Seventy-Four Billion Reasons

Chapter Eight: The Burned Page

Darius called Freya from the taxi, and she was waiting in the vault when he got back, sleeves rolled up and two cups of black coffee already poured. She didn't ask how he had gotten the records. He didn't tell her, and he didn't mention the handwritten line on the back of the invitation either. It sat in his pocket all night, and he felt it there every time she leaned over his shoulder.

They spread Isabella's pages across the long table and began to trace.

The first part was easy. Jasper had moved the stolen pension money into the casino in small deposits, a few hundred thousand dollars at a time, then cashed it out as gambling winnings so it looked clean. Darius had expected the trail to jump straight to the Cayman account from there. It didn't. The winnings went to a numbered account first, and from there into a company Darius had never heard of.

"Orrery Holdings," he read aloud. "Do you know it?"

Freya was already typing at the server terminal. She stopped, and for a long moment she didn't say anything. Then she turned the screen toward him.

Orrery Holdings was a shell company with no employees, no office and no activity for almost twenty years. It was registered in the Tally's own records, and it belonged to the Larkin Tally. Darius looked at the registration date, and his chest tightened. It was the same year his parents had died.

"Barnaby set up dozens of companies like this over the years," Freya said slowly. "Most were used once and left dormant. I didn't even know this one still existed."

Darius sat back in his chair and let the numbers settle into their true shape. Until tonight, the story had been simple. A junior analyst had stolen from pensioners. It was ugly, but it was about him. Once anyone connected Orrery to the Larkin name, the story would change completely. It wouldn't be one thief anymore. It would be the Tally itself robbing two hundred old people of their savings.

"That's public disgrace," he said quietly. "Any House could force the vote tomorrow, and nobody would blame them. Every debt in this room would be erased."

Freya nodded. "The frame was never just about you."

"No. It was built to destroy the Tally, and I was only the handle."

It got worse. The Tally's systems kept a record of every change to every company it owned, and Orrery's record showed it had been switched back on three weeks ago. The authorization came from Barnaby's personal code, a twelve-digit sequence that only the Keeper was supposed to know. The timestamp read two o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, and Darius remembered that Tuesday. He had brought Barnaby lunch, and the old man had spent the whole hour at his workbench repairing a carriage clock.

"Someone inside the Tally had his code," Darius said. "Someone helped build this."

Freya didn't argue. Around four in the morning she went upstairs to lie down on Barnaby's old sofa, and Darius kept working alone.

He pulled the vault's own access log next, because he had stopped trusting anything he hadn't checked himself. The pocket watch opened the clock wall in the shop, but the vault had a second way in, a steel service door leading from the cellar of the building next door. According to the log, only two keys to that door existed.

He scrolled back to the night his grandfather died, and his hand stopped moving.

The service door had been opened at 11:52 p.m.

At that exact minute, Darius had been standing in a hospital room watching Barnaby take his last breath. Basil had been in the corridor outside, close enough to touch. Basil held one of the keys, and Basil had been with him.

Only one other person held a key.

He sat there for a long time, staring at the screen, while the clocks ticked overhead and the folded invitation pressed against his ribs. Leave the lawyer behind. She isn't who you think she is.

When the shop opened in the morning, the news was already playing on Basil's small radio behind the counter. The Ellingham pension board had announced a public hearing in two days, to be broadcast live from the auditorium at Ellingham Tower, with every pensioner invited to attend. Jasper had given a statement on the steps of the building. He promised the hearing would reveal the full truth about the missing money, and then he named Darius personally and invited him to attend, if he had the courage.

The station cut to a second clip. Sienna stood beside Jasper in a cream coat, a new diamond on her left hand, and the reporter introduced her as Jasper Ellingham's fiancée. She spoke softly into the microphones with her eyes lowered.

"I don't hate Darius," she said. "Honestly, I pity him. Some people just can't accept where they come from."

Basil switched the radio off without a word.

Freya came down the stairs a few minutes later with her hair still damp, and stopped when she saw Darius's face. He didn't make her wait. He turned the laptop toward her, with the log entry from the service door at the top of the screen.

"11:52," he said. "The night he died. Basil was with me. That leaves you."

She looked at the screen for a long moment. He waited for her to deny it, or blame someone else, or tell him the log was wrong.

She did none of those things. "Yes," she said. "I was here."

"And Orrery?"

"I never touched Orrery." Her voice was steady, but her hands had closed into fists at her sides. "I didn't know it still existed until last night. I swear that to you, Darius, on anything you like."

"Then why were you in this vault while my grandfather was dying?"

Freya walked to the shelves along the far wall and ran her fingers along the spines, as if she needed something to hold. "Barnaby gave me a sealed envelope two years ago," she said. "He told me to open it only if he died. That night, Basil called me from the hospital, and I opened it in my car." She turned to face him. "It was an order, in his handwriting. I was to come down here before anyone else, find the ledger from the year your parents died, and remove one page. Then I was to burn it before you could ever read it."

Darius stared at her. "And you did it."

"I did. Barnaby never asked me for anything in six years. That was the only thing." She held his gaze. "I burned it in the sink upstairs, and I watched every scrap of it turn to ash."

The clocks ticked around them. Darius heard his own voice as if it came from very far away.

"What was on it?"

Freya hesitated for the first time since he had known her.

"Barnaby said that if you ever read it, you would never forgive him," she said quietly. "And you would walk away from the Tally forever."