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Chapter 123: The Long Quiet
I read until the light went.Bishop had drawn the curtains back when the afternoon began to fail, and then, without a word, lit the lamp on the desk and set it at my elbow. Later he brought a tray from somewhere, a cup of tea I didn't touch, a plate I didn't look at. I heard him come and go. I did not look up.The first notebook took nearly two hours. It was not long. It was small and dense, written in a hand that grew smaller as it went, as if the writer were saving paper, or saving himself. I read it as one reads a letter from the dead, slowly, line by line, trying to hear the voice under the words.It wasn't what I'd expected.I had expected grief, and there was grief, though not in the way I'd imagined. It was held in, flattened, folded away between the lines like a pressed flower. What came through was something else. It was a mind at work. Calm and exact and tireless. The mind of a man who had decided that if he could do nothing else for his son, he could at least understand.--
Chapter 122: What Was Locked
Bishop opened it himself.I'd expected to send for someone. I'd said as much, kneeling on the carpet with the useless key in my fist, and he'd given me a long, mild, considering look and asked whether I trusted him with a pair of tools. I said that I did. He went out to the car and came back with a small flat leather roll, the sort a watchmaker might carry, and laid it on the blotter and untied it.I didn't ask where he'd learned. He didn't offer.He worked with the torch propped against the desk leg and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, bent almost double, breathing slowly through his nose. The tools were thin as hat pins. He slid the first into the dust-packed keyhole and drew it out grey, and wiped it on a handkerchief, and slid it in again. I stood over him and found I was holding my breath."It's a good lock," he murmured. "Better than the drawer deserves. Someone paid for it.""Richard.""I should think so." He tilted his head, listening to something I couldn't hear. "Ol
Chapter 121: The Drawer
I went to my grandfather's house on Saturday morning, because it was the one place in the city where Marcus Hale had no key.I'd thought about that on the way. Everything at the firm passed through his hands in one way or another, the archive, the indexes, the retention schedule, the old files with their neat labels. Even what legal now held had been sorted by his people before it reached her. If Richard Cole had left anything behind that mentioned the man, it wouldn't be there. It would be in the library, among the books and the old furniture, in the house he had never let a stranger arrange.Bishop drove. He didn't speak for most of the journey, and I was grateful. The long gravel approach came up grey under a low sky, and the house stood at the end of it with its shutters half closed, as it had stood since the day I'd first come to it as a stranger.I let myself in with the key the lawyer had given me. The hall was cold and quiet. It smelled of beeswax and old paper. I had not expe
Chapter 120: Slowly
"I'm going to tell you what I think," the general counsel said. "You may not like it."She had taken off her glasses and let them hang on their chain, and without them her face looked older and a little more tired. The silver pen lay on the blotter between her hands. I noticed that she'd stopped turning it. I had come to understand that it was a sign."I'd rather hear it than not," I said."Good. Because I am about to advise you to do almost nothing."I felt Bishop shift in the chair beside me, a small movement, as of a man who'd expected it."Nothing?" I said."Very little. And very slowly." She laid one finger on the stack of papers. "I don't say it lightly. I've read what you've brought, and I find it deeply disturbing, and I believe a good deal of it. If this were a matter between friends over a dinner table, I'd say you'd made your case.""But it isn't.""No. It's a matter between a firm and a man who has held its confidence for nineteen years." She folded her hands. "I want you
Chapter 119: Counsel
I took it to the firm's lawyer on Friday morning.I had thought about that decision for most of the previous night, and in the end it came down to a simple fact. Everything I had against Marcus had been built in rooms I'd chosen. I'd built it with Bishop, and Sophia, and a stranger with a machine, and a voice on a telephone that wouldn't say its name. It had all been done quietly, and carefully, and it was real. But it was not yet the kind of real that could be put before anyone who didn't already believe me.A man like Marcus would have lawyers. He'd have the weight of twenty years behind him, and every door in the building would open to his hand. If I wanted to stand against that, I needed someone on my side who could read a document the way a court would.So I put the folder in a case, and Bishop carried the case, and we went down two floors to an office whose door I'd opened perhaps four times in my life.---The general counsel was a spare, careful woman in her sixties, with iron
Chapter 118: The Carton
I had done it once, and it had told me what I feared.That was the trouble with a second test. The first had been a clean, cold piece of work, a lie told in a quiet office and a column of buying at twenty-two minutes past seven. It had proved that Marcus Hale carried what I told him across the city. It hadn't proved anything about what he'd do with his own hands.I laid it out to Bishop on Wednesday afternoon, in the room by the long table, with the door shut and the strip of dates at my back."He knows I tested him," I said. "The texter says so. He's moved the archive and deleted the thread and he's told Victor he's been thorough. He thinks he's cleaned the house.""He has cleaned the part of it he knows about," Bishop said."Exactly. So I want to give him something he doesn't know about. Something he'll go to fetch."Bishop folded his hands. "A bait.""A carton."I told him. It wasn't elaborate. It was the kind of idea that had come to me in the early hours, on the sofa, between the
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