The key ground in the lock with a thin scrape of metal against metal, and Maren Voss held her breath until the tumbler gave way. She pushed the door inward and stood on the threshold, her hand still wrapped around the brass handle, and let her eyes adjust to the grey afternoon light that fell through the single high window at the far end of the room.
The Voss accounting office had not been opened in eleven months. She knew this because she had been the one to lock it, on the day the solicitor handed her the keys to her father's estate and the whole weight of the Shrike's Garden settled across her shoulders like a sodden coat. The smell hit her first, before her vision caught up, before her boots had crossed the threshold. It was not the expected smell of dust and old paper. It was something sharper, sweeter, the kind of sweetness that clung to the back of the throat and warned of laboratories and clean-up crews.
Maren stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The latch fell soft as a held breath.
The room had been torn apart. That was the only honest description. The tall shelving that lined the eastern wall had been pulled away from its brackets, and heavy ledgers lay tumbled on the floor like felled trees. Drawers had been wrenched from the desk in the centre of the room, their contents spread across the warped floorboards in drifts of paper. She could see the pale spines of bound accounts, sheets of carbon copy curling at the edges, a photograph that had fallen face-down near her left foot. The glass front of the tall cabinet by the window had been smashed, and a thick scatter of shards caught the weak light and threw it back at her in a dozen small bright points.
She did not move for a long moment. She stood with her shoulders square and her chin level, and she breathed through her mouth because the sweetness of the chemical smell was thickening, settling on her tongue like the residue of burnt sugar. Then she walked forward, slowly, the way her father had taught her to walk in the glasshouses at the Shrike's Garden when something venomous had got loose among the specimens.
The floorboards gave beneath her boots, soft with rot in the places where rain had come in through the broken windowpane above. She crouched beside the nearest pile of spilled ledgers and turned one over with the toe of her boot. The cover was unmarked. The pages inside had been ripped out, not cleanly but with a kind of impatient violence, and the torn edges stood up in little white peaks like the teeth of a saw. Someone had been through every page of this book. Someone had looked at every line.
She straightened and turned a slow circle, taking inventory. Three of the four drawers from the central desk were missing entirely. The fourth lay on its side near the cold fireplace, its back panel pried off and the small secret compartment behind it exposed and empty. She had known about that compartment. Her father had shown it to her once, years ago, when she was young enough to be impressed by such things. The compartment had held a single envelope. She could see the ghost of its rectangle in the dust that lined the hollow space.
Someone knew. That was the thought that settled cold and certain at the base of her spine. Someone had known about the compartment. Someone had known to look for it, and someone had come prepared to prise it open.
Maren moved toward the tall cabinet by the window. The smashed glass crunched under her boots, fine and bright as crushed ice, and she caught a faint second scent beneath the chemical sweetness: pine resin, and beneath that something faintly herbal that she almost recognised. She crouched and studied the floor around the cabinet. There, in the thick dust, a single set of footprints. Work boots by the look of the tread, size ten or eleven, the prints neat and even and not at all the marks of a hurried thief. Whoever had been here had walked these boards with the confidence of a man who had done it before.
She rose and looked up at the broken pane. A length of thin cord had been tied to the iron latch of the lower sash and run up over the sill and out into the alley. Someone had raised the window from outside without having to put a hand through the broken glass. Someone had planned this. Someone had brought a cord and a small bottle of something that smelled like sweet chemistry, and they had come in the way a locksmith comes in, with tools and patience and the certainty of a man who knew which drawer to pull first.
Maren's hand found her own hip pocket, where the folded inventory of the estate sat in a slim manila folder. She had made that inventory herself, three weeks after her father's death, sitting at the kitchen table of the Gardener's Cottage with a biro and a torch when the power had gone off in the storm. She had listed everything she could find in the house. She had not, until this moment, thought to list what was missing from this room.
She crossed to the desk and crouched again. A fine white powder had been scattered across one corner of the desktop, and she recognised the residue even before she leaned close enough to taste it on the air. Fingerprint powder. Someone had taken prints from the wood. Her father's prints, perhaps, or her own from that last visit eleven months ago, or the prints of the solicitor who had come to take inventory. Or the prints of whoever had stood here and worked this room apart looking for whatever it was they had come to find.
Maren stood very still. The chemical smell was heavier here at the desk, and she could feel it now at the back of her nose, a faint prickle that made her want to sneeze. Acetone. That was the closest she could name it, though it carried something else beneath it, something floral and faintly rotten that reminded her of the back rows of the glasshouses at the Garden, where her father had kept the orchids that preferred the smell of decay.
She turned the thought over in her mind the way she would turn a specimen pot in her hand, looking for the clean surface, the truth of the thing. Someone had come into this room with knowledge. They had known the layout. They had known the secret compartment. They had brought acetone to lift the prints from the wood, and they had lifted them, and they had gone. They had taken the envelope. They had taken the ledgers' pages. They had left only the smell of themselves behind, and the careful footprints in the dust, and the sense of a tidy mind that did not leave loose ends.
Outside, in the alley below the broken window, a fox barked once, sharp and solitary. Maren did not move. She was looking at the smear of white powder on the desk, and the smear had fallen in a shape that looked, if she let her eyes unfocus, like the corner of an envelope. Like the place where an envelope had rested on this desk, and had been lifted away by a careful hand.
She drew the inventory from her pocket and unfolded it on the corner of the desk that had not been powdered. She ran her finger down the list of items she had catalogued in the house proper. She paused at the entry marked 'letterbox, hall, original Voss, contents unknown'. She had noted it but never opened it. Her father had told her once, in that slow rough voice of his, that the contents of the letterbox were not to be touched until such a time as the estate had been properly settled. She had respected that. She had respected every locked drawer and every sealed envelope in the house, and now someone had come and taken what they wanted without the same respect, and the smell of their passage was still in the air, sweet and chemical and faintly floral, and the floor was littered with the wreckage of a careful search.
Maren folded the inventory and slipped it back into her pocket. She took one more slow turn around the room, counting what was left, memorising what was missing, and then she walked back to the door and stood for a moment on the threshold with her hand on the frame. The light from the alley fell in a long pale stripe across the floor, and the dust motes turned in it like tiny planets. Somewhere down the lane a dog began to bark, and the sound carried through the broken window and settled in the corners of the room among the torn pages and the powdered desk.
She did not close the door behind her when she stepped out onto the street. She wanted the air to move. She wanted the smell of whoever had been here to thin and fade and be replaced by the colder smell of the autumn lane, the wet slate and the bramble and the far-off smoke from the cottage chimneys of Blackwood Hollow. She turned up the collar of her coat and stood for a moment with her hands in her pockets, looking up and down the empty street. The accountant's office stood above the old greengrocer's, and across the lane the launderette was shuttered, and further down a single light burned in the window of the solicitor's rooms.
She looked at the solicitor's window for a long moment. Then she looked back at the open door of the office behind her, and at the pale stripe of light that fell across its ruined floor. The afternoon was getting on. She had work to do at the Garden. She had specimens to catalogue, and the new cuttings to pot before the frost came down from the moor. But the smell of the acetone was still in her hair, and the shape of the missing envelope was still behind her eyes, and somewhere in the lanes of Blackwood Hollow a man in work boots was walking away from her with whatever he had come to find.
Maren Voss pulled her collar tighter and turned her face toward the lane that led up to the Shrike's Garden, and she did not go back inside the office to lock it. She wanted, she found, to know whether anyone else would come to that door before she did.
The lane climbed out of the village in a long, slow bend, and Maren let her feet find their own rhythm on the packed earth. The hedgerow was blackberry and hawthorn, both gone over, and the brambles caught at her coat as she passed. She did not hurry. There was no one behind her, no sound but her own boots and the occasional shudder of wind through the bare ash trees that stood at intervals along the lane like old men waiting to be asked something.
The smoke from the cottage chimneys thinned and was replaced, as she climbed, by the colder smell of the moor itself: wet bracken, peat, the faint mineral tang of the beck that ran somewhere down in the cutting below the road. Her hands were deep in her pockets, and her right thumb kept working itself over the smooth place on her father's old penknife where the bone handle had been worn thin by three generations of thumbs. She had taken it out of the desk drawer that morning, without quite knowing why, and slipped it into her pocket. Now she could not put it down.
The gate to the Shrike's Garden stood at the top of the lane where the tarmac gave out and the rough track began. It was wrought iron, or had been once; now it was mostly rust, and the gap between its bars was wide enough to walk through without unlatching it. She had been meaning to have it off its hinges for years. Her father had said, more than once, that a closed gate was an invitation to anyone who wanted to be invited, and an open one a discouragement to anyone who wasn't. She had not been sure he was right. She was still not sure.
The path from the gate to the house was a quarter of a mile of old gravel, mostly swallowed now by creeping thyme and self-heal and the long white runners of the wild clematis that her father had let colonise the banks on either side because, he said, it kept the deer from browsing the more interesting things. She walked it slowly, letting her eyes move over the beds as she passed. The asters were finished. The hydrangeas had gone the colour of old parchment. The great clump of Molinia on the far bank was the bleached blonde of late autumn, and every now and then a gust of wind would comb through it and make it lean and whisper.
She loved this place. That was the trouble with it. She had spent her twenties and most of her thirties telling herself she did not, and had gone off to work in other people's gardens, and had come back only for funerals and christenings and the rare Christmas, and had always left a day earlier than she meant to. And now her father was a year in his grave, and the will was settled, and the Garden was hers in the blunt legal sense, and there was no one left to leave early for.
The house rose out of the laurels at the end of the path, long and low and grey, with the chimneys at each end and the smallpaned windows that gave it the look of a face peering through spectacles. She let herself in by the kitchen door, because the front door had swollen in the wet and would need a shoulder she did not want to give it today. The kitchen was cold. She did not light the range. She went through the scullery and the boot room and along the passage to the front of the house, keeping her coat on, her hands still in her pockets, her thumb still on the worn place on the penknife.
The study was at the back of the house, on the garden side, with windows that looked out over the lower lawn and the long border and, beyond them, the pond. She did not look at the pond. She had looked at it enough in the last year. She crossed the room to the fireplace and stood with her back to the empty grate and looked up at the mantelpiece.
The mantle was a single piece of oak, dark with age and beeswax, and above it the wall was panelled in the same wood up to the picture rail. She had grown up with this wall. She had sat on the hearthrug many an evening and watched her father mend plant labels or read correspondence by the light of the oil lamp, and she had never, in all those years, thought to look at the panelling above the mantle with any particular attention. It had simply been there, the way a wall is.
She reached up now and pressed her fingertips against the wood, just to the left of the centre, about a hand's breadth below the picture rail. She had found the seam this morning, before she went down to the village, by accident. She had been dusting. She had been standing on the fender to reach the top of the mirror, and her elbow had bumped the panel, and a small square of it had given, just slightly, under her arm. She had stood very still for a moment. Then she had got down and gone to make tea, and had thought about it for the rest of the morning, and had walked down to the village to see what Mr. Pike had to say about the missing envelope, and had come home again.
Now she pressed the panel again, more deliberately. There was a soft click, and the square of wood swung inwards on a hinge she had not known was there. Behind it was a cavity the size of a small book, lined with green baize that had gone brown at the edges. In the cavity there was a single object: a ledger, clothbound, the size of a missal, with the year 1985 stamped in gold on the front cover. The gold had gone dull. The cloth was spotted with mildew.
She took it out carefully, the way you take out a sleeping bird. It was lighter than she had expected. She carried it over to the desk and sat down in her father's chair, which still had the slight backwards tilt he had liked, and she opened it.
The pages were dense with writing. Not her father's hand, or not entirely. Some of it was his, she could see that at once, the slow careful script she had grown up trying to imitate for school exercise books. But a good deal of it was in other hands, some of them cramped and small, some of them large and sloping, and some of them in a shorthand she did not recognise. The entries were dated, and after each date there was a line of code, two or three letters, then a dash, then a sum of money, then two initials. The sums were small. Two pounds ten. Seven shillings. One pound three and sixpence. They were the kind of sums her father had kept in the housekeeping book in the kitchen drawer, the kind of sums you wrote down when you were keeping the household honest.
She turned the pages slowly. The dates ran from January 1985 to the following March, and then stopped. The last entry was in her father's hand, and it was not coded. It said, in the careful block letters he had used only for things he meant to be read clearly: "Closed this account. No further entries. J.V."
She closed the ledger and sat for a moment with her hand flat on the cover, looking at the cold fireplace, listening to the small sounds the old house made when the wind came up the chimney. The initials in the coded entries she did not recognise. Two letters, sometimes three, set down with the small dollar amounts as if they were ordinary household transactions. Some of the initials appeared again and again. Some appeared only once. There were no full names. There were no addresses. There was nothing to say what the account had been for, or why it had been opened, or why her father had closed it in the spring of 1986 and put the book behind the panel above the mantle and said nothing, to her or to anyone she knew of, for the rest of his life.
She opened the ledger again and went through it more slowly, page by page, making a careful note in the back of her own pocketbook of every pair of initials and every sum. She did not try to interpret the codes. She was not ready to try to interpret the codes. She only wanted, for the moment, to have the facts of the book in her own hand, so that they could not be lost or burnt or walked away down a lane in a pair of work boots while she was not looking.
When she had done this, she put the ledger back into its cavity, and pressed the panel shut, and stood for a moment looking at the panelling as if she had never seen it before. Then she took off her coat and hung it on the back of the door, and went out to the potting she'd to do the work she had told herself she would do that afternoon, and she did not think about the book again until she came in at dusk and found that she had left the kitchen range unlit and the house was as cold as a stone.
Maren struck a match and held it to the kindling in the range. The flame caught, spat, settled into a low blue crawl that she coaxed into something warmer with the bellows. The smell of the fire came back into the kitchen, sour and resinous, and the old grate began its slow tick. She set the kettle on the hob and stood with her hands in her pockets, waiting for it to boil, and the house settled around her the way the house always settled, with the small complaints of beams and floorboards and the slow clock in the hall.
She had not lit a lamp. The dusk was thick enough in the kitchen that the window went the colour of tarnished silver, and her own face came back at her in the glass, pale and tired, the dark hair flattened where she had pushed it back from her forehead with the back of her wrist a hundred times that afternoon. She watched herself and thought, with the small dry honesty that was all she could manage now, that she looked like her father when she stood like this, in the half-light, with her shoulders drawn in.
Then there was a knock at the back door.
It was a quiet knock, the knuckle of it rather than the fist, two measured taps and a pause, as if the person outside had rehearsed the courtesy and wished it noted. Maren crossed the kitchen and drew the bolt and found Tobias Marsh on the step in his dark overcoat, the collar turned up against a wind that had come up while she was out, and a bottle of rye in his hand by the neck, the way a man carries a bottle when he means to set it down and not carry it home.
"Good evening, Maren," he said. His voice was the same as it had been when they were children, polished and slightly too quick, every consonant bitten off clean. He had come up from the village that afternoon, he said, and had thought to call, and then had thought better of calling and had come instead. He glanced past her shoulder into the kitchen as if to take its measure. "I see you have not eaten."
"I've been working," Maren said. "Come in."
He stepped past her and laid the bottle on the table without being asked, and stood for a moment in his coat as if uncertain whether to take it off. The fire had taken hold properly now and was beginning to push back the cold that had settled into the flagstones all afternoon. Maren took down two glasses from the dresser and set them beside the bottle and did not pour. She wanted him to say why he was here first. She had not seen him since the reading of the will, which had been a thin affair conducted in the solicitor's office in the town, and at which Tobias had been present not as a relation but as the executor of the funeral arrangements, a role that had fallen to him, by some arrangement she still did not understand, when her father died.
"I have not come to talk business," Tobias said. He read her silence correctly, or thought he did. He sat down at the table and laid his hat on the chair beside him and folded them both into his usual neatness. "I have come to tell you something about your father that I think you ought to know, and that I think he would have wanted me to tell you, in his own way, if he had been able."
Maren sat down across from him. The fire ticked. The kettle had begun to whisper on the hob. Outside, the wind pushed at the loose edge of the back door and the iron latch jumped in its housing, once.
"Jonas came to me," Tobias said, "two weeks before he died. He came to the funeral home in the evening, after we had closed, and asked whether he might sit in the chapel for a while. I said he might.