The One-Star Husband

Chapter Nine: The Thumbprint

By noon, Thrale had come for Enzo too.

He found him on the pier, standing in front of what was left of the warehouse. The fire had burned itself out before dawn, leaving a black skeleton of girders and a smell of melted plastic that hung over the whole dock. Enzo had come back to see if anything had survived. Nothing had.

Thrale walked up the planks with two officers behind him and a sheet of paper in his hand. "The lease on this building," he said, holding it up. "Signed and paid for in the name of E. Moretti."

Enzo looked at the signature. It was nothing like his own.

"And a witness," Thrale went on. "Rafferty Abernethy tells us he saw the Fairness husband carrying petrol onto this pier last night." He nodded to his officers. "Turn around."

Enzo turned. The cuffs closed around his wrists, and as the officers walked him back down the planks, he understood what the lease meant. Someone had built this frame days ago, before the fire, before Ozzie, perhaps before the Star Report. The Critic hadn't found the Lodestar yet. It had simply made sure that whoever came looking would find a Moretti waiting.

At the station, Thrale took the thumbprint himself. He pressed Enzo's thumb onto the glass of the scanner, rolled it slowly from one edge to the other and watched the print bloom on the screen. Then he lifted an evidence bag from his desk. Inside it lay the broken seal from the bridge, the red wax still holding the shape of the star.

"Both of these go to the lab," Thrale said. "Results by evening."

Enzo said nothing. He had pressed his thumb into that wax himself, right beside the star, and held it there until it gripped. By evening, Thrale would have proof that the Lodestar was a one-star driver from the Underbank, and the Critic would know it a minute later.

They put him in a cell at the end of a concrete corridor. Dorcas was two cells down. He could see the edge of her grey scarf through the bars, and he said her name once, quietly. She didn't answer. According to the duty officer, she hadn't said a word since the bridge, not her address and not the name of a lawyer, nothing at all. Enzo knew her well enough to understand. Every word she spoke in here could be weighed against the seal in Thrale's bag, so she gave them nothing and waited.

From the end of his bench, Enzo could see the duty officer's screen. It had been turned toward the corridor, and on it was his own rating, because everyone in the station wanted to watch the Fairness husband fall. For days it had been creeping toward two. Last night it had touched one point nine.

But since the bridge, Raff's friends had spent the morning voting him down out of spite, one star at a time, with comments they thought were clever. Arsonist. Liar. Hold the door, one-star. By the time the duty officer went for lunch, Enzo was back to one point three.

He sat looking at the number for a long time. Without knowing it, Rafferty Abernethy had just saved the Lodestar's seat.

In the afternoon, the corridor door opened and Benedict Abernethy came in alone. He sent the officer away and stood outside the bars in his charcoal coat, studying his son-in-law the way he might study a column of figures that refused to add up.

Enzo waited for him to gloat. He didn't.

"I didn't remember you," Benedict said. "Not until the Chief Justice bowed to you. Then I remembered a boy at the night counter and a little girl asleep on a bench." He paused. "I told you that you'd thrown your life away."

"You did."

"I came to tell you something, and then I'll go." Benedict glanced down the corridor toward Dorcas's cell and lowered his voice. "The Fairness Wedding was never my idea. I needed a one-star for the cameras, yes. But I didn't choose you. The Critic did."

Enzo looked up.

"He sent me your name a month before the election," Benedict said. "He said the Moretti family was worth keeping under my roof. I never asked why." He buttoned his coat. "Tonight, I think I'm about to find out."

He left without another word, and Enzo listened to his footsteps fade down the corridor until a door shut somewhere and there was nothing but the hum of the lights.

The afternoon crawled. Twice Enzo heard a phone ring at the front desk and braced himself, and twice it was nothing. He went over the night again and again, the drip of the wax, the weight of the star, his thumb pressing down. There was no mistake to find. He thought of his mother at her machine and Lucia doing her homework at the kitchen table, of Ottoline sitting up by the stove again with her phone in her lap. He thought of what the Critic would do to all three of them once it knew where the Lodestar slept.

The lab result came back at dusk. Enzo heard Thrale before he saw him, a door slamming, a voice raised at someone out of sight. Then the inspector came down the corridor with a printed report crushed in one fist and his face dark with fury. He jammed a key into the lock and dragged the cell door open.

"Get out," he said.

Enzo stood up slowly. "The print?"

"Isn't yours." Thrale spat the words. "Not a single point of match. Now get out of my station before I find another reason to keep you."

Enzo walked down the corridor as if the floor might tilt under him. He had felt the wax give under his own thumb. He had held it there. As he passed Dorcas's cell, she lifted her head for the first time since the bridge and looked at him, and there was something in her face he couldn't read.

At the station door, under the light, Benedict Abernethy was waiting. He had a copy of the lab report in his hand, and he was smiling.

"It's your mother's," he said.