Chapter 13

# Chapter Thirteen

## The Genealogist

The board beneath Ms. Doe’s elbow split with a dry crack. Harrow hauled her back by the coat collar, bringing her, the lamp and a shower of lime dust into the attic together.

For several seconds she could hear nothing but Neris breathing through his nose.

“My hat,” she said.

The constable lifted it. A white handprint lay across the veil where he had gripped it.

“Keep it,” Harrow told him. “She’ll only go back for it.”

Ms. Doe sat up. “It isn’t worth a broken neck.”

“You tried to rescue a thread.”

“The thread could tell us something.”

Theo lay on his stomach beside the fractured board. He pushed a ruler into the gap. It went through wood that should have stopped it, then struck plaster a foot below.

“The top is sound where the dust has settled,” he said. “Underneath, a beetle could make a career of it.”

“Can it be braced?” Harrow asked.

“Yes. By someone who knows which wall carries the weight. I don’t from this side.”

Nella’s track ran around the bend into the bakery. Ms. Doe could see the heel mark immediately past the cracked board, close enough to reach and no use to her while the passage might drop a person into the old ovens. She disliked leaving a route untried. Lio was still halfway up the stair, watching the lamp as though its light might bring Nella back with it.

“Station the doors,” Ms. Doe said to Harrow. “Nobody enters from the street. We have Mrs. Thorne’s key on this side.”

“Neris. Front and yard. I’ll have the fire works sent for a brace.”

“I can stay here,” Lio offered.

Sabine got to her feet from the blanket shelf. “You have a shift at six.”

Lio turned on her. “I’m not going.”

“Your employer—”

“Can polish his own lamp housings.”

That was unlikely. Ms. Doe thought better of saying so.

Mrs. Vale had come up with two cups of tea, one of which she gave to Lio. “I’ll write that you have a family emergency. You can decide in the morning whether to send it.”

Lio took the cup. Sabine opened her mouth, then closed it over whatever instruction she had prepared.

By dawn constables guarded the bakery’s sealed street door and the loft loading door on the rear stair. The municipal seal remained intact; Neris had checked its edges twice. Harrow could break it during a search for a missing woman, but the fire works supervisor would not let anyone pass the sagging front lintel or climb the rear stair until his crew propped them. They arrived with timber and wedges and measured the span from both sides. The supervisor was not impressed when Ms. Doe said she already knew the roof was weak. His invoice would include the measurement anyway.

The men could not work from the attic while the opposite roof was unsecured. Once they reached the loft from the street side, the crew would brace the crawlway and open the leased rooms under police supervision. While the props went in, Harrow went to the registry for the bakery’s keys and a record of whoever leased those rooms. Ms. Doe went with him, still wearing the hat with Neris’s handprint. She had tried brushing it; the lime had entered the black gauze and made a map of his fingers.

At the station, the night clerk had left a note in the wrong tray. Harrow found it while the day clerk was telling him that the bakery’s lease file could not be released until nine.

“It’s eight forty-seven,” Ms. Doe said.

“Correct, madam.”

“Do you take the file somewhere between now and nine?”

“No.”

“Then what happens at nine?”

“I’m permitted to hand it over.” The clerk slid the note out of Harrow’s reach. “It is a difference to me.”

Harrow asked for the key without using her argument. He got it at eight fifty-four.

The lease named Calder Storage, a company that kept estate papers in the bakery’s dry upper rooms. Its principal agent was Gideon Sable. Harrow had already requested a list of firms holding retired Saint Wythe stationery; Calder Storage was on that list as well. He copied the firm’s active probate docket numbers before they left.

“One man for both questions,” Ms. Doe said.

“One business. We have not asked what he kept.”

They were halfway down the station steps when a man in a dark travelling coat called after Harrow by name. He carried a leather portfolio under one arm and climbed carefully, protecting a polished boot from a puddle that occupied the whole lower step. The other boot went in. He stopped long enough to examine the damage, then continued upward without pretending it had not happened.

“Inspector. Gideon Sable.” He offered Harrow a card, then held a second toward Ms. Doe. “I was told you were asking about an old Saint Wythe stamp.”

Harrow accepted the card. “Who told you?”

“A registry notice reached my office when your clerk asked which license holders had handled those records. I have an active estate file using a Saint Wythe witness return. I thought you would prefer the stock book to a list of people who remember seeing it.”

The distinction interested Ashgrove. Sable had come before being called, but he had brought the thing that might answer the question. She took his card. GIDEON SABLE, LICENSED GENEALOGICAL AGENT, appeared above an address in the Archive Quarter.

“Did you come to protect your file?” she asked.

“Partly. A false seal attached to a valid return makes everyone’s work slower.” His eyes settled briefly on her lime-marked hat. He kept the observation to himself. “May I show you the book?”

Harrow led them to the public interview room rather than his desk. Sable opened his portfolio and removed a bound stock register with worn corners and a rubbed spine. He did not give it to Harrow until he had found the relevant page and laid a clean handkerchief beneath the binding.

“Saint Wythe sold unused wrapper stock when it changed its stamp. My storage firm bought a case for its paper quality. The seal impressions already on those sheets were invalid for new requests. We cut them up for backing boards.”

“How many sheets?” Harrow asked.

“Thirty-six in the lot. I can account for the case at my office. I cannot swear no employee carried off a scrap.”

Ms. Doe placed the grey wrapper from Thorne House beside the stock-book entry. Same size. Same red wax. The paper’s cut remained wrong for an official fold; Theo’s finding stood. Sable did not try to argue it away.

“That is ours,” he said after examining it. “Or from another lot made at the same mill. You’ll want the purchase docket.”

“I will,” Harrow said.

“You will have it.”

An arrangement this agreeable made Ashgrove want to test it. She asked who could reach Calder’s upper rooms in the bakery.

“Clerks I authorize. Carters by appointment. The city holds the street key because the ground floor is condemned.”

“And you?”

“I hold a duplicate for the loft.”

“Have you used it this week?”

“Tuesday. We removed a probate box.”

On his right boot, a pale blue-white powder lodged in the deep welt between leather and sole. The morning rain had cleared the top of the boot but left the welt packed. A baker’s building might explain it. So might half the streets around the mills. Ashgrove noted the detail and asked something else.

“Who inherits a dead person’s name in your profession?”

Sable’s hand remained on the open register. “Usually the next person with a plausible claim to the estate.”

“And when there is no estate?”

“Then I have no client.”

“There is a house on Linnet Row whose residents would disagree.”

For the first time, he seemed to weigh how much she knew before he answered. “A borrowed work identity is an excellent way to escape a cruel employer,” he said. “It also leaves the next employer with no reliable contract history. Both facts can be true.”

“Are you reporting them?” Harrow asked.

“I am supplying my stock book to a missing-person investigation. If you require a view on the other matter, ask me in the capacity that makes it my business.”

It was a good answer. Ashgrove resented that, too.

Harrow retained the register under receipt, asked Sable to produce the purchase docket and warned him that the bakery would be searched. Sable offered the loft key at once. His thumb left a print of blue-white powder on the key’s brass bow. He rubbed it away with the edge of his handkerchief.

“Old flour,” he said. “The place distributes it in one’s shoes.”

Harrow sealed the key in an envelope. “Where should I find you today?”

“At my office until noon. After that, I have a client appointment.” Sable gave the address again and left without asking which woman was missing.

“He already knows,” Ms. Doe said when the door closed.

“Possibly.”

“He knows the house.”

“You told him enough to identify it.” Harrow closed the receipt book. “You also asked him about its business before he volunteered anything.”

She disliked having her own test handed back to her. “You noticed.”

“That happens.”

Mrs. Vale met them outside Thorne House with a telegram folded into her glove. She had been to the rail telegraph office while Harrow sought the key. Esther Pell was at her destination and had answered a paid reply addressed only to Mrs. Vale.

“She says Nella did not board with her,” Mrs. Vale reported. “She saw a blue shawl under the trunk cords, but thought Mara had tucked it there for rain. The rent book was inside when she unpacked. She sent both back on the first goods train. They should reach Saint Corda by afternoon.”

“Did she tell you where she went?” Sabine asked from the doorway.

“She gave the telegraph office an address for my reply.”

“And?”

“And I sent it.”

Sabine held Mrs. Vale’s gaze. “I was going to ask whether she was safe.”

“She wrote that she is. I believe her.”

The exchange ended before Sabine could turn safety into a request for the town’s name.

Inside, Lio had refused to send the note to her employer after all. She sat at the kitchen table filing a rough edge from the button she had torn off her coat. Mara had given her a scrap of metal polish for the job, which was as near as she came to approving absence from work.

Ms. Doe told them what Sable had brought. At his name, Sabine set down a jar she had been washing.

“I know that office,” she said. “Della dealt with him.”

“Della?” Lio asked.

“Della Vane. She lived here before you.”

“The one who sent you ribbons from the coast?” Mara asked.

“The ribbons were from Auldmire.”

“The return address said coast.”

“Della liked the look of the word.”

Mara gave a brief sound at that, then stopped. Ms. Doe could picture a woman who might pay extra postage to become, for an afternoon, a person writing from a seaside town.

Sabine went to the bureau and returned with a letter she did not hand over immediately.

“She wrote to me last week. Asked me to tell Nella she was back. I waited a day before I did. Della had been in trouble before. I thought—”

“You could decide whether the trouble reached the house,” Lio said.

Sabine accepted the interruption. “Yes.”

The letter’s first page contained little more than an invitation to meet. Della’s hand filled every space available and tipped upward whenever she ran out of room. The second page asked Nella to bring a binding needle; a book had been opened and sewn shut badly, and Della trusted nobody in Sable’s office to recognize which leaf had been moved.

At the bottom she had added, “I have spent the partnership money in my head three times. That may be the only place he lets me spend it.”

“What partnership?” Ms. Doe asked.

“Hats,” Mara said. “She wanted half a millinery shop. The other woman had the place and no capital. Della had a talent for promising capital she hadn’t received.”

Sabine’s mouth set at the memory. “She did have money for a short while. She sent gifts nobody requested, then nothing. The last letters were scarcely letters. I thought she had tired of us.”

There was affection in Mara’s answer and irritation that had survived the woman herself. “Della tired of porridge. People took longer.”

Mrs. Vale turned the page toward the window. A number had been pressed hard into the margin, visible as a dent from the back: 418/9.

“I missed that,” Sabine said. “I was reading the part about Nella.”

Harrow unfolded the active docket list he had copied at the station. The number appeared under a dormant estate claim in Calder Storage’s custody. One name stood beside it: CLARA WYNN.

The confirmation date was three days away.