The fluorescent tube above the circulation desk had been flickering for three weeks. A maintenance request sat in a queue somewhere, stamped, ignored, stamped again. Detective Jonas Veers watched the stuttering light from a chair that smelled of industrial cleaner and old paper, the kind of paper that had begun to yellow decades before he was born. He let the silence stretch. He had learned, early in his career, that silence frightened people more than questions.
Elena Marsh sat opposite, spine straight as a bookbinder's awl, a cup of institutional coffee cooling between her hands. Her fingers were stained at the tips, a faint brownish residue that spoke of leather dressing and vellum. She had not touched the coffee. She had not looked away from him.
"You found the gap," Veers said, not quite a question.
"I logged a routine check." Her voice was clipped, Boston consonants clipped shorter. "Two days before the theft was discovered. The volume was present. I initialed the slip. I can show you the slip."
"I'd like to see the slip."
"It will be where I filed it. Which is where I always file things."
Veers inclined his head a fraction of an inch. The fluorescent tube flickered again, throwing her face into a strobe of pale and shadow. He noted the slight muscle tension along her jaw, the way her thumb traced the rim of the cup without drinking. Not nerves, he decided. Irritation. There was a difference. Nerves betrayed guilt; irritation betrayed inconvenience.
"Walk me through the morning," he said.
Marsh set the cup down with a precise click against the desk.
"I arrived at seven forty-two. I always arrive at seven forty-two. I signed the staff ledger. I took my satchel to the conservation lab, where I'd left a pair of cotton gloves drying on a linen towel. I retrieved them. I went to the rare books cage. I checked the ambient humidity reading on the hygrometer, noted it on the daily log, and then I pulled the annotated volume for a condition survey. I held it. I opened it. I inspected the gutter between folios forty-three and forty-four, where there is a recurring cockling I have been monitoring. I closed it. I reshelved it. I locked the cage. I came back here. I made coffee. I worked at my terminal until lunch."
"You didn't take notes."
"I took notes in the daily log. I am the daily log, Detective. I have maintained it for eleven years. Ask anyone in this building who is paying attention, which is a shorter list than you might hope."
"What did the volume look like?"
"It looked like itself. Half bound in calf over boards, marbled edges, nineteenth century, possibly 1847 but I would want to confirm against the binder's ticket. Foxing along the fore-edge. A small abrasion at the head of the spine where someone, in an earlier century, dragged a fingernail. The leather was a little dry, but not distressingly so. I considered ordering a small pot of hydration compound, then decided against it until after the humidity stabilized."
"You're very observant."
"It's my profession."
Veers let a beat pass. Outside the glass partition, a junior librarian pushed a cart of returns with the guilty haste of someone late for something. The cart wheels squealed on the linoleum, a high thin sound that set Veers's teeth on edge.
"And the marginalia," he said. "You authenticated that yourself, years ago."
"I authenticated the hand. I dated the annotations. I did not authenticate the content, because the content is not for me to authenticate. I am a cataloger, not a cryptographer."
"But you noticed something, later. After the authentication. Something you didn't put in the official report."
Marsh's fingers stilled on the cup. For the first time, something moved behind her eyes, a flicker of calculation, or caution, or both.
"I noticed," she said, "that a certain scholar took a very particular interest in the volume shortly after my authentication went public. A scholar who had previously expressed no interest in commonplace books whatsoever. I mentioned it to no one at the time. I mentioned it to no one later, either, until the theft. That is not a thing one mentions. One is liable to be told one is imagining patterns."
"Who was the scholar?"
"His name is in the reading room logs. Anyone who looked could find it. I will not speak it aloud in this room. The walls in this building are thinner than people think."
Veers glanced at the wall behind her. A corkboard pinned with withdrawal slips. A poster for a lecture on paleography, the date already past. A photograph of the library's centenarian gala, everyone in black tie, everyone holding a glass of something celebratory, the camera flash flattening every face into the same polite smile.
"You're worried," he said.
"I am annoyed. There is a difference. I am annoyed that someone took a thing from a building I have spent eleven years protecting. I am annoyed that I am now sitting across from a man who thinks I am a suspect because I happen to know what a hinge joint looks like."
"I don't think you're a suspect."
"Then why am I here?"
"Because you are the person who last touched the book."
"I touched it two days before it vanished. Other people touched it after me. Many people. Students. Researchers. The reading room is a public space. There are cameras, which I assume your people have already pulled, and there is a sign-in sheet with a ballpoint pen chained to a podium, which is the kind of evidence that ends careers."
Veers allowed himself a small, dry sound that might have been a laugh in a different life.
"The cameras," he said, "have a gap of forty-seven minutes between four twelve and four fifty-nine in the afternoon of the day in question. The maintenance log shows a power cycling event, attributed to a faulty junction box in the east corridor. The sign-in sheet, I am told, has been accidentally bleached."
Marsh looked at him for a long moment.
"Well," she said. "That's theater."
"It is."
"The cameras cycling, the log excusing the cycling, the evidence bleaching. That is a production. That is someone with access to the building and a willingness to make a mess."
"It could also be coincidence."
"It could also be the pope converting to Buddhism. I would not build a case on the odds."
Veers studied her. There was something he liked about her, despite himself, or perhaps because of himself. She did not perform distress. She did not rush to fill silence with confession. She sat in her straight-backed chair and looked at him with the clear, unforgiving gaze of someone who had spent decades handling things that crumbled if mishandled.
"You mentioned a scholar," he said. "Someone who took an interest."
"I mentioned a pattern."
"Tell me about the pattern."
Marsh exhaled through her nose, a controlled sound, the kind of sound one makes when negotiating with an immovable object.
"The annotated volume was donated in 1974 by a former student of this institution. The donor's name is in the accession record. I can show you the accession record. The donor was a woman of considerable age, who had kept the book in a cedar chest for most of her life. When she died, her executor shipped it to the university library along with a number of other items, including a set of lecture notes, a bundle of letters tied with green ribbon, and a small wooden box containing what appeared to be desiccated lavender and a brass key."
She paused. Veers waited.
"The book was accessioned, cataloged, and shelved in the general collection for some years. It was not considered remarkable. Then, in 2014, I was asked to authenticate a small group of marginalia that had appeared at auction. The annotations in that lot matched the hand in our volume. I wrote a short authentication paper. I gave a talk at a conference. The paper was noticed by, among others, a scholar who had built his career on textual criticism of an unrelated author. He requested access to our volume. He came to the reading room. He spent three days with it. He took extensive notes. He requested the volume again six months later. He requested it a third time, more recently."
"And you think he may have removed it."
"I think he is a person who wanted the volume badly enough to spend nine days with it across a span of four years. That is not a suspicion. That is a description. Whether he removed it or whether he hired someone to remove it or whether someone entirely unrelated removed it for reasons of their own, those are questions for you. I am a cataloger. I do not investigate. I maintain."
"But you watch."
"I watch. It is a professional habit. It has, over the years, made me unpopular at parties."
Veers glanced toward the glass partition. A young man in a grey cardigan had paused outside the door, holding a stack of pamphlets and looking in with the expression of someone trying to decide whether to interrupt. The young man saw Veers looking and made a small retreat. Marsh tracked the movement in her peripheral vision and did not turn her head.
"You said there were letters," Veers said. "Tied with green ribbon."
"I said there were letters."
"What did you do with the letters?"
"I transferred them to the manuscript department, as per protocol. They are not my responsibility. I believe they were subsequently reviewed by a reader who requested them, though I do not recall which reader. The manuscript department keeps its own records, which I am told are meticulous, though I would not know, as I do not work in that department."
"But you remember the letters."
"I remember the box. I remember the lavender. I remember the key."
"What was the key for?"
"I don't know. It was a small brass key, possibly for a desk or a cabinet. It was not labeled. I noted its existence in the accession record and then I put it in the manuscript box with the letters, because that is where things go when one does not know where else they belong."
"And the letters, were they remarkable?"
"They were in a hand I did not recognize. They were addressed to someone whose initials I noted but whose name I did not commit to memory. They were, as far as I could tell, personal correspondence. Some were affectionate. Some were not."
"Affectionate how?"
"The usual way. Declarations. Complaints about weather. References to mutual friends. One mentioned a wedding. One mentioned a funeral. I read them quickly because I was working, and because reading other people's letters is, in my opinion, a kind of theft, even when one is processing them for a library."
Veers sat back. The chair creaked beneath him, a thin complaint of aging springs. Outside, the clouds over the quad had begun to thicken, pressing the afternoon into a premature dusk. The fluorescent tube above them gave one long, theatrical flicker and then steadied into a sullen hum.
"One more thing," he said. "The annotated marginalia. The content. What was it, in your professional opinion?"
Marsh regarded him.
"It was," she said, "a series of notes in a private code. The code appeared to be keyed to a small set of symbols drawn from a medieval cryptographic manual. The notes themselves were fragmentary. They appeared to reference places, dates, and a person referred to only by an initial. I could not, and cannot, tell you what they mean. I can tell you that whoever wrote them believed the meaning would outlast them. That is the only thing I am sure of."
"And the scholar. The one who took an interest."
"His name is in the logs, Detective. I am not going to say it. You have a warrant, or you will have a warrant, or you will not need a warrant because the logs are public records. Find the name. Find the man. Ask him why he came back a third time. Ask him what he was looking for that he had not yet found. Those are the questions for your desk. I have answered the questions for mine."
She picked up her coffee, finally, and drank. Her expression did not change.
Veers stood. The chair gave another creak of relief. He took a card from his pocket and set it on the desk between them.
"If you think of anything else," he said.
"I will call."
"You can also reach me at this number if you would prefer not to be recorded by the front desk."
Marsh looked at the card. She did not pick it up.
"I will call," she said. "When I have something worth saying. Not before."
Veers nodded. He turned toward the door, then paused.
"The other staff," he said, without turning. "The junior librarians. The reading room attendants. Anyone who had keys."
"Talk to Margaret Holloway. She is retired now, but she was the head of special collections when the volume was donated. She will remember things that no one else remembers. She will also tell you, very politely, that you are wasting her time. I recommend you ignore that. She is sharper than she pretends to be."
"Thank you."
"Do not thank me. Find the book."
Veers walked out into the corridor. The linoleum was waxed to a dull gleam, and his shoes made the softest of sounds against it. Behind him, the fluorescent tube began to flicker again, a tentative, arrhythmic pulse, as if uncertain whether it was about to die or merely to complain.
The walk to Margaret Holloway's house took Veers through streets that grew older the farther he went from the river. The shop fronts thinned. The traffic thinned. The light changed, softer, filtered through plane trees whose leaves had begun to turn at the edges, the first pale yellow of late summer giving way to something duller. He had been given an address in Hampstead, a terraced house on a quiet lane, and he found it without difficulty, though he circled the block once because he wanted to look at the house from the street before he presented himself at the door.
It was a narrow house, three windows wide, with a black painted door and a single step down from the pavement. The window boxes were overgrown but not dead. A small brass plaque beside the doorbell bore a single initial, H. The paint was fresh. The brass was polished. The step had been swept recently, though a single cat hair clung to the bristles of the mat, pale and long, lifting in the breeze.
He pressed the bell. He heard it ring somewhere deep in the house, two notes descending. Then footsteps, unhurried, and the door opened.
The woman who stood in the doorway was smaller than he had expected. Her hair was white and pinned back severely, though a single wisp had escaped and lay against her temple. She wore a cardigan over a blouse, and a long skirt, and her feet were in carpet slippers. Her hands, folded in front of her, were spotted with age but not with trembling. She looked at him with pale blue eyes that missed nothing.
"Detective Veers," she said. It was not a question.
"Mrs Holloway."
"I am not a Mrs. Miss. But that is a small vanity. Come in. I have put the kettle on, because I assumed you would be the sort of man who expects tea, and because I refuse to be interviewed without it."
He stepped inside. The hall was narrow and dim, hung with framed prints of botanical subjects, all of them faded, all of them carefully straightened. The smell of the house was paper and lavender and something faintly astringent, perhaps furniture polish. She led him not into a front parlour but past it, into a back room that looked out onto a small garden, mostly shadow at this hour, with a single apple tree against the far wall.
The room was full of books. They were on shelves, on tables, in stacks on the floor, in piles beside the chair she indicated to him. The chair itself was upholstered in a faded rose pattern, and a quilt had been folded over its back. She did not sit. She stood by the mantelpiece, on which stood a clock and a small framed photograph of a younger woman in academic dress, and she looked at him.
"Sit," she said, as if she had given the matter consideration. "I will bring the tea. You may look about you, but please do not pull anything from the shelves. I have a system. It is not a system you would understand, but it is a system."
She left the room. Veers sat. He did not touch the books. He looked at the spines. They were the spines of a working library, not a decorative one. Many were reference works. Many were journals, bound or unbound. Several were modern, but the majority were older, their cloth worn at the corners. He saw a run of the library journal, and beside it a volume of Bibliographical Society publications, and beside that a slim cloth-bound book whose spine he could not read from where he sat.
She came back with a tray. Two cups, a pot, a small jug of milk, a bowl of sugar. She set it on the table beside him with the care of a woman who had done this a thousand times, and who had opinions about the placement of sugar bowls.
"Milk?" she said.
"Please."
She poured for both of them. She sat, finally, in a chair opposite, and she lifted her cup, and she drank, and she waited.
"I have spoken to Elena Marsh," Veers said.
"Yes," said Margaret Holloway. "She rang me this morning. She rang me to warn me that you would be coming, and to tell me that I should cooperate, and to inform me, in her charming way, that if I did not cooperate she would hold it against me personally for the rest of our natural lives. She is a very loyal friend. It is one of her more irritating qualities."
"Did she tell you why I am here?"
"She told me a man is dead. She told me he had a connection to the annotated volume. She told me the volume itself cannot be found. She did not tell me anything else, because she does not know anything else. She is impatient with her own ignorance. It is her way."
Veers nodded. He took a sip of the tea, which was strong and well made.
"I would like to ask you about the volume," he said.
"I am sure you would."
"Can you tell me when it came into the library's collection?"
She set her cup down. She did not use the saucer; she set it on the table beside the tray.
"It was donated in the autumn of 1987," she said. "The donor was a Miss Imogen Castellan, of whom I expect you have heard, since her name has been in the papers. She was at that time an elderly woman, perhaps seventy, perhaps a little more. She had been a reader in the special collections for many years. She had, in particular, been a reader of the Foyle papers."
"The Foyle papers."
"Yes. Bertram Foyle. A figure of very minor literary interest, whose diaries and commonplace books had been held by the library since the bequest of his executor in 1934. Miss Castellan had been working through them systematically since, I believe, the late 1960s. She had produced one short monograph, and she was preparing another, and she had come to feel that the library was not giving her sufficient access to certain items. There was friction. There had been friction for years."
"What kind of friction?"
"The kind that arises when a reader believes that an institution is in possession of materials that the institution does not wish to be in possession of. She believed that we were suppressing certain items. She believed that we had moved items out of the collection, or had placed restrictions on them. She believed, in short, that we had something to hide."
"Was she right?"
Margaret Holloway looked at him. Her expression did not change, but something behind it sharpened.
"She was a scholar of considerable distinction," she said. "She was also a woman of considerable imagination. It was not always easy, in dealing with her, to know where one ended and the other began."
"But you worked with her."
"I worked with her. I was the deputy head of special collections at that time. I processed her requests. I supervised her reading. I brought her the boxes she asked for, and I took them away again at the end of the day. I knew the Foyle papers better, in those years, than anyone alive. I knew where every item was. I knew what was in every box. I knew what was not in any box."
She paused, and lifted her cup, and drank.
"And then," she said, "in 1987, Miss Castellan donated the annotated volume to the library. The volume which has since caused so much trouble. She did not consult me about the donation. She did not consult the head of special collections. She went over our heads, directly to the dean."
"The dean."
"Yes. Dean Reginald Polk. Who was, at that time, a very different man from the man he has since become. He was younger, for one thing. He was also more easily flattered. Miss Castellan flattered him considerably. She told him that the volume was a treasure of the first water. She told him that the library would be honoured to receive it. She told him that the volume would be a centrepiece of any retrospective on Foyle that the library might choose to mount. He was, I regret to say, charmed."
"And you were not consulted."
"I was informed. I was informed after the fact. I was told that the volume had been accepted, and that it would be accessioned into the collection, and that I was to process it as a matter of priority. I did as I was told. I have never regretted doing as I was told, because the alternative would have been insubordination, and I was not, in those days, in a position to be insubordinate."
She paused again. She looked at him over the rim of her cup.
"You are wondering," she said, "why I am telling you this."
"Yes."
"I am telling you this because I want you to understand the chronology. I am telling you this because I want you to understand that the volume was donated to the library, and not removed from it. I am telling you this because, in due course, certain persons have suggested that I was involved in the donation in some improper way, and I want it to be clear, on the record, that I was not."
"What persons?"
"Persons whose names I will not give you, because I do not traffic in gossip, and because I do not intend to be drawn into the kind of mud-slinging that has disfigured this affair from the beginning. I will say only that there are those who have suggested, in private, that Miss Castellan's donation was not entirely voluntary. That is to say, that she was persuaded. That is to say, that she was pressured. That is to say, in the most unkind version, that she was, in some sense, forced."
"And was she?"
Margaret Holloway set her cup down again. She did not look away from him.
"I do not know," she said. "I have asked myself that question for thirty years. I have asked myself that question in the long watches of the night, Detective Veers, and I have never found an answer that satisfies me. I will tell you what I know, and you may make of it what you will. What I know is that Miss Castellan came to the library one morning in the autumn of 1987 and announced that she intended to make a donation. What I know is that she met with Dean Polk that afternoon. What I know is that she came to see me the next day, and that she was, by her own lights, in a state of considerable agitation. She had been a woman of considerable self-command. I saw her in a state of considerable agitation only twice in the thirty years I knew her. One of those times was in the autumn of 1987. The other time was the day before she died."
"What did she say to you, on that day?"
"She said that she had made a mistake. She said that she had been persuaded to do something that she ought not to have been persuaded to do. She said that the annotated volume ought to remain in the library, because the library was its proper home. She said that she had not realised, when she made the donation, what the consequences of the donation would be. She did not say what those consequences would be. She did not say who had persuaded her. She said only that she had been a fool, and that she hoped I would forgive her."
"And did you forgive her?"
"I told her that there was nothing to forgive. I told her that the volume was now in the library's possession, and that it would be catalogued, and that it would be made available to scholars in due course. I told her that I was glad the library had it, because it was a remarkable object, and that she had done a generous thing. She did not look as though she believed me."
She paused. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. The garden outside was silent. Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked, as if under the weight of a cat.
"I went to look at the volume," she said. "I went to the vault. I opened the box. I looked at it. I read the annotations. And I sat, for what must have been an hour, with the volume open on the table in front of me, and I tried to decide what I ought to do."
"What did you decide?"
"I decided to do my duty. I decided to accession the volume. I decided to catalogue it. I decided to make it available to scholars. I decided that whatever Miss Castellan's reasons had been for the donation, the volume was now the library's property, and that the library's property was to be treated as the library's property."
"And the annotations?"
"The annotations were remarkable. They were the work of a mind of considerable acuity. They were, in many places, original scholarly insights. They went beyond mere commentary. They were, in three places that I can remember, genuinely new contributions to the understanding of the text."
"Did you make notes of your own?"
She looked at him. He saw, for the first time, something in her expression that might have been surprise.
"You are a sharper man than you look," she said.
"I am told that is one of my better qualities."
"I made notes. I made notes in the margins of a photocopy. I was not permitted, under the terms of the donation, to make notes in the original. I was permitted to handle the volume. I was not permitted to write in it. So I photocopied the pages I was interested in, and I made notes in the margins of the photocopies, and I kept the photocopies in my own files, because I believed that my notes had value."
"Do you still have them?"
"I have them. They are in this house. They are in a box in the attic, in a trunk that I have not opened for some years. I will open it for you, if you wish. I will show you what I wrote."
She stood. She did not wait for him to respond. She walked to the door, and she paused there, and she looked back at him.
"You should know," she said, "that when I made those notes, I had a sense, which I could not justify, that someone, at some point, would want to know what I had written. I did not know who. I did not know when. I only knew that the volume was, in some sense, a dangerous object, and that anyone who engaged with it carefully was, in some sense, at risk. I put the box in the attic because I did not want it in the house. I told no one that I had made the notes. I told no one what was in them. I have kept them for thirty years, and I have not looked at them, and I have not spoken of them, and I have wondered, from time to time, whether I ought to have destroyed them."
"Why did you not destroy them?"
"Because they were my work. Because they were true. Because I am not in the habit of destroying work that is true, even when the truth is inconvenient."
She left the room. He heard her footsteps on the stairs, slow and measured. He heard the creak of a floorboard overhead. He heard, faintly, the sound of a trunk being dragged across boards.
He sat, and he waited, and he looked at the books on the shelves, and he thought about a woman who had made notes in the margins of a photocopy and had put them in an attic for thirty years, because she had known, without knowing how she knew, that the truth she had written down would, one day, be needed.
The footsteps overhead continued for some minutes, and then they ceased, and then they resumed, and Bertram Foyle understood that the woman was searching through old belongings, and the sound of it, the muffled rummaging, the occasional grunt of effort, carried to him where he sat in the parlour, and he thought, with the clarity that sometimes visits a man in his eighth decade, that this was the sound of a decision being enacted, that a thing long deferred was at last being done.
He waited. He did not count the minutes. He looked at the spines of the books on Imogen Castellan's shelves, and he read them as one reads the names on a war memorial, alphabetically, slowly, with the recognition that each represents a life that was and is no longer. Aeschylus. Aristotle. Augustine. Bacon. He read until the footsteps descended, and then he ceased reading, and he turned in his chair, and Margaret Holloway stood in the doorway with a tin box under her arm, and the tin box was old, and the paint on it was chipped, and there was a small brass clasp that did not quite close.
She crossed the room. She set the box on the table, beside the commonplace book and the folder of letters. She did not sit. She stood over the table, and Bertram Foyle stood as well, because a gentleman of his generation did not remain seated when a lady was standing, and the habit was too deeply ingrained to be set aside, even now, even here, even in the presence of tin boxes and old truths.
"I have not opened it," she said. "I have not looked at it. I am telling you this so that you will understand that what you are about to read is as new to me as it is to you."
He nodded. He did not speak.
"I will make us tea," she said. "I will make us tea, and I will leave you to read, and when you have read, we will discuss what ought to be done."
She left the room. He heard her in the kitchen, and the sounds from the kitchen were familiar and domestic, the sound of a kettle being filled, the sound of cups being taken from a cupboard, the sound of a match being struck. He stood over the tin box, and he did not open it immediately, because he understood that what was inside was, in some sense, the culmination of a great deal of searching, and he wished to honour the moment with a pause.
He opened the clasp. He lifted the lid.
Inside were sheets of paper, and the sheets were yellow with age, and they were covered in a handwriting that was neither Imogen Castellan's nor his own, and he realized, with a small shock, that the handwriting was Margaret Holloway's own, written thirty years before, when she had been a younger woman, when she had been a librarian at the university, when she had first held the commonplace book in her hands and had begun to make notes in the margins.
He read.
The first sheet was dated in the upper right corner, in a neat hand, the date of her first examination of the volume. Below the date was a single sentence, and the sentence read: "This book is not what it appears to be." Below the sentence was a paragraph, and the paragraph described, in precise and careful language, the annotations in the volume, and the way in which the annotations seemed to constitute a continuous narrative when read in sequence, and the way in which the narrative seemed to describe a series of events that had occurred in the early twentieth century, and the way in which the events seemed to involve members of the academic staff at the university.
He turned to the second sheet. The second sheet continued the description, and it named names, and the names were names he recognised, and the names were names that he had seen in the university records, and the names were names that corresponded, in several cases, to the names in the letters that Imogen Castellan had written to him.
He read on. He read through the morning, and the kettle whistled, and Margaret Holloway brought tea, and he did not notice her come in or go out, and the light shifted across the table, and the cups grew cold, and he did not drink them, and he read, and the world outside the window continued, and he did not notice that either.
What Margaret Holloway had written, in those yellowed sheets, was a record of a society. The society had been called, she wrote, the Shadow Scholars. The society had been founded, she wrote, in the year 1903, by a group of academics who had become interested in the more obscure aspects of medieval literature, and who had decided, for reasons that were never entirely clear, to conduct their inquiries in secret. The society had met, she wrote, in the old library building, in a room that no longer existed, and the members had taken vows of silence, and they had kept records, and the records had been hidden, and the society had continued, in one form or another, for the better part of forty years.
Bertram Foyle read, and his hands began to tremble, and the trembling was not the trembling of age but the trembling of recognition, and he understood, as he read, that what Margaret Holloway had discovered, and what she had written down, and what she had hidden in an attic for thirty years, was the truth about a great many things that he had suspected, and a great many things that he had not.
The Shadow Scholars had not been, she wrote, a society devoted to scholarship. They had been a society devoted to something else. They had been a society that believed, with the fervour of true believers, that certain books contained truths that were too dangerous to be disseminated, and that it was their duty, as custodians of those books, to suppress those truths, and to ensure that they were never read by those who were not initiated. They had been, she wrote, a society of censors. They had policed the collections of the university library. They had removed books that contained passages they considered objectionable. They had altered books, in some cases, to remove passages they considered dangerous. They had kept a record, in a book that was kept in a locked cabinet, of every book they had altered, and every passage they had removed.
Imogen Castellan's commonplace book, she wrote, had been one of the books they had altered. The annotations were the original text. The printed text was the censored version. The book that Bertram Foyle held in his hands, and that Imogen Castellan had held before him, was a forgery, in the most precise sense of that term: it was a book that had been deliberately altered to deceive, and the alterations had been so skilful that they had passed, for over a century, as the original.
He sat back in his chair. He looked at the commonplace book on the table. He looked at it as he had never looked at it before, as an artefact of a great deception, as a thing that had been made to conceal rather than to reveal, and the weight of that knowledge settled upon him, and he felt, for a moment, the vertigo of a man who has been standing on solid earth and has discovered that the solid earth is hollow.
Margaret Holloway came in. She stood in the doorway and looked at him, and she did not ask what he had read, because she could see it in his face.
"I understand," she said.
"I am not certain that I do," he said.
"You will," she said. "In time."
She sat down across from him. She poured fresh tea. She pushed a cup across to him, and he took it, and he held it in both hands, and the warmth of it was a comfort, and the warmth of it was insufficient.
"There is more," she said.
He looked at her.
"I received a telephone call," she said. "This morning, before you arrived. A man called. He did not give his name. He told me to stop reading between the lines."
The phrase landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
"Reading between the lines," he said.
"Yes," she said. "That phrase. It was used by the Shadow Scholars. I found it in the marginalia. It was their term for the practice of recovering the suppressed text from the censored volumes. The man who called, whoever he was, knew that phrase. He knew what it meant."
"Did you recognise the voice?"
"No," she said. "It was a man's voice. It was not a voice I knew. It was quiet, and it was educated, and it was, I thought, the voice of someone who was not accustomed to making threats, and was therefore all the more dangerous for that."
"Did you call the police?"
"I have not yet done so," she said. "I wished to speak with you first. I wished to know whether what I had found was, as I had begun to suspect, connected to the death of your nephew."
Bertram Foyle set down his cup. He looked at her, and she looked at him, and the look that passed between them was the look of two people who have arrived, by different paths, at the same place, and who understand, without the need for words, that the place they have arrived at is dangerous, and that the only sensible thing to do is to turn back, and that turning back is no longer possible.
"My nephew," he said, "was killed because he had begun to read between the lines."
"Yes," she said.
"The caller," he said, "warned you to stop reading between the lines."
"Yes," she said.
"It follows," he said, "that the caller is either the person who killed my nephew, or is associated with that person."
"It follows," she said.
He was silent for a long moment. He looked at the commonplace book. He looked at the folder of letters. He looked at the tin box, open on the table, the yellowed sheets visible within.
"What ought we to do?" he said.
"I do not know," she said. "I have spent thirty years not knowing what to do with what I found. I have spent thirty years hoping that the question would never arise."
"It has arisen," he said.
"Yes," she said. "It has."