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Chapter 115: Deleted
The younger man found it on Tuesday evening, and he found it by accident.That was how he put it afterward, in a flat, apologetic voice, as though he'd been caught trespassing. He had been working through the firm's mail since the previous Friday, in the room by the long table, with his machine open on its cable and a thermos beside him that he never seemed to drink from. Bishop had given him a narrow brief. Look for what had been moved or removed since the retention schedule changed. Look for anything that had been there once and wasn't now.I'd stopped checking on him by Monday. I'd learned not to hover.At ten to seven, he knocked on the frame of my office door and said, "Mr. Cole, I think you ought to come."---Bishop was already there. So was the accountant, standing at the back of the room with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, looking, for once, entirely without expression. The young man's screen glowed against the wall. He'd turned it so that I could read it from the doo
Chapter 114: Piece by Piece
Sophia came to the long table at seven that evening and took off her coat without being asked.She'd spent the afternoon at her desk, and I'd heard nothing from her until the door opened. She stood for a moment on the threshold looking at the room. Bishop's people had gone for the day, leaving the younger man's slim machine closed on its cable and the accountant's diagram pinned to the wall beside my father's strip of dates. HALE, in block capitals, with a dozen empty boxes branching from it."Show me where you are," she said.I did. It took ten minutes. When I'd finished she stood quite still, studying the wall, and then she turned to the table, where I'd laid out Margaret's list in her own handwriting, and picked up a pen."We're doing it wrong," she said."How?""We've been keeping three lists. What happened to your father? What happened to the firm? What Marcus did." She tapped the paper. "They're not three things. They're one thing, seen from three windows. I'd like to put them o
Chapter 113: Follow the Money
Bishop arrived at eight on Thursday with two other men.I'd asked for him alone. But he walked into the room beside my office with a slim, grey-haired man in a rumpled jacket and a younger one carrying a flat case, and he introduced them in a single sentence and sat down before I could object. The grey-haired one was a forensic accountant. The younger one, Bishop said, was very good at finding where things had been put.I looked at the three of them across the long table. The strip of paper still ran along the far wall, covered in pins and dates and small neat handwriting. Nobody remarked on it. I'd noticed that, in the weeks since Bishop had started coming, nobody ever did."You had a long night," Bishop said."Sophia heard from the house at midnight." I told them the outline of it, briefly, leaving out most of what Margaret had said. They listened without moving. When I finished, the accountant took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sleeve."A divorce he won't file," he said.
Chapter 112: The Papers
The housekeeper called again at ten to twelve.Sophia and I hadn't moved. We'd sat in the lamplight for nearly an hour with the phone between us on the desk, saying very little, the way you sit by a bed in the hours after a crisis has passed. Bishop's man had sent word at half past eleven. *In position. Lights on in the study. Nothing else.* I had read it twice and put it down.When the phone lit, Sophia had it in her hand before it sounded."I'm in the kitchen," the housekeeper whispered. Her voice was hoarse and very tired. "I've shut the door. I'm sorry I cut you off, Miss. He came into the hall.""Are you all right?""I got into the pantry. He didn't see me." A shaky breath. "He went to the foot of the stairs and stood there a minute with his hand on the post. Then he went back in.""And you stayed?""I couldn't leave her." A pause. "I went back to the door. I thought you'd want to know the rest."Sophia glanced at me. I nodded. She pressed the speaker again and set the phone on t
Chapter 111: Enough
I called Bishop first.I stood at the window of my office with the phone to my ear and my back to Sophia. "Victor Grant is home, and he's shouting at his wife," I said. "I've never heard him do it. I want a man on that street tonight, close enough to see the house and the road. If anyone leaves in a hurry, or if anything looks wrong, I want to know within a minute."Bishop heard me out in silence. When I'd finished, he said only, "Twenty minutes," and hung up.I turned. Sophia hadn't moved. She sat on the edge of the chair with her phone in both hands and her eyes on the dark screen, and I knew without being told that she was counting the minutes until it lit.I came back and sat across from her. I didn't speak. There wasn't anything useful to say. A man was shouting in a room across the city, and a woman was standing in front of him with her hands folded, and the only thing either of us could do was wait.It rang at five past ten.Sophia held her phone out and pressed the speaker, th
Chapter 110: Betrayed
It was Wednesday night when the house finally spoke.Sophia and I were in my office, with the lamp on and the blinds drawn and the long folder of copied pages spread between us. We'd been at it since six. It was dull work, the kind that numbs the mind and keeps the hands busy, sorting Margaret's careful recollections into columns against the dates we already had. She had called Sophia twice that week from the unknown number, in short, hurried bursts. Each time she'd given us a name, a season, a face at a table. We were writing them down as fast as we could.At twenty to ten, Sophia's phone buzzed on the desk.She glanced at it and went still. "It's the housekeeper."I put my pen down.She answered on the speaker, the way we'd done with her mother. For a second there was only a hiss, and then a voice, low, quick, and shaking in a way I hadn't thought it could."Miss Sophia.""I'm here.""I'm in the back passage. I don't have long." A rough breath. "Mr. Grant came home at half past eigh
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