The registration slip sat on the doormat like a small grey confession.
Hugh Pendleton counted the heartbeats between his thumb and forefinger, a habit picked up in university libraries where silence was law. Three beats. Four. The envelope carried a second-class mark, a Salisbury postmark dated the eleventh of September, and a typed address that bore his name in slightly uneven capitals, as though struck by fingers no longer certain of their task. He turned it over. Wax. Black, brittle, pressed with an H he did not recognise.
His hall smelled of damp wool and the polish he had applied to the floorboards that very morning, a Thursday he had decided to set aside for cataloguing the outbuildings at Marsh Court. A specialist in decay required patience, and patience required clean shoes.
He carried the letter into the kitchen, set the kettle on out of reflex, and only then noticed the postmark again. He fetched a magnifying glass from the cutlery drawer, where it lived beside a tin of pipe tobacco he no longer smoked, and held the envelope beneath the bulb. The ink was correct Royal Mail blue. The cancellation read 11.09, Salisbury. The date of dispatch was correct. The date was, in fact, two days after the fire at Weston Bele care home that had taken the life of Harlan Marsh, and three days after the announcement, carried in the Wiltshire Gazette, that the elderly solicitor had died in his sleep, smoke inhalation, no suspicious circumstances.
Hugh set the magnifying glass down very carefully, as though it might shatter.
He had never met Harlan Marsh. He had, until that morning, been entirely unaware that any such person existed, beyond a line in a parish register and a footnote in a planning document for the A303 bypass. The Marsh family had owned a grey stone house on the edge of the village of Upper Brindle for the better part of that span, and the surviving relative, a woman of advanced years called Eleanor, had engaged Hugh, on the recommendation of a former tutor, to produce a definitive history of the estate for submission to the county archive. The work was to begin in October, when the leaves had fallen from the beeches and the scaffolding around the east wing could at last come down.
Harlan Marsh had not been mentioned in any of the correspondence.
Hugh made tea. He drank half a cup standing at the window, watching a blackbird drag a worm across the lawn with more purpose than Hugh felt he could currently muster. The kettle ticked as it cooled. A church bell, two miles distant in the village, struck the half hour with a brass note so faint it could have been imagined.
He opened the letter.
The paper inside was thick, cream, faintly blue-ruled, and bore no letterhead. The handwriting was careful, the sort of script taught in schools whose names no longer appeared on maps. The address at the top was his own. The date was the tenth of September.
The letter read:
Dear Mr. Pendleton,
Forgive the presumption. I am informed you have agreed to undertake a historical survey of Marsh Court, and that you are a person of methodical habit and discreet disposition. I write to you in some urgency because I believe that what you find in that house will not be what you have been told you will find.
I am a solicitor of fifty years' standing, the last of the male line of my family, and I am recently dead also, though not by the means reported in the local press. I do not expect you to credit this. I ask only that you read what follows, and that you act upon it in the order I have set down.
First: do not begin your survey in the cellars. Begin in the attic. There is a trapdoor in the ceiling of the linen closet off the principal bedroom, concealed beneath a board that lifts. Behind that board you will find a tin box, green, of the sort once sold for tobacco. Inside you will find a ledger bound in red morocco. Do not remove it from the house. Photocopy it. Read it in order.
Second: when you have read it, make no approach to my mother, Mrs. Eleanor Marsh. Do not telephone, do not write, do not call upon her at Marsh Court. She is unwell in a manner she will not acknowledge. Her mind is not what it was, and what she believes to be true is not what is true.
Third: speak with my son, of the same name, who practises from an office in Bristol. He will deny all knowledge of this letter. He will deny all knowledge of me. That denial is, in itself, a confirmation.
I have made provision for you to be paid for your additional time at a rate you will find acceptable. Enclosed is a banker's draft for five hundred pounds, drawn on the account of H.M. Marsh and Co., Solicitors, Bristol, account number to follow under separate cover.
I wish I could tell you who killed me. I cannot. I can tell you only that the fire was set, and that the hand that struck the match was not my own, and that if you do as I ask, you will understand why I chose to write to a stranger rather than to my own flesh.
Yours in hope of justice,
Harlan Marsh.
Hugh set the letter down. He picked it up. He set it down again. He walked to the window and looked out at the lawn, which had not changed in the three minutes since last he observed it, though he felt certain it ought to have, that the world ought to have rearranged itself to accommodate what he had just read.
The blackbird had gone. In its place, on the lawn, a tabby cat from the house next door sat washing its shoulder with the fastidious air of one who has never once doubted the outcome of any enterprise.
Hugh returned to the table and read the letter a second time, and then a third. He held the paper to the light and saw no watermark beyond the standard. He examined the banker's draft, which was drawn on a High Street bank in Bristol, bore no date, and was signed in the same careful hand as the letter. He made a note of the drawer, the amount, the branch, in his small black book, and then he made a note of the fact that he had made a note, because he had learned, in his trade, that the first thing a forger considers is what the recipient might consider in turn.
He telephoned the Bristol number listed at the foot of the draft.
A recorded voice informed him the offices of H.M. Marsh and Co. were closed until further notice. A second line rang and rang and was not answered.
Hugh sat in his kitchen for the better part of an hour, turning the envelope between his fingers. He thought of Eleanor Marsh, whom he had met once, briefly, at the tearoom in Upper Brindle, a woman in her eighties with white hair pinned like a coronet, who had taken his measure across a pot of Earl Grey and pronounced him acceptable. He thought of Harlan Marsh, whose existence the letter had conjured out of a parish register and a news item and a sealed envelope. He thought of the attic of Marsh Court, which he had not yet entered, and of the linen closet off the principal bedroom, which he had not yet opened, and of the trapdoor he had not yet found.
He thought, finally, of the banker's draft, and of the five hundred pounds, which would cover his rent for the coming quarter and leave enough over to pay for the damp course the landlord had been pressing him to address since spring.
Hugh Pendleton had spent his career in archives. He had handled documents that smelled of other centuries, of other hands. He had a sense for paper, and a sense for the spaces between what was written and what was meant. The letter before him smelt of neither fraud nor jest. It smelt of the particular desperation of a man who had run out of time and had chosen, in his last hours, to place his trust in the unknown.
He took down the leather satchel he kept for site visits. He packed it with the letter, the draft, a torch, a notebook, a soft pencil, a small digital recorder, a phone with a charged battery, a flask of water, a packet of biscuits, and a stout pair of gloves. He locked his house. He walked to the bus stop at the end of his road and stood in the thin September drizzle until the 0940 to Upper Brindle arrived.
The bus was almost empty. A woman with a shopping bag nodded at him. A boy in a school blazer stared at his phone. Hugh sat near the back and watched the countryside slide past in a wash of gold and brown, and he considered, for some miles, whether he was a prudent man or a fool.
The letter had asked three things of him. He had done two. The third remained.
The bus turned off the main road at the sign for Upper Brindle, a village that existed in three time zones at once: medieval, Georgian, and the one that had come since the bypass. Hugh alighted at the war memorial and walked the half mile to Marsh Court on a lane lined with beeches whose leaves had only just begun to fall. The house appeared at the end of the avenue, grey stone, mullioned windows, a portico added in the Regency taste. A tarpaulin flapped gently over the east wing. A small marquee had been erected on the lawn, though there was no function visible, and a man in a dark coat stood beside it, hands clasped behind his back, watching the lane.
Hugh slowed also. He took out his mobile and pretended to make a call.
The man in the coat did not move.
Hugh pocketed the phone and continued up the drive. The man watched him come. He was perhaps fifty, broad through the shoulders, with a face that had been handsome in a particular, hard sort of way and had not softened with the years. He wore no uniform. He wore no badge.
"Morning," Hugh said, when he judged himself within hailing distance.
"Morning," said the man. His voice was flat, Bristol, and uninflected. "Help you?"
"Hugh Pendleton. I'm expected. I'm surveying the house for Mrs. Marsh."
The man considered this for a moment, and then he produced a small leather wallet and held it open. The card inside bore a photograph of the man, a name, and the legend DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR, WILTSHIRE POLICE.
"Frank Burrows," the man said. "I'm leading the inquiry into the fire at Weston Bele."
Hugh took the card. He held it between thumb and forefinger as he had held the magnifying glass that morning, and for the same reason. He looked at the photograph, which was of a younger Burrows, and then at the man himself, who was older and heavier.
"Has something happened at the house?" Hugh asked.
"Mrs. Marsh is in hospital. She collapsed yesterday evening. Nothing life threatening, the doctors say, but she's to be kept in for observation. Her son is on his way from Bristol."
"Harlan Marsh."
"The same. You know him?"
"By reputation only," Hugh said. It was not a lie. It was not the whole truth. The distinction mattered to him, and he trusted that Burrows would recognise it.
Burrows nodded. "We're treating the fire as arson. We'll know more when the forensic report comes back."
Hugh felt the letter in his satchel, the weight of it against his hip, the banker's draft folded within. He thought of the third instruction, which had asked him to speak with Harlan Marsh, and which had also said that Harlan Marsh would deny all knowledge of him.
"When did you learn it was arson?" he asked.
"This morning. The fire investigator called me at six. He found a point of origin in the wardrobe in Mr. Marsh's room. He'd been dead some time before the fire reached him. Smoke inhalation, the post mortem says, but the burns came after."
Hugh said nothing for a long moment. A rook took off from one of the beeches and wheeled, twice, over the lawn. The tarpaulin flapped.
"What I need," Burrows said, "is a list of who has been in this house in the past week. Mrs. Marsh, her staff, her son. You, from tomorrow."
"I'm not due until October."
"You're here now, Mr. Pendleton. Why?"
Hugh took a breath. He had spent his life in archives, where the smallest inaccuracy could become legend, and where the truth, told too soon, could vanish like breath off glass.
"I came to look at the east wing," he said. "The scaffolding is due to come down next week. I wanted to see the roof timbers before they're hidden again."
Burrows considered him. Then he stepped aside.
"Carry on. But if you see anything out of place, you tell me."
"Of course."
Hugh walked up to the portico. He felt Burrows' gaze between his shoulder blades, and he did not look back. The front door was unlocked. He let himself in.
The hall of Marsh Court smelled of beeswax and old stone and something fainter, beneath, that he could not place. He had been in it twice before, both times in company. He had never been in it alone.
He set his satchel down on the flagged floor. He took out his torch. He climbed the principal staircase, past the portraits of Marsh dead, whose eyes did not quite follow him, and reached the landing. The principal bedroom door stood open. The linen closet was beyond it, a small white door set into the panelling.
He opened it.
The closet smelled of lavender and dust. Shelves of sheets, pillowcases, blankets, folded in the careful manner of a household that had once employed a housekeeper and now did not. A wooden pole at shoulder height for hanging. No trapdoor in the ceiling.
Hugh stood quite still. He looked up.
Above the pole, set into the ceiling, was a board of the same pine as the rest. He fetched a chair from the landing. He stood on it. He ran his fingers along the edges and felt, halfway along, a slight depression, a place where the board had been lifted and replaced so often that the join had worn. He pressed. The board swung up on a hinge he had not seen, and a square of darkness opened above him.
He reached in.
His fingers found the box. Green tin, of the sort once sold for tobacco. Cold to the touch. He drew it out, set it on the chair, and sat down beside it on the dusty floor of the linen closet.
He did not open it.
He sat with his hands on his knees, breathing slowly through his nose, and he considered that a dead man had written to him, and that he had answered, and that the answer had begun.
The green tin smoldered in the dust of the linen closet like a small, patient beast.
Hugh Pendleton did not open it. He sat with his hands flat on his knees and watched the play of his torch across its surface. The tin had once been painted, he could see that. The green had faded to the color of pond water, and a faint gilt scroll remained along the rim, the kind of flourish that had adorned tobacco tins at the turn of the century. A crease ran diagonally across the lid, where someone had dropped it, or stood on it. A second crease, parallel, made a kind of bracket. He found himself tracing these with his eyes as one might trace the lines of a palm.
He thought of the letter that had arrived three weeks ago at his rooms in Exeter, postmarked Tavistock, no return address, the handwriting a careful copperplate that had the slight tremor of age or of a hand held steady by will alone. He thought of the paper, which had been expensive and faintly yellowed, as if it had been kept in a drawer for some time before it was sent. He thought of the words, which had been few.
Mr Pendleton,
You do not know me. I know of you through your pamphlet on the moorland crosses, which I read with attention and some profit. I am instructed to inform you that there exists, in the house I have long inhabited, a matter concerning the early history of this district that I believe will be of professional interest to you. I am not at liberty to be more specific in writing. If you wish to pursue the matter, you will find the relevant materials behind a loose board in the linen closet of the principal bedroom of Marsh House. I am confident you will know which board.
I will not be present when you call.
Yours faithfully, A. Marsh
He had read the letter, then read it again. He had held it up to the light from his desk lamp. He had noted the postmark, the paper, the hand. He had, that same evening, taken down from his shelf the bound file of his own publications and found the pamphlet on the moorland crosses, which had been a small thing, a job for the county archaeological society, and he had read his own prose with the embarrassed attention of a man searching for something he had perhaps said without knowing. He found nothing. He went to bed. He lay awake for some time.
In the morning he had telephoned the number he had for Eleanor Marsh, the widow who now held the house. There had been no answer. He had tried again at noon, and again at four, and again at half past seven that evening, when he had at last reached her and heard her voice, which was the voice of a woman who had been waiting by the telephone for some time and was determined not to show it.
Mrs Marsh, he had said. My name is Hugh Pendleton. I am the local historian. I have been engaged to catalogue the contents of Marsh House.
Yes, she had said. I know who you are.
I have had a letter, he had said, and he had described it as carefully as he could.
A silence had followed. Then she had said: I see. And then: When did you receive it?
He had told her. She had asked him to read it to her, and he had done so, and there had been a second silence, longer than the first. When she spoke again her voice was different. It was the voice of a woman who has just heard something she had hoped, perhaps, never to hear.
Do not go to the house, she had said.
He had waited.
Mr Pendleton. I am asking you, as a personal matter, not to go to the house until I have had an opportunity to speak with my son.
He had asked when that might be.
I do not know, she had said. Soon. I cannot say. There are things that must be arranged. There is a second will, you see. There is a question of the second will.
He had not understood her then. He understood her better now. There had been, in the days that followed, a great deal of telephoning and a great deal of not being put through, and then at last, on the Friday, a conversation with Eleanor Marsh in which she had explained, with the measured courtesy of a woman accustomed to handling difficult girls in difficult circumstances, that there were papers belonging to her late husband that could not be released until a second will had been located, and that until those papers were released he was not to enter Marsh House, and that she was sorry, and that she was sure he understood.
He had understood. He had also, that same evening, packed his satchel.
He sat on the dusty floor of the linen closet and looked at the green tin and thought about the dead man who had written to him. A. Marsh. Anthony? Alfred? Arthur? The initial had been very firmly inscribed, a single arch, and he had studied it for some time. He thought about the tremor in the hand. He thought about the postmark Tavistock, which was the post town for the village, though Marsh House itself lay two miles beyond it, up a private drive that was now, in this dry August, more suggestion than surface. He thought about the paper, which had been kept in a drawer. He thought about the sentence: I will not be present when you call.
He thought, then, that he was alone in a house that had been sealed since the death of its master, in a room that smelled of lavender and dust, with a tin that had been placed for him by a hand that was no longer steady, and that no one in the world knew he was here.
He picked up the tin.
It was lighter than he had expected. He turned it in his hands. The latch was of the simple sort, a small wire loop that passed over a catch. He unfastened it. He lifted the lid.
The smell that came out was not the smell of tobacco, nor of lavender, nor of dust. It was a smell he could not at first place, dry and faintly sweet, like old paper that has been shut up with something organic. He held the tin under the torch.
There were three things inside. A folded square of paper, yellow with age, which he could see at once was covered in the same careful copperplate. A small leather pouch, drawstring, the leather cracked and pale. And a photograph, face down, of a size that suggested a carte de visite, the little stiff portraits that had been the fashion in the eighteen-sixties and seventies.
He took out the photograph first. He turned it over.
The face that looked up at him was a young man's face. Dark hair, parted in the middle. A narrow tie, knotted high. A waistcoat with a watch chain. He held the photograph closer to the torch and saw that the young man was standing in front of a painted backdrop of the sort photographers then favoured, a balustrade and a suggestion of drapery, and that his expression was one of the most serious Hugh had ever seen upon a human countenance. He looked, Hugh thought, as if he were about to be hanged.
On the reverse of the photograph, in the same copperplate, was written: A.M. 1869.
He set the photograph down on the floor beside him, face up, so the young man could continue to look at the ceiling. He took out the leather pouch. He loosened the drawstring and tipped the contents into his palm.
A key. Small, of brass, of the sort that might fit a desk or a small cabinet. A ring of it, plain. He turned it over. No mark.
He set the key down beside the photograph. He took out the folded paper.
He unfolded it carefully, because the paper was brittle and he did not wish to damage it, and he held it under the torch and began to read.
The handwriting was the same. The ink was brown. The paper was of a kind he had handled before in archives, the foolscap of the period, with the faint watermark of a Devon mill. The date at the head of the first page was the eleventh of September, 1869.
He read.
Mr Pendleton,
If you are reading this, then I am dead, and you have kept your appointment. I am glad of it. I had feared you would not. I had feared, indeed, that the letter would not reach you, or that you would disregard it as the raving of an old man whose wits had begun to fail.
I will come to the point.
In the year 1869, there occurred at Marsh House a matter of which no record exists in the parish register, nor in the files of the county, nor in any place that I have been able to discover after forty years of searching. I refer to the death, by violence, of a young woman in this house, in the month of August of that year, and to the burial of her body in a place that I will not name in this letter, because I do not yet trust the paper, and because there are persons yet living who would be much inconvenienced by the truth.
The young woman was named Catherine. She was in service here. She was twenty years of age. She was the daughter of a farmer in the parish of Brentor, and she had been in the house for the better part of a year.
The young man responsible for her death was my brother.
I will not name him in this letter. I will say only that he was the elder of the two of us, that he was the heir, and that he was possessed of a temper which I will not further describe, except to say that when it was upon him he was capable of anything. He was also possessed of a name which has, since that August, been spoken of in this district with great respect, and which has been engraved upon the memorial in the church, and which I have, all year, in my own house, refused to speak aloud.
He killed her. I will not write how. I will say only that the body was disposed of by two men, one of whom was my brother, and the other of whom was a man whose name you will recognise from the records of the county bench, and who was, at the time of the burial, the sitting magistrate for this hundred.
The body was buried in a place that I will tell you of when I see you, if I see you, or when I am satisfied that you are the man I take you for, and not some idle fellow who has wandered into my house to look at the furniture.
I am not a well man, Mr Pendleton. I have not been a well man for some years. I am writing this in the evening, by the lamp, and my hand is not what it was. If I do not come to the house before the end of the month, then you must suppose that I am dead, and that the matter is now in your hands, and that the young woman, whose name was Catherine, has been lying in the ground for one hundred and four years.
There is a key in the tin. It opens the drawer of the secretaire in the library. In that drawer you will find, if you look, a small bundle of papers tied with green tape. These are the only other records I have. They are not complete. They are, however, sufficient.
If you publish what you find, you will do me a great service. If you do not publish it, I beg you to see that it is placed in the care of the county archive, with such instructions as you think fit.
I remain, sir, Your obedient servant, Anthony Marsh
Hugh read the letter twice. He read it a third time. He set it down on the floor beside the photograph and the key and the leather pouch. He sat very still for some time, with his hands on his knees and his torch making a small bright circle on the boards.
He thought: there is a body in the ground.
He thought: it has been there for one hundred and four years.
He thought: a magistrate of the county.
He thought: my pamphlet on the moorland crosses.
He thought, with a clarity that surprised him, that he had been the right man, after all, to receive this letter, and that the dead man had chosen well, and that the choice had been made some time ago, in a room he had never seen, by a hand that was no longer steady.
He folded the letter. He placed it, with the photograph and the key and the pouch, back into the green tin. He closed the lid. He fastened the latch.
He sat for a moment longer, listening to the house, which was silent in the particular way that empty houses are silent, a silence that is not the absence of sound but the presence of something else. He thought he could hear, very faintly, the sound of his own breathing, and, more faintly still, the sound of something moving in the timbers of the roof above him, a small settling, a small complaint.
He stood up. He took the chair back to the landing. He took the torch. He went down the stairs, past the portraits, past the hall, and out through the front door, which he closed behind him and which did not, in any way he could see, resist his closing it.
The drive was bright. The sun had moved while he was in the house. He stood for a moment, blinking, with the green tin under his arm, and looked at the ruined roof of Marsh House against the sky, and then he turned and walked, with great care, down the track to the road, where he had left his car.
He did not look back.
He put the tin on the passenger seat. He started the engine. He drove, slowly, because the track was rough, down to the lane, and then, a little faster, because the lane was better, to the road that led, eventually, to Exeter.
He did not open the tin again until he was home.
He did not telephone Eleanor Marsh that night, or the next morning, or for some days after. He had not yet decided what to do. He had not yet decided what he believed. He sat at his desk and he read the letter again, and he looked at the photograph, and he turned the key over in his hand, and he thought about the secretaire in the library of Marsh House, which he had not yet been permitted to enter, and which Eleanor Marsh had, on the telephone, described as not being part of the catalogue, and as being, in any case, locked.
He thought, then, about the second will.
Harlan Marsh was in his office on the third floor of a Georgian building in Queen Square, Bristol, when the letter arrived. He read it once at his desk. He read it again with the door closed. He sat for some time with the letter lying open on the blotter, and the window open to the noise of the street below, and the faint smell of someone else's cigarette smoke drifting up from the pavement.
He did not telephone his mother that evening.
He went home. He ate a cold supper from the fridge, standing up, because his wife was at her sister's in Cardiff and the kitchen felt too large without her in it. He drank a small whisky. He went to bed at half past nine. He lay awake until nearly one, thinking, and then he slept badly, and then he woke at his usual time, and he went back to the office, and he sat down at his desk, and he looked at the letter, which he had brought with him, folded inside his jacket pocket.
At ten o'clock he telephoned Hugh Pendleton.
The historian answered on the second ring. His voice was thin and quick, the voice of a man who had not slept well either, and who had perhaps been waiting by the telephone. Harlan listened to it for a moment, that voice, and he thought, with a detachment that surprised him, that his mother had been right about the man, that he was competent and that he was not a fool, and that these were, in the circumstances, the only two qualities that mattered.
"My mother has told me," Harlan said, "that you have written to me."
"I have," Hugh Pendleton said. "I apologise for the delay. I wanted to be certain of the facts before I troubled you."
"You need not apologise. I appreciate the caution. It is, in my experience, an uncommon quality."
There was a small pause on the line. The historian was perhaps not certain how to take this. Harlan did not help him.
"I have a number of questions," Harlan said, "which I would prefer to put to you in person. I also have a number of things to show you, which I think will interest you, and which I would prefer not to discuss on an open line. Are you free to come to Bristol? Today, if possible. This afternoon, if you can manage it."
"I can manage it," Hugh Pendleton said. "I can be there by three."
"Good. I will expect you then. Do you know the building?"
"I do not."
Harlan gave him the address. He hung up. He sat for a moment with his hand resting on the telephone, and then he opened the bottom drawer of his desk, which was locked, and he took out a second folder, which was thinner than the first, and which contained a small number of papers, and he placed this folder on the blotter beside the letter from Hugh Pendleton, and he looked at them both, and then he closed the drawer, and he went to find his clerk, and he told him that he was not to be disturbed for the rest of the morning.
At half past two he went downstairs to meet Hugh Pendleton in the entrance hall. The historian arrived exactly on time, which Harlan noted and approved of. He was a thin man in his early forties, with a sallow face and careful clothes and a manner that hovered, very precisely, between deference and professional self-respect. He carried a leather satchel. He wore no coat, although the day was cool.
They shook hands. Harlan led him upstairs. They did not speak in the lift. Harlan showed him into his office, and he closed the door, and he sat down behind his desk, and he indicated the chair opposite, and he waited until Hugh Pendleton had sat down, and then he opened the second folder, and he took out of it a single sheet of paper, which he placed on the desk between them, and which he did not explain.
It was a letter. It was dated eleven years ago. It was written in his father's hand.
Hugh Pendleton looked at it. He read it once, quickly, and then again, more slowly. His face did not change. His hands, resting on his knees, did not move.
"I found this," Harlan said, "among my father's papers, after his death. I did not know what to make of it. I showed it to my mother, who told me to put it in the drawer and to forget I had ever seen it. I have, until today, taken her advice."
"I see," Hugh Pendleton said.
"Do you," Harlan said.
It was not quite a question. Hugh Pendleton looked up from the letter, and he met Harlan's eyes, and he said, with the careful precision of a man who has learned to weigh his words, "I see that your father wrote to a man named Edward Roome, eleven years ago, and that the letter makes reference to certain matters which your mother, in her letter to me, has described as not having been resolved."
"Yes," Harlan said.
"I see also," Hugh Pendleton said, "that the letter refers to a secretaire, and to a tin box, and to certain items which your father appears to have intended to remove from Marsh House, and which he appears, from the tone of the letter, to have been prevented from removing."
"Yes," Harlan said again.
"And I see," Hugh Pendleton said, and now his hands tightened, very slightly, on his knees, "that the letter is unfinished. That it breaks off, as it were, in the middle of a sentence."
"Yes," Harlan said for the third time. "That is precisely why I have kept it. That is precisely why I did not destroy it when my mother asked me to. And that is precisely why I have asked you here this afternoon."
He paused. He let the silence settle. Outside, in Queen Square, a pigeon cooed, and a motorbike passed, and someone shouted, and the ordinary world went on.
"I have spent eleven years," Harlan said, "trying to decide whether my father was a criminal. I have spent eleven years trying to decide whether my mother knows that he was, and is protecting his memory, or protecting herself, or protecting me. I have spent eleven years trying to decide whether the letter is genuine, or whether it is a forgery, or whether it is a confession written under duress, or whether it is the ravings of a man in the early stages of the illness that killed him."
He stopped. He looked at Hugh Pendleton. He said, "I have, in other words, spent eleven years unable to decide what to believe. I am, as you may have noticed, a solicitor. I am trained to weigh evidence. I am trained to form conclusions. And I have been unable to form one."
Hugh Pendleton said nothing. He sat very still in the chair, with his hands on his knees, and his thin face composed, and his eyes on Harlan's face, and he waited.
"I cannot," Harlan said, "ask the police. My mother would not survive the scandal, and I am not convinced, in any case, that the police would be able to do what I now believe must be done. I cannot ask my brother, because my brother is dead. I cannot ask my father, because my father is dead. There is no one left, Mr. Pendleton, except my mother, and a local historian from Exeter who has been cataloguing the house for six months and who has, in the course of that catalogue, uncovered evidence that he does not yet understand, and which I believe may be the key to the whole thing."
He reached across the desk. He turned the letter around so that it faced Hugh Pendleton again. He tapped it, once, with his forefinger.
"Tell me what you have found," he said. "Tell me everything. And then tell me what you believe we should do."
Hugh Pendleton looked at him. For the first time, his careful composure slipped, just slightly, and what showed through was not ambition, and was not excitement, but something quieter and rather more frightened, which was the recognition, perhaps, that he had been offered, by a man he had never met before this afternoon, the chance to be useful in a way that he had never imagined, and the corresponding fear that he might fail.
He opened his satchel. He took out his notebook. He placed it on his knee. He looked at Harlan Marsh, and he began, in his thin, quick voice, to tell him what he had found.
The afternoon passed. The pigeon in Queen Square cooed, and was answered by another. The light in the office changed, and lengthened, and faded, and the shadows of the buildings opposite moved slowly across the square, and the traffic noise rose and fell, and inside the office the two men sat, one behind the desk and one in the chair opposite, and they talked, and they looked at papers, and they looked at the photograph from the green box, and they looked at the unfinished letter from eleven years ago, and they did not come to any conclusion, but they did come, by the time the light had gone and the lamps had been lit, to an agreement.