The thumbprint on the inspection log did not belong to Elena Marsh.
Detective Jonas Veers set his coffee down on the cluttered desk, the brown liquid sloshing against the rim of the styrofoam cup. The smell of burnt hazelnut and stale office dust hung heavy in the air. He leaned closer to the archival scan, the blue light of the monitor washing out the hollows under his cheekbones. Marsh's signature sprawled across the bottom of the form, dated yesterday, asserting that the temperature controls in the subterranean vault were functioning within standard parameters.
But the print sitting just above her name, a smudged whorl of oils transferred onto the glossy paper, was wrong.
He tapped a key, pulling up the personnel file he had requisitioned from university HR. A photograph of Elena Marsh stared back at him. She had long fingers, a prominent ridge on her left thumb from a childhood fracture. The print on the form was a clean oval, collected from someone who had never broken a bone.
The precinct was quiet. The ambient hum of the ventilation system vibrated through the floor, mixing with the distant clatter of a keyboard two cubicles over. Veers rubbed his eyes, the grit of a forty-hour shift grinding against his palms. He reached for the phone, dialing the number for the university's security office. A dispatcher picked up on the second ring.
"Archives annex. I need the overnight surveillance footage from Tuesday," Veers said. His voice was a low, gravelly monotone. "The external loading bay and the interior corridor by the special collections wing."
He ended the call and stood up, his knees popping as he shrugged on his rumpled suit jacket. The drive to the university took twenty minutes through the pre-dawn streets, the city mostly asleep except for the scattered delivery trucks and the blue neon glow of laundromats.
The security office was a cramped room in the basement of the library, smelling of old paper and ozone. A bleary-eyed guard named Driscoll was waiting for him, a half-eaten bagel sitting on a stack of incident reports. Driscoll slid a DVD into the player without a word.
The timestamp read 02:14. The main doors to the archives were dark, the motion sensors dormant. For an hour, the screen showed nothing but empty marbled floors and the occasional stray mouse darting across the edge of the frame.
Veers checked his watch. "Fast forward. Let's look at the loading bay."
Driscoll manipulated the remote. The footage cut to the exterior camera, looking down at the concrete delivery area. At 02:47, a figure stepped into the frame.
The person wore a dark, bulky hooded sweatshirt, the fabric obscuring their face and posture. They moved with a deliberate, unhurried gait, carrying a rectangular object under their right arm. A document case. Matte black, hard-sided, the kind used for transporting flat archival materials.
Veers leaned forward, the leather of his jacket creaking. "Freeze that."
Driscoll paused the tape. The figure was caught mid-stride, one foot lifted off the concrete. Even frozen, there was something familiar in the way the shoulders angled, the slight tilt of the head.
"Enhance the face," Veers ordered.
Driscoll shook his head. "I tried. The camera is twenty feet up, and the hood is too thick. You can't see a thing. Look at the build, though. It's not a student. Whoever that is has a solid frame."
Veers grunted, his jaw tightening. He recognized the type of case. He had seen one exactly like it on Elena Marsh's desk during his initial interview. She had called it her "travel kit" for valuable manuscripts.
The figure on the screen walked out of the camera's range, disappearing into the shadows of the parking lot. Three minutes later, a university shuttle bus passed the camera, its headlights sweeping across the empty concrete, leaving the area completely deserted.
Veers stood up, his mind racing. The timing fit. The falsified log. The missing document case. If Marsh hadn't been in the vault, who had? And why sign her name to a form that never happened?
He drove to Marsh's antique shop in the financial district, the morning traffic thickening around his unmarked sedan. The shop was called "Quintessential Rarities." The irony of the name was not lost on him, given the recent history of the place.
The bell above the door chimed a discordant note when he entered. The shop smelled of lemon oil and binding glue. Elena Marsh was behind the counter, wearing a crisp white blouse and a pair of reading glasses perched on her nose. She was examining the spine of a leather-bound octavo, a magnifying loupe held to her eye.
She didn't look up. "We're closed. I open at ten, Detective. Surely the badge doesn't override the posted business hours."
Veers dropped his keys onto the glass counter. The clatter made her flinch, the loupe lowering an inch. Her eyes were sharp, a dark hazel that assessed him with a mixture of irritation and scrutiny.
"We need to talk about Tuesday night," Veers said.
Marsh set the book down carefully, aligning the pages flush with the edge of the display shelf. A gesture of control, he noted. "I was home. You can check with my neighbor, Mrs. Gable. We watched the late news and drank a regrettable amount of pinot grigio."
"According to the vault inspection log, you were in the subterranean stacks at eight PM."
"And according to my memory, I was horizontal on a sofa, arguing with a Pomeranian about the state of modern journalism." She adjusted her glasses, her tone crisp. "Is the log in question? I suppose the university has finally lost its mind. I wouldn't be surprised if the plumbing down there has corroded the paperwork."
"The log bears your signature."
A flicker of something crossed her face. Not guilt, but a rapid calculation. "People forge signatures, Detective. It is an ugly but common practice in a world where reputation is the only currency that matters." She picked up the book again, dismissing him. "If you'll excuse me, I have a client arriving in an hour to look at a Caxton print. I'd rather not be smelling of cheap cologne and burnt coffee when they do."
Veers didn't move. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a printed photograph from the security footage. The hooded figure, caught in the stark black and white pixels of the loading bay camera. He slapped it down on the glass counter, covering the leather binding of the octavo.
"Recognize the case?"
Marsh stared at the photograph. The color drained from her cheeks, leaving her skin pale and tight across her cheekbones. The loupe slipped from her fingers, hitting the glass with a sharp crack. She didn't pick it up.
"Where did you get this?" she whispered.
"Your building. Two forty-seven in the morning. You said you were on a sofa."
"That isn't me," she said, her voice losing its sharp edge, becoming thin and urgent. "That is not me. I have a twin, Detective. Her name is Sarah. We haven't spoken in fifteen years, but if she is in that footage, you need to find her before she destroys everything."
The admission hung in the air, heavy and unexpected. Veers picked up the photograph, sliding it back into his jacket. He looked at Marsh, searching for the lie, the angle. He found none. Just the raw, unvarnished terror of a woman whose past had just walked into her carefully constructed present.
"Where is Sarah now?" Veers asked.
"I don't know," Marsh replied, her hands gripping the edge of the counter. "But if she is looking for the marginalia, she is looking in the wrong place. And she is going to get someone killed."
Bertram Foyle stood at the back of the shop, half-hidden behind a rack of nineteenth-century hymnals whose spines had gone soft with age. He had not moved when Marsh's twin appeared in the photograph. He had not moved when the loupe cracked against glass. But now, as the name Sarah settled into the room like a stone dropped into still water, his hand found the edge of the bookshelf and held on.
Sarah Marsh. He knew the name. He had read it once, in a letter kept in a box at the Whitmore, and he had dismissed it as a curiosity, a thread too thin to pull. Now the thread had become a noose, and it was tightening around everyone in the room.
Veers had not flinched. The detective's face remained a mask of professional calm, but his eyes had narrowed at the word twin, and his weight had shifted forward onto the balls of his feet. Foyle recognized the posture. He had seen it in old photographs of detectives from the thirties, men who learned to read violence in the geometry of a body before it happened.
"A twin," Veers said. The word came out flat, stripped of inflection. "You have a twin sister, and you didn't think to mention this when I first sat down?"
Marsh's laugh was brittle, the sound of glass stepping on glass. "Mention what, Detective? That I have a sister I haven't spoken to since before 9 11? That she dropped off the face of the earth because she couldn't stand the sight of me? What exactly would that have told you about a dead body in a library basement?"
"It would have told me you have family," Veers said. "It would have told me family means motive."
"Motive for what?" Marsh's voice rose, the crisp Boston edges fraying into something rawer. "I authenticated that book. I authenticated the marginalia. I didn't kill anyone. I have spent ten years building a reputation on the premise that dead men don't talk, Detective, and now one of them is trying to talk through me."
Foyle stepped out from behind the hymnals. The floorboard beneath his foot gave a soft groan, and both Marsh and Veers turned toward him. He had not intended to reveal himself, but the conversation had reached a point where silence was its own kind of lie.
"There's something you both should see," he said.
Marsh stared at him. Veers's hand moved, not to his weapon but to the notebook in his breast pocket, the unconscious gesture of a man accustomed to recording the unexpected.
"Who are you?" Veers asked.
"Bertram Foyle. I work in the basement of the Whitmore Rare Book Library. I catalogued the marginalia when it first came in." He reached into his coat and produced a folded piece of paper, yellowed at the edges, soft as cloth. "This was in a book that arrived three days ago. A commonplace book, same donor as the original. Same handwriting in the margins. But this one has something the first didn't."
He laid the paper on the glass counter between them. Veers and Marsh both leaned in, and Foyle watched their faces as they read.
The note was short, written in a hurried hand that slanted to the right as though pulled by an unseen current. It read: She knows where the second printing was buried. She is not who you think. The B is not the B.
Foyle had read it forty times since finding it tucked into the back board of the binding. He had read it until the words lost their meaning and became shapes, then meaning again, sharper each time. He had not slept.
"The B," Marsh said slowly. "The B is not the B."
"It could be a typesetting mark," Foyle said. "A printer's reference. The letter B in a forme refers to a specific compartment in the type case. If the marginalia was set into print, then someone used a B that wasn't a B."
Veers looked up from the note. "You're saying this is about Horace Quint."
The name landed in the room with a weight that surprised even Foyle. Marsh's breath caught. Veers's expression did not change, but his eyes moved to the window, to the street beyond, as though calculating distance.
"Horace Quint set the type for the university press from 1962 until his retirement in 1991," Foyle said. "He worked on the restoration of several nineteenth-century texts. He would have had access to the original marginalia if it was ever reproduced."
"And he would know," Veers said, "if someone substituted one letter for another."
Foyle nodded. The note made a kind of sense now, terrible sense. The marginalia, as printed, might not match the marginalia as written. A single substitution, a B where there should have been a different letter, could change the meaning of an entire passage. Could change a name. Could redirect a legacy.
"Where is Quint now?" Veers asked.
"Alive," Foyle said. "Retired. Lives in Bayswater. I called him this morning. He asked me not to come."
Veers picked up the note and folded it carefully, sliding it into his pocket beside the photograph. "Then that's where we go next."
Marsh stepped forward, her hand outstretched. "Wait. You can't just leave. If Sarah is involved in this, if she has something to do with the marginalia or the dead man in the basement, you need protection. You need to tell me everything."
Veers paused at the door. He looked back at her, and for the first time his expression softened into something that might have been sympathy or might have been pity.
"What I need, Ms. Marsh, is for you to stay where I can find you. Don't leave the city. Don't talk to your sister. Don't talk to anyone named Foyle, Quint, or Holloway. And for God's sake, don't authenticate anything else until I tell you it's safe."
He pushed the door open, and the bell chimed its small, indifferent note. Foyle followed him out into the street, where the morning had turned the color of old pewter and the smell of wet asphalt rose from the gutters like a memory.
Veers lit a cigarette. His hands were steady, but his eyes were not. He looked at Foyle with the appraising gaze of a man deciding whether to trust a witness or arrest him.
"You found that note three days ago," Veers said. It was not a question. "Why didn't you call the police?"
Foyle considered the question. He thought of the box in the basement, the letters from Imogen Castellan, the careful arrangement of a life spent among the quiet dead. He thought of Margaret Holloway, who had called him that morning with a voice like cracking ice.
"Because I wasn't sure it was a crime," he said. "I thought it might be a correction. A typesetter's note to himself, left in the binding for reasons of his own. I thought I could handle it."
"And now?"
Foyle looked at the photograph in Veers's pocket, the shape of it pressing against the wool like a second heart.
"Now I think someone has been waiting a very long time for someone to find it," he said. "And I think they are tired of waiting."
Veers dropped his cigarette and ground it beneath his heel. He opened the car door for Foyle, and the metal groaned under his hand like a living thing.
"Then let's not keep them waiting any longer."
Margaret Holloway closed her office door with the careful deliberation of a woman sealing a letter she had written many times in her head. The small room smelled of old paper and furniture polish, the particular perfume of institutions that endured. She did not turn on the overhead light. The desk lamp cast a circle of warmth across the blotter, leaving the corners in shadow. She preferred it that way. Shadows had a way of keeping things honest.
She removed her reading glasses, polished them on the hem of her cardigan, and set them down beside the folder she had assembled that morning from the university archives. The folder was thin. The truth, she suspected, would not be.
Her fingers, still steady despite the arthritis that had begun to claim the knuckles, opened the folder and turned the pages one by one. Photocopies of correspondence. A handwritten inventory from 1987. A photograph, faded to the color of weak tea, of a man standing outside the old print shop with his sleeves rolled to the elbow. Horace Quint. Even in reproduction, the eyes were unmistakable. They had the startled look of a man who had seen something he was not meant to see, and had spent the decades since trying to unsee it.
The manuscript had been donated in 1952 by a woman named Edith Castellan, a distant relation of Imogen's and the last of that line to hold any interest in the family's papers. The donation was routine: a box of letters, a journal kept by a great-aunt, and a commonplace book bound in calfskin that had once belonged to a minor Victorian poet whose name Margaret could no longer remember and did not bother to retrieve. The accession records described the manuscript as a commonplace book of miscellaneous verse, possibly useful for coursework on periodical literature of the period.
That was forty years ago. Margaret had been the junior archivist who processed the donation. She had been the one to notice, in the margin of a sonnet about mutability, a penciled gloss that did not belong to the original hand. The handwriting was cramped and precise, the punctuation slightly askew, as though the writer had been working very quickly or had been very afraid.
She had flagged it then. Flagged it, and forgotten it, and remembered it again when the world had changed and the manuscript had changed hands and Horace Quint, who had once tried to buy the very volume now missing, had written three letters to the library over the course of a single summer asking for access to the marginalia. The letters were in the folder. Margaret read them again, one by one, the way she had read them that morning while waiting for the kettle to boil.
The first was courteous, almost diffident. The second referenced his earlier offer of purchase, and expressed the hope that the library might reconsider. The third was shorter, and the handwriting in it had deteriorated. He had written, in a postscript, that he understood if the library wished to refuse, but that he hoped they understood the importance of what they held. He had underlined the word importance twice.
Margaret turned the page and found the inventory she had been looking for. Item seventeen in box four: one commonplace book, calfskin binding, gilt edges, slight water damage to rear board, with marginal annotations in pencil. Below this, in her own hand from that long-ago processing, she had written: See notes. Possibly significant.
She had been right. She had been right about that, at least.
The telephone on her desk rang with the small, apologetic sound of an instrument that knew it was interrupting. She lifted the receiver and listened to the click and hum of a connection being made across the city.
"Margaret Holloway."
"It's Veers. We need to talk about a man named Horace Quint."
Margaret did not sit down. She remained standing, the receiver pressed to her ear, the folder open in front of her like a meal she had not yet decided to eat.
"I was rather expecting your call, Detective."
"You know him."
"I know of him. He wrote to me. Three letters, over a summer, about twenty years ago. He wanted to purchase the manuscript. The one that is now missing."
There was a pause. In the background, she could hear the muffled sounds of a police station: a door closing, a radio muttering, someone laughing in a way that did not sound amused.
"Did he say why?"
"He said it was a matter of historical significance to his family. He said his grandfather had been a typesetter at the university press, and that there were questions he needed to answer about certain work the old man had done. He was very polite. He was also, I think, very desperate."
"How do you read desperation, Mrs. Holloway?"
"I spent forty years in archives, Detective. I have read a great many letters from people who wanted things very badly. The polite ones are always the most dangerous. They have had practice."
Veers was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had the careful flatness of a man arranging facts in a row.
"Did you ever meet him?"
"Once. He came to the reading room. He signed the visitor's ledger. He wore a grey suit that had been cleaned many times, and his hands shook when he turned the pages. He stayed for three hours and left without speaking to anyone except the desk attendant. He left a donation of fifteen pounds and a note that said the library had been very kind. The donation was in the folder I sent you this morning."
"The typesetter," Veers said. "His grandfather."
"His grandfather set type for the university press from 1909 until 1947. He set, among other things, the first edition of a slim volume of poems by one Imogen Castellan. The volume is exceedingly rare. It is not in our collection. I believe Mr. Quint owns one of the surviving copies. He has never lent it to the library, despite my requests."
"Requests."
"I am retired, Detective. I have time to make requests."
She heard him exhale, the sound of a man unclenching a little. Then his voice returned, rougher now, the edges showing.
"The thief. The one we picked up this morning. His name is not Horace Quint."
"No."
"But Quint tried to buy the manuscript. Twenty years ago."
"Yes."
"And now it is missing."
"Yes."
"Mrs. Holloway."
"Detective."
"I need you to come down to the station. I need you to look at some photographs. I need you to tell me whether the man we have in custody is the man who wrote those letters."
Margaret closed the folder. She placed both hands flat on its surface, as though pressing down on a lid.
"I will be there within the hour," she said. "I have something to show you first."
"What is it?"
She looked at the photograph on her desk, the one of Horace Quint outside the print shop with his sleeves rolled and his eyes startled.
"A face I have not seen in twenty years," she said. "And a name I should have spoken sooner."
She set the receiver down with the same care she had used to open it. The line went dead. The room was quiet again, the way libraries are quiet even when they are empty: full of the hum of waiting.
Margaret Holloway stood for a moment longer, her hand resting on the folder, her eyes on the photograph. Then she opened her desk drawer, took out a small key on a leather fob, and put it into her coat pocket. The key was for the strongroom in the basement, where the library kept things it was not sure it should keep.
She turned off the desk lamp. The room went dark. She did not hurry, but she did not linger. There was a man in a cell who might or might not be the right man. There was a name she had carried for twenty years like a stone in her shoe. There was a manuscript that had been waiting, in one form or another, for a very long time to be read.
She closed her office door behind her. The corridor stretched out before her, long and lamplit, and at the far end of it the lift waited with its doors already open, as though it had known she was coming.
Margaret Holloway walked toward it, and the building settled around her like a sentence finding its ending.
The strongroom smelled of iron and old paper. Margaret Holloway fitted the key into the lock and felt the tumblers turn with a click that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than the door.
She did not turn on the overhead light. She knew the room well enough to navigate by the thin bar of daylight that fell from the basement grating above. The shelves rose around her, steel and shadow, and the boxes upon them sat in their numbered rows like a congregation waiting to be told what to believe.
She found the box she was looking for on the third shelf from the floor. The label on its spine read: HOLLOWAY, M. PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE, 1987-1991. ARCHIVAL RESTRICTION APPLIED. She carried it to the reading stand at the centre of the room and set it down.
The lid came away with a faint sigh of disturbed air. Inside, beneath a sheet of acid-free tissue, lay a bundle of letters held together with a cotton tape. The envelopes were addressed in a hand she would have recognised anywhere: tight, forward-leaning, with a slight rightward slant that spoke of haste and certainty in equal measure. The return address on each was the same: 17 Villiers Street, Strand.
Bertram Foyle.
She did not open the bundle. She had read these letters enough times over the past two decades to have most of them by heart. But she lifted the topmost envelope and held it for a moment, feeling the weight of the paper, the faint texture of the ink that had been pressed into the surface almost four decades ago. Then she set it back and closed the lid.
She had come down here for something else.
At the back of the box, beneath a folded sheet of layout paper that had yellowed to the colour of weak tea, lay a single photograph in a plain paper sleeve. She drew it out and held it up to the thin light.
The photograph was black and white, slightly overexposed, the kind of image a press camera produced when it had been asked to do too much in too little light. It showed a group of men standing outside a doorway. The doorway belonged to a print shop. The men wore the dust-coloured coats of compositors, and their hands were ink-blackened. They squinted against a sun that was clearly not the sun they were used to.
Margaret's eyes went straight to the second figure from the left. He was slighter than the others, with a narrow face and a way of standing that suggested he would rather have been somewhere else. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. His eyes, caught in the act of looking away from the camera, were startled, as though he had only just realised that history was being made of him.
She had carried this photograph in her personal correspondence box since 1989. She had never shown it to anyone. She had never told anyone that she possessed it.
She was about to break that habit.
She slid the photograph into her coat pocket, alongside the key, and closed the box. She lifted it back to its shelf. She checked the label. She checked that the lid was properly seated. She checked that the tissue lay flat. Only then did she allow herself to turn toward the door.
The lift carried her back up through the building's bones. Somewhere above her, she could hear the muffled tread of a cleaner on the upper gallery, and the distant, papery sigh of the pneumatic message system that the library had never quite got around to updating. These were the sounds she had grown up with, in a manner of speaking. They were the sounds of a building that had learned, over the course of a century and a half, to be patient.
The outer office was empty when she stepped out of the lift. The front desk was unattended. Through the glass she could see a lorry parked at the kerb, its hazard lights ticking in the grey morning air. She walked past the desk, past the row of public computers, past the rotating stand of local history pamphlets, and pushed through the swing doors onto the pavement.
The air outside was sharper than she had expected. She turned up the collar of her coat and walked toward the taxi that was already pulling up at the kerb. The driver leaned across and opened the passenger door without being asked.
"Police station," she said. "Homicide division."
She gave him the address she had committed to memory from Detective Veers's card, and settled back against the vinyl seat. The photograph was in her left pocket. The key was in her right. Between them, pressed against her ribs, she could feel the shape of every choice she had not made for twenty years, and every choice she was about to make.
The taxi moved off down the empty street.
At the police station, she was shown into an interview room on the second floor. It was a small room, painted the colour of weak custard, with a table bolted to the floor and two chairs on one side and one on the other. The mirror on the far wall was not very well disguised as a window. She sat down on the single chair, placed her handbag on the floor beside her feet, and waited.
Detective Veers came in carrying two paper cups of coffee and a file folder that was thicker than his forearm. He set one cup in front of her, sat down opposite, and opened the folder.
"We found something," he said. "On the back of the manuscript page. The one with the codex entry."
She looked at him. Her face did not change, but her eyes did.
"A partial imprint," he said. "As if something had been pressed onto the page and then lifted away. We only got a partial read because the page had been handled so much. But what we got was a letterhead."
He slid a photograph across the table. It was a colour photograph, taken under raking light, of the reverse of the manuscript page. On it, in faded blue ink that had been transferred rather than written, she could make out the outline of a crown, and beneath it, in serif type, the words: HIS MAJESTYS STATIONERY OFFICE.
Margaret did not move. Her hand, which had been reaching for the coffee, stopped halfway across the table and hovered there.
"When the Stationery Office prints a confidential document," Veers said, "it prints it on paper with that letterhead. When the original is filed away, the carbon copy, if there is one, goes into a separate archive. When the archive is decommissioned, the documents are pulped. Except when they aren't."
He looked at her. She looked at him.
"You knew," he said. It was not a question.
"I suspected," she said. "For some time."
He waited.
She reached into her left pocket and brought out the photograph in its paper sleeve. She laid it on the table between them, next to the photograph he had just given her.
"I found that in a box of personal papers that I have been keeping in the strongroom for twenty years," she said. "I found it in 1989, when I was still working at the university library, and a colleague of mine was cataloguing a bequest from a recently deceased antiquarian. The bequest included a bundle of correspondence from a man called Bertram Foyle. Foyle had been a printer in the Strand. He had also, it turned out, been a part-time agent for the British government during the war. He had used his print shop as a cover for a small operation that produced, among other things, certain coded documents for a section that nobody would admit existed."
She tapped the photograph.
"This was taken at the print shop in the summer of 1944. The man on the left, with the cap, was the foreman. The man second from the left, with the rolled sleeves, was the compositor who set the type for the operation's coded output. His name was Horace Quint."
Veers looked at the photograph for a long time.
"And the man on the right?"
"That was Bertram Foyle himself."
"And the woman who gave the bequest?"
"His daughter. She had kept his correspondence for sixty years and then decided she could no longer bear to. She sent it to the university because she did not know what else to do with it. By the time it reached me, half of it had been thrown away by a junior cataloguer who did not know what he was looking at."
She paused. The coffee steamed gently between them.
"The letters I kept were the ones that mentioned a manuscript. Foyle had written, in 1947, to a friend in the university, about a manuscript that had come into his possession during the war. A manuscript that contained, among other things, a codex that he believed could be used to identify a network of agents and assets that had been established across Europe in the early 1940s. He wanted to keep the manuscript hidden until he could be sure it would not be used against the people it described. His friend, the academic, advised him to deposit it with a trusted institution. He did not."
"Why not?"
"Because, by the time he was ready to deposit it, in the spring of 1948, the network had been quietly dismantled. The assets had been reassigned. The files had been pulped. And Bertram Foyle had died in a fire at his print shop in January of that year."
"A fire."
"The official verdict was accident. Aypesquitable. I have never been convinced."
She looked at him steadily.
"The manuscript passed, after Foyle's death, to his daughter. She kept it until 1987, when she sent it to the university along with the rest of his papers. By that time, the marginalia had been added to it. By whom, I do not know. I have my suspicions."
Veers leaned back in his chair.
"And the codex entry in the manuscript," he said. "The one that points to Imogen Castellan. How does that fit?"
"It fits," she said, "because Bertram Foyle was not the only person who knew about the codex. There was at least one other. And that other person has been waiting, for the same twenty years I have been waiting, for someone to read what he had written."
She reached into her right pocket, brought out the key, and set it on the table next to the photograph.
"There is a lockbox in the strongroom," she said, "that I have not opened in twenty years. It contains a single item. I have not opened it because I made a promise, to a man I loved, that I would not open it until it was safe to do so."
She looked at him.
"I think it is safe now."
The room was very quiet. Somewhere beyond the custard-coloured wall, a printer was producing a long, unbroken run of pages. Margaret could hear the faint, rhythmic percussion of the machine, like a heart that had forgotten how to rest.
She picked up her coffee. She had not touched it before. Now she raised the cup to her lips, and drank.
The case, for the first time in its long and patient life, had begun to move.