The archive room smelled of candle wax and dust older than the town itself. Iris Calloway pushed through the heavy oak door and let her eyes adjust to the gloom. Rows of leather-bound ledgers lined the walls, their spines cracked and faded, each one a silent witness to generations of births, deaths, and marriages recorded beneath the cathedral's vaulted ceiling.
Father Aldous Vesper stood at a reading lectern near the single window, his long fingers tracing the gilt edge of an open volume. He did not look up at her entrance, but the slight tightening of his shoulders told her he had heard.
"Father Vesper." Iris kept her voice steady, though her pulse quickened. "I need to see the maintenance records. The ones from the bell tower."
The priest turned, his pale eyes measuring her over the rim of his reading spectacles. "The bell tower," he repeated, each syllable deliberate. "An unusual request from a clockmaker's apprentice."
"Mr. Halloran's disappearance has opened questions." She chose her words with care. "Questions about the cathedral. About what happened here in the past."
Something shifted behind Vesper's composure, a flicker of guarded recognition. He removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a cloth he produced from his cassock, a ritual gesture that bought him time.
"The records are kept in the parish archive," he said at last. "I will fetch them for you. But I must ask, Miss Calloway, what you hope to find."
"Truth."
The word hung between them. Vesper studied her for a long moment, then nodded once and disappeared through a smaller door behind the lectern.
Iris exhaled slowly and turned her attention to the room. Three narrow windows admitted slants of grey morning light. The floorboards creaked beneath her boots as she moved toward the nearest shelf. Her fingers brushed the spines of ledgers marked with dates: 1987, 1988, 1989. She pulled one out and opened it. Births and deaths in neat clerical hand, the same format she imagined had been used for two centuries.
She set it back and found 1991, 1992. The volume for 1993 was missing. Not misplaced, she realized with a prickle along her arms. Removed. The gap on the shelf was too clean, the neighboring volumes standing slightly proud where the missing book should have pressed against them.
The door opened behind her. Vesper returned carrying a wooden box, its surface scarred with water stains and tool marks. He set it on the lectern and lifted the lid. Inside lay a stack of loose papers, architectural diagrams, and a cloth-bound journal.
"The maintenance records," he said. "The bell mechanism required frequent attention in those decades. Mechanical failures, weather damage, the usual concerns of a working tower."
Iris approached the lectern and reached for the journal. Vesper's hand closed gently over hers, stopping her.
"Before you begin," he said, his voice dropping to something softer, almost confessional, "I should tell you that some pages are damaged. Water. Mice. The archive is old."
She met his gaze. "I understand."
He released her hand. Iris lifted the journal and opened it. The first page bore a date: March 1985. She turned pages, scanning entries about bell rope replacements, clapper adjustments, the cost of copper fittings. Ordinary records. The handwriting changed abruptly in mid-1988, shifting from a cramped script to something looser, more hurried. A new sexton, perhaps.
She turned to the entries for 1992. Roof repairs. Lightning damage. A cracked beam in the belfry. Then, at the start of 1993, the pages stopped. Not gradually torn or water-damaged. Cut. The remaining paper edges were sharp, uniform, as if sliced with a razor.
"Father Vesper." Iris kept her voice level. "These pages have been removed."
Vesper's hands, folded atop the lectern, did not move. "As I said, damage occurs."
"This is not damage. This is surgery."
For the first time, the priest's composure cracked. His jaw tightened, and he looked away toward the window. "Some records are sensitive. They concern matters of parish business that are not suitable for outside examination."
"I'm not asking about parish gossip. I'm asking about maintenance to a bell tower. What could be so sensitive about that?"
Vesper turned back to her, and something hard entered his expression. "You are young, Miss Calloway. You did not live through what happened in this town in 1993. Some wounds are best left unopened."
"Wounds don't vanish because we refuse to look at them." She closed the journal and set it down. "They fester."
The priest regarded her in silence. Then he did something she did not expect. He laughed, a short, rueful sound that held no humor.
"You sound like someone I once knew," he said. "Someone who asked too many questions and received answers that cost them everything."
"Who?"
Vesper shook his head. "That is a story for another day. For now, I will tell you this much. The pages you noticed are gone because I removed them. At the request of the bishop. At the request of people who believed they were protecting the parish."
"Protecting it from what?"
"From itself." Vesper moved to the window and stared out at the rain-grey morning. "There was an accident in the bell tower. A young man fell. The circumstances were unclear. Some said negligence. Some said something else. The bishop at the time decided that the matter should be closed quietly, for the good of all concerned."
Iris felt the floor tilt beneath her. "A young man fell. Who?"
"I cannot say."
"You just told me something happened, Father. You cannot leave it half-told."
Vesper turned. His pale eyes held hers, and she saw the weight of years in them, a weariness that went beyond age. "I have told you as much as I can without breaking a confidence I swore to keep. The full story is not mine to give."
"Then whose is it?"
He hesitated. Then, quietly: "There is a woman in this town who remembers. She was postmistress then. She kept records of her own, letters, diaries, the small documents that official histories never record. If you want to know what truly occurred in 1993, you would need to speak with Lillian Prewett."
The name settled into Iris's mind like a stone dropped into still water. She knew of Prewett, of course. Everyone in the town did. The former postmistress lived alone in a white cottage at the edge of the village, tending her garden and receiving visitors who came seeking bits of the past she had hoarded like a magpie.
"Thank you, Father."
Vesper nodded, but his expression remained troubled. "Miss Calloway. Be careful what you ask. Some truths, once spoken, cannot be unheard. They change the shape of everything around them."
"I'll take that risk."
"Yes." A sad smile crossed his face. "I believe you would."
Iris gathered the remaining records into her satchel, aware of Vesper's eyes on her as she worked. The missing pages from 1993 gnawed at her thoughts. A young man fell. Something else, something unspoken, hovered just beyond the priest's careful words.
At the door, she paused and looked back. Vesper stood where she had left him, a solitary figure in the grey light, his cassock dark against the pale stone of the walls.
"Father," she said. "The young man who fell. Was his name Bram?"
The silence that followed was answer enough. Vesper closed his eyes, and when he opened them, something had shifted in their depths. A resignation. A grief long held at bay.
"I cannot say," he whispered. "But if you find Lillian Prewett, ask her about the bell that rang twice."
Iris stepped out into the corridor, her heart pounding against her ribs. The cathedral's ancient stones pressed close around her, and somewhere high above, beyond the vaulted ceiling, she could hear the faint sound of wind moving through the empty bell tower.
She thought of her mentor. She thought of the missing pages. She thought of a bell that rang twice, and a young man whose name the priest would not speak.
The answers waited somewhere in this town. She could feel them, like the hum of a struck tuning fork, resonating just beyond reach.
She tightened her grip on the satchel strap and walked toward the door that led to the rain-washed street.
The rain had softened to a fine mist by the time Iris reached the bottom of the cathedral steps. She turned up her collar and walked east along Bell Lane, past the shuttered windows of the post office where Lillian Prewett had reigned for forty-one years. The smell of wet slate rose from the cobblestones, mixing with the sharper scent of woodsmoke drifting from chimneys along the lane.
Lillian's cottage stood at the end of a narrow lane, its whitewashed walls bright against the grey afternoon. A wooden sign hung above the door, painted in faded letters: POSTmistress RETIRED, ITEMS ACCEPTED. Beside it, a smaller board: L. PREWETT, LOCAL HISTORIES AND GENEALOGIES, BY APPOINTMENT OR CHANCE.
Iris knocked three times. From somewhere within came the clatter of teacups, then the shuffle of feet, then a voice warm as bread fresh from the oven.
"One moment, one moment. If you're selling anything, I already have two of them."
The door swung inward. Lillian Prewett was a small woman with silver hair pinned in a low bun and spectacles perched on the end of her nose. She wore a cardigan the colour of dried sage and smelled faintly of rosewater and pipe tobacco. Her eyes, bright as a robin's, took in Iris from head to toe in a single sweep.
"Well now," she said. "You're not selling anything. You're the clock girl. Calloway's apprentice." She stepped aside, gesturing inward with one bony hand. "Come in out of that damp before you rust."
The cottage interior was a treasure house of paper and memory. Stacks of letters lined the walls, tied with faded ribbons. Boxes of postcards occupied the corners. A mahogany desk dominated the centre of the sitting room, its surface hidden beneath sheaves of genealogical charts, parish records, and a half-finished letter. The smell of old paper filled the air, sweet and dry, layered with the sharper tang of sealing wax.
"Sit," Lillian ordered, pointing to a wingback chair upholstered in green velvet. "Tea is brewing, and don't tell me you don't want any. Nobody comes to my door in this weather without wanting tea."
"I do, thank you," Iris said, sinking into the chair. The velvet was cool against her back. "How did you know I was Calloway's apprentice?"
Lillian snorted as she lifted the kettle from the hob. "I've been postmistress of this town for forty-one years, and postmistress before that my mother was, and her mother before that. I know everyone's business. Yours included." She poured steaming tea into two cups painted with pink roses. "Three months you came down from Dublin, you lodgings at Mrs. Halloran's, you work with old Calloway in the shop on Hill Street, and your mentor disappeared three days ago after visiting the bishop's residence."
Iris's hand froze on the cup. "How did you know about the bishop's residence?"
"Because, dear girl, I delivered the letter that brought him there in the first place." Lillian settled into the chair opposite, her small feet not quite reaching the floor. "Thirty years I've been keeping the records of this town, and the bishop is one of my oldest correspondents. A letter arrived at the post office the morning your mentor disappeared, addressed to him at the bishop's residence. I thought nothing of it then. I think a great deal of it now."
"What did the letter say?"
"I didn't read it, of course." Lillian paused, then added with a glimmer of something that was not quite innocence, "Not directly. But the envelope smelled faintly of lavender, which is the scent Miss Eleanor Vesper used in her stationery. And the bishop's secretary asked me later if I could recall who had posted it, and I could not. Mystery upon mystery."
"Eleanor Vesper," Iris repeated. "Is she related to Father Vesper?"
"His aunt, dear. The bishop's sister. A very private woman. She died in 1994." Lillian sipped her tea, her eyes never leaving Iris's face. "But you didn't come here to talk about the bishop's family. You came to ask about the bell that rang twice."
Iris set down her cup. "How do you know about that?"
"Because Father Vesper called on me yesterday afternoon, the first time he has left the cathedral grounds in eleven months, and he asked me to tell you what I know." Lillian's voice softened, losing its sharp edges. "He is a good man, Iris Calloway. A very good man. But he carries a weight I would not wish on anyone."
"What weight?"
Lillian rose from her chair and moved to a tall cabinet against the far wall. She opened the lower drawer and withdrew a leather-bound ledger, its cover worn smooth by generations of handling. She set it on the desk between them.
"This is the sexton's ledger," she said. "Every grave in the churchyard, every burial record, every christening since 1742. I copied it in my own hand after my cousin died, because no one else was keeping the records. My cousin was the sexton."
"The 1993 horologist?"
"Bram Prewett. My mother's brother's son." Lillian ran her hand across the cover of the ledger. "He was twenty-three years old, and he fell from the bell tower of St. Ambrose in November of that year. The inquest called it an accident. I have never believed the inquest."
The room seemed to grow smaller. The ticking of a clock on the mantle, which Iris had not noticed before, grew suddenly loud. She watched Lillian's face, saw the grief that lived there still, patient as ivy on old stone.
"What do you believe?"
"I believe Bram was frightened. I believe he went to the tower that night because someone had told him to. And I believe the bell that rang twice was not an accident, but a signal." Lillian opened the ledger to a page marked with a faded ribbon. "This is the entry for the burial."
Iris read the entry. Bram Prewett. Age 23. Sexton of St. Ambrose. Buried in the churchyard beside his father and grandfather. The ink was brown with age, but the script was clear and careful.
"There is nothing here about the bishop."
"No. There wouldn't be. The bishop kept himself apart from the affair." Lillian turned a page, revealing a series of short entries in a different hand. Letters received. Letters sent. Small payments recorded in the margins. "I found this letter tucked inside the ledger the year after Bram died. It was addressed to him, but he had never opened it. I kept it all these years, waiting."
She withdrew a folded sheet of paper from between the pages. The paper was thick, expensive, the colour of old cream. She unfolded it and set it before Iris.
The handwriting was elegant and precise, the letters formed with the careful discipline of one taught penmanship in childhood. Iris read.
Mr. Prewett. It has come to our attention that your inquiries into the matter of the cathedral's former sexton have attracted notice you would do well to avoid. The town has no need of a historian so young and so thorough. You are advised to cease your researches into the events of 1947, to relinquish whatever documents you have gathered, and to depart Bellhaven by the end of the month. Should you fail to comply, you will leave us no choice but to ensure your silence in a more permanent fashion.
The letter was unsigned. No name at the bottom. No return address. Only the postmark on the back, blurred but legible: Bellhaven Post Office, October 1993.
"Who sent this?" Iris whispered.
"I don't know." Lillian's voice was steady, but her hands trembled as she folded the letter and returned it to its place. "Bram never spoke to me of receiving it. He died three weeks later. The bell tower. A fall. No witnesses."
"And the bell that rang twice?"
"The bell tower holds three bells. The smallest is the funeral bell. The middle is the Angelus. The largest is the warning bell, rung only when the town is in danger." Lillian's eyes met Iris's. "On the night Bram died, the warning bell rang twice. No one knows why. The bell rope was found coiled neatly beside the door. Bram's body was at the base of the stairs."
"But if he fell, who rang the bell?"
"That, dear girl, is the question." Lillian closed the ledger and pressed both hands flat against its cover. "I have lived with that question for thirty years. I have written to every historian I know, consulted every record I could find. No one has an answer."
Iris thought of the missing pages from the cathedral's baptismal records. The year 1993. The same year Bram fell. The same year the bishop would have been newly installed in his residence.
"The bishop was not yet in residence in 1993," she said. "The notice in the paper said he came to St. Ambrose in 1995."
"Correct." Lillian tilted her head, considering. "But the bishop before him, Bishop Marius Thorne, was a man of considerable influence. And Bishop Thorne had a nephew who served as his secretary, a young man of considerable ambition. That nephew would have been twenty-two years old in 1993. He is now a bishop himself, in another diocese, and visits Bellhaven only rarely."
Iris felt the pieces shifting in her mind, not yet forming a picture but beginning to connect. The bishop's nephew. A young man in 1993. A warning bell rung twice. A sexton who fell.
"What was the nephew's name?"
"Cormac Thorne." Lillian rose and moved to the window, peering out at the misty lane. "He was staying at the bishop's residence that autumn, ostensibly to help his uncle with cathedral business. He left two days after Bram's death. The official records say nothing of why."
Iris gathered the satchel strap over her shoulder, her mind racing. The missing pages. The unsigned letter. The bishop's nephew. The bell that rang twice. All of it circling some central fact she could not yet grasp.
"Mrs. Prewett," she said carefully, "I must ask you something directly."
"Then ask." Lillian turned from the window, her face composed, her eyes watchful.
"Do you believe Bram was murdered?"
The word hung in the air between them, heavier than the mist outside, heavier than the smell of old paper and rosewater. Lillian did not answer immediately. She returned to her chair, settled herself, and folded her hands in her lap.
"I believe," she said at last, "that Bram Prewett was a young man who asked questions he should not have asked, and that he paid for those questions with his life. Whether the hand that pushed him was the hand of the bishop's nephew, or another, I do not know. But I know this." She leaned forward. "Whatever Bram discovered about the events of 1947, it was dangerous enough to kill a man thirty years later."
"1947," Iris repeated. "What happened in 1947?"
Lillian reached into the cardigan pocket and withdrew a small key on a faded ribbon. She pressed it into Iris's palm and closed her fingers around it.
"The archives in the parish hall. Box 47, drawer 3. The records of the cathedral orphanage. Whatever Bram found, he found it there." She released Iris's hand. "Go now, before the light fails. And when you find what you find, bring it to me. I have waited thirty years for someone to ask the right questions."
Iris stood, the key warm against her skin. The cottage seemed suddenly larger, the stacks of paper less cluttered, as though the room itself had exhaled.
"Mrs. Prewett," she said at the door. "Why are you helping me?"
Lillian smiled, and for a moment the sharp edges of her face softened into something almost maternal.
"Because you have your mentor's eyes," she said. "And because Bram would have wanted someone to finish what he started."
The mist had thickened into proper rain by the time Iris stepped outside. She turned up her collar and walked west toward the parish hall, the key in her pocket, the ledger's contents turning in her mind like the gears of a clock searching for the hour.
She did not notice the figure that emerged from the doorway of the antique shop across the lane and watched her go.
The parish hall squatted at the end of the lane like a man trying to make himself smaller. Two stories of soot-blackened stone, a slate roof patched with lichen, windows boarded or broken in equal proportion. The rain had driven everyone indoors, and the street belonged to her and the gulls.
Iris tried the front door. Locked. She circled the building, boots squelching through moss and old leaves, until she found a side entrance wedged open by a brick. The hinges protested when she pushed, a long metallic shriek that scattered pigeons from the eaves.
Inside, the smell hit her first. Damp plaster, rotting carpet, and beneath it something older, paper oxidizing in the dark. She pulled a torch from her coat and swept the beam across the entrance hall. A noticeboard held curling parish announcements, some yellowed past legibility. A staircase climbed into shadow. To her left, a corridor ended at a fire door marked with hand-painted lettering: ARCHIVES.
The corridor narrowed as she walked, the walls pressing close enough to brush her shoulders. Water stains bloomed across the ceiling like bruises. At the end, the fire door opened onto a room that had once been a schoolroom and was now a mausoleum for paper.
Cardboard boxes lined every wall, stacked four and five high, their lids warped or missing. Filing cabinets stood in crooked rows, drawers pulled open or hanging off their tracks. A single overhead bulb dangled from a cord, unlit, but her torch was enough.
Box 47. She moved down the rows, counting. The numbers had been written in chalk on the boxes' ends, some faded, some replaced with newer markings. 43, 44, 45. She stepped over a spilled box of christening records, pages fanned across the floor like dropped cards.
Drawer 3. The label was handwritten in a careful copperplate, the ink gone brown with age. She worked the drawer open. Manilla folders, fat with documents, each labeled in the same careful hand: ADMISSIONS, DISCHARGES, DEATHS, CORRESPONDENCE.
She lifted the admissions folder first. The pages inside were typed on a machine that had clearly seen better decades, the letters uneven, the ribbons worn. Names. Dates of birth. Dates of admission. The ages ranged from infants to twelve-year-olds. Most of the surnames were local: Prewett, Halloran, Calloway. One column listed "reason for admission." Most read illegible. Some read "father deceased." Some read "mother unable to care." One read "father incarcerated." One read simply "orphan."
She set the folder aside and opened the deaths register. Thinner than the admissions, but not by much. Dates stretched from 1939 to 1962. She scanned the entries, looking for anything unusual.
And then she stopped.
The entries from 1947 were missing. Not damaged, not illegible. Removed. Where the pages should have been, someone had sliced them cleanly from the binding.
She flipped forward. The entries resumed in 1948, as though 1947 had never existed.
Her pulse quickened. She set the deaths register aside and reached for the correspondence folder. Letters, mostly formal, addressed to the cathedral chapter, to social services, to the diocesan office. A few replies. Routine administrative noise.
Then she found the last letter in the stack, folded in quarters and tucked into a plain envelope. The envelope was unstamped, unposted. Addressed only to Bram.
She unfolded it.
The handwriting was the same careful copperplate as the box labels. But the tone was different. The letters leaned and trembled, the careful penmanship sliding into something more urgent.
Bram. You will not have heard from me in twenty years, and I apologize for the silence. I am writing because I fear we are no longer safe. The doctor has been asking questions about 1947 again. I have told him nothing, but he is persistent, and he has the Bishop's ear. I do not know what he suspects, but I know what he might find. The pages are gone, as I removed them, but the bones are still in the walls of the old chapel, and they will not stay buried forever.
I beg you. Do not pursue this. Let the dead rest.
The letter was unsigned. But the copperplate, the formal tone, the knowledge of what lay buried, all pointed to one hand.
Iris heard footsteps.
She killed the torch and pressed herself against the stacks. The footsteps came from the corridor, unhurried, the measured pace of someone who knew where they were going. A door opened at the far end of the room. A beam of light swept across the boxes, paused, moved on.
Then a voice, soft and reverent, in the dark.
"You might as well come out, Miss Calloway. I saw you enter."
Father Vesper stepped into the aisle between the stacks, his torch angled low. His face was composed, almost sorrowful. In his free hand he held a set of keys.
"I had hoped," he said quietly, "that Lillian would keep to her promise this time. She has not kept a promise since 1952, but one hopes."
Iris stepped out from behind the boxes. Her heart was hammering, but she kept her voice steady.
"You knew I would come."
"I suspected. The ledger went missing from the desk this morning. The seal was broken when I checked this afternoon. There are only two people in the village who would recognize its significance. You are the younger and the more determined."
He lowered his torch and regarded her. In the dim light, his face looked older than it had in the churchyard.
"I should like that letter back, if you please."
"It is evidence, Father."
"It is also a confession." His voice did not waver. "Written in panic, thirty years ago, to a man who promised to destroy it. I see he did not."
"Who are they, Father? The children. The ones buried in the walls."
Vesper closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were bright with something that might have been tears, or might have been the torchlight's reflection.
"Seven of them. Seven children who died in the winter of 1947, of a fever the doctor could not name, and whose bodies the Bishop ordered sealed into the foundations of the old chapel rather than consecrated in the cemetery. I was the curate then. I was twenty-four. I did as I was told, because I was afraid, and because the Bishop told me that God would understand."
He drew a breath that shuddered at the edges.
"Bram discovered it in 1994. He came to me, and I begged him, as I begged him in that letter, to let the dead rest. He refused. He said the children's souls deserved a grave. He said their families deserved the truth. And then he went to the Bishop."
"What happened?"
"The Bishop is a patient man. He waited. And when Bram persisted, he arranged for Bram to be removed. Quietly. Without scandal. The way things are arranged in cathedral towns."
"You mean killed."
"I mean transferred. To a parish in Northumberland, where he could do no more harm. He took his questions with him, and the questions died with him, or so I believed. Until three weeks ago, when I received word that he had died, and that his research had been sent to his apprentice."
Vesper looked at her for a long moment.
"I have spent thirty years trying to forget what I helped bury. I have failed every night. And now you stand here with the evidence in your hand, and you must decide what to do with it."
Iris looked down at the letter. Her mentor's name, written in a dead man's careful hand.
"If I take this to the police, the Bishop falls. The cathedral falls. The town falls."
"Yes."
"And if I do nothing, the children stay in the walls."
"Yes."
The rain had begun again outside, drumming on the slate roof, filling the silence between them. Iris folded the letter and slipped it into her coat.
"Then the walls come down," she said.
Vesper closed his eyes. A tear tracked down his cheek, glittered, fell.
"I will help you," he said quietly. "Whatever you need."
The pub was crowded by the time Iris returned. She took a table in the corner, ordered a whiskey she did not want, and sat with her hands wrapped around the glass. The letter was in her inside pocket. The key was in her trouser pocket. The weight of both seemed enormous.
She thought of Bram, patient and stubborn, piecing together a story no one had wanted told. She thought of Lillian, waiting thirty years for the right person to ask. She thought of Father Vesper, twenty-four and afraid, and the kind of fear that curdles into decades of complicity.
The door opened and a cold wind pressed in. She looked up, half expecting trouble.
Instead, the young constable she'd seen that morning stepped inside, shaking rain from his cap. He scanned the room, found her, and crossed to her table.
"Miss Calloway," he said. "I am sorry to disturb you. We have been trying to reach you at your cottage."
Something in his tone pulled her upright.
"Is something wrong?"
He hesitated, and in that hesitation she read it.
"There has been a break-in. Your cottage was entered while you were out. We thought you should know."
She was on her feet before he finished speaking. The whiskey went over as she stood, spreading across the table like an accusation.
The cottage was a quarter mile up the lane. They walked it in silence, the constable matching her stride, his torch cutting the dark. When the cottage came into view, she saw the door hanging open, the light inside spilling out across the path.
She went in first. Drawers pulled from the dresser. The mattress stripped. Her meager collection of jewelry scattered on the floor. But the jewelry had not been taken. Her few coins had not been taken. What had been taken was obvious the moment she looked at the workbench.
Her tool roll was open. The leather unfurled like a skin. The tools inside were gone. The screwdrivers, the pliers, the small hammers, the picks. Every instrument her mentor had taught her to use, and that she had used to dismantle his ledger that very morning.
They had come for the tools. They had come because they knew what those tools could do, and what they might have already done.
She stood in the ransacked cottage and looked at the empty roll.
The ledger was still in the parish archives, hidden in her coat. The letter was against her chest. And the children were still in the walls, waiting for someone with the right instruments, and the right stubbornness, to set them free.
She looked at the constable.
"I need to make a phone call," she said. "And then I need you to take me to see your Chief Superintendent."
The constable blinked.
"Now, Miss?"
"Now," she said. "Before whoever did this realizes what I still have."