on the downstrokes.
The cash holdings were the first thing he had noticed. They were not, in absolute terms, small. Whitfield had been a wealthy man, and wealthy men keep cash the way other men keep photographs, as a record of who they had been at various points in their lives. But the figures had a quality he did not like. They suggested a man who had been liquid at some earlier stage and had ceased to be so, not all at once but in a series of small withdrawals, each of them within the tolerance of the auditors and none of them large enough to attract the particular attention of a probate court.
He began, as he always began, with the largest of the withdrawals. He traced it through the schedules: a payment to a development partnership in March, a matching payment in May, a final instalment in July. The partnership was named on the schedules, but the name did not appear in any of the supporting correspondence. It did not appear in any of the letters from Gerald Otte. It did not appear in any of the notes Margot had brought him from her father's desk. It existed, as far as the documents in front of him were concerned, in the space between the entries: a signature without a body, a name without a face.
He wrote it down in his notebook, in the small, precise hand he had been taught to use in court: Whitfield Project.
Then he began to trace the smaller withdrawals, and the smaller withdrawals traced, in their turn, into the same channel. A payment to a consultancy in February that had been folded, by June, into the development partnership. A retainer to a surveyor that had ceased abruptly in April. A sum, modest but specific, paid to a firm of architects whose letterhead bore an address on the north side of the city that he did not recognise.
The Whitfield Project.
He sat back in his chair. The clock on the mantel struck the quarter hour, and the sound was thin and accurate and did not comfort him. He reached for the telephone and dialled a number he had not dialled in some time, and a woman answered on the second ring with the brisk, slightly impatient manner of someone who keeps irregular hours.
"Harrington," she said. "Who is this?"
"Cassian," he said. "I need a favour, and I need it tonight."
A pause. Then: "You have the decency of a fire, Cassian. You only call when something is already burning."
"This one has been burning for some time. I am only now seeing the smoke."
"Tell me."
He told her, briefly, what he had. She listened without interrupting, which was itself a measure of her interest. When he had finished she said, "Whitfield Project. I have not heard the name. That does not mean anything. Half the developments in this city have names I have not heard. But I will ask."
"Quietly."
"I am always quiet. You forget who you are talking to."
"I forget nothing," he said. "I am, as ever, relying on it."
She made a small sound that might have been a laugh and hung up. Cassian set the receiver down and sat for a long moment with his hands flat on the desk, feeling the grain of the wood through his fingertips and the slow, particular weight of the hour.
He thought of Iris. He thought of her as he had last seen her, at their mother's birthday in the summer, when she had been thinner than he remembered and quieter than he had any right to expect. He had not asked her what she had been doing. He had assumed, because one always assumes with Iris, that she was conducting some private campaign of her own, and that it would emerge in its own time.
He reached for the telephone again and then did not pick it up. He sat with his hand on the receiver and thought about what Margot had said: that his sister had telephoned the house in April and asked for Whitfield by his first name, and that afterwards Whitfield had gone into his study and not come out for the evening, and that he had changed his will within the month.
He thought about Gerald Otte, whose name he had not spoken aloud in seven years, and whose recommendation had brought him, by a route he had not foreseen, into the middle of a family he had never met.
He thought about David Hahn, whose name Margot had offered without elaboration, and which Cassian had recognised without explaining, because there are certain names one does not enlarge upon in rooms where the walls may have opinions.
The fire in the grate had burned down to a deep, steady glow. The documents lay open before him in their careful order, and the smallest of the withdrawals, the one that had first drawn his eye, was written in a hand he now recognised as Gerald Otte's.
He had not, until this moment, known that Gerald Otte's hand was in the estate at all.
The clock struck midnight. The wind had dropped. Somewhere in the house a pipe ticked once and was still.
Cassian closed his notebook. He did not lock the documents away. He left them on the desk, in the order he had arranged them, and he turned off the lamp and sat in the dark for a long time, listening to the house settle around him and to the small, persistent sound of his own thinking, which had at last found the shape it had been looking for since the cream envelope had arrived in April.
In the morning he would telephone Iris. In the morning he would speak to Harrington again. In the morning the Whitfield Project would cease to be a name without a body and begin to be something he could, at last, get hold of.
But for now, in the last hour before the day turned, he sat very still and let the shape of it settle, and the room was quiet, and the documents waited, and outside the first thin suggestion of rain began to tap against the glass.