Chapter 14

# Chapter Fourteen

## Flour for the Dead

The fire works supervisor put his palm against the bakery door and refused to turn the key.

“I want the people in that house out of the roof rooms first.”

Ms. Doe stepped off the threshold. “They are.”

“All of them?”

“Mrs. Thorne counted.”

“Mrs. Thorne counted six last night,” Harrow said.

The supervisor let his hand fall. He had been called from another job and was already tired of the way people in this one used numbers. Neris went back to Thorne House and returned with Sabine’s signature beneath a list of occupied rooms. Only then did the supervisor break the municipal seal.

The door resisted. Four winters of damp had swollen its frame, and the iron bar the men used to persuade it produced a long scrape that carried down the row. Women opened upstairs curtains. A boy in a baker’s apron came from the corner shop to see whether the old place had begun selling bread again.

Harrow sent him back to work.

Calder Storage occupied the upper floor and part of the old drying rooms below. The building had stopped baking but had never quite stopped behaving like a bakery. Flour lodged in the mortar. An idle belt hung above the mixing floor, stiff and grey, while canvas sacks of estate papers filled the cooling racks. Whoever had chosen the premises understood that paper liked a dry room. Whoever had maintained it had done less for the floors.

The fire works crew shored the loft from beneath. Their wedges rang through the timbers each time a man struck one home. Theo watched the first brace take load and asked the supervisor to move the second six inches off a cracked stone bearing. The man argued until Theo showed him the hairline that continued down the plaster below it. He moved the brace without thanking him.

“Can we cross?” Ms. Doe asked.

“One at a time,” the supervisor said. “And no one on the old lift platform. I can make the route safe. I cannot make the building young.”

They entered through the street door rather than the crawlway. Neris guarded the house side; two constables kept the bakery entrance. Harrow had recorded the condition of the city seal and Calder’s lease before allowing the search. He gave the supervisor a copy of the entry plan and kept the original with his notes.

The loft was crowded with racks. Sheets of brown wrapping paper hung from cords to keep damp from reaching the stored files, and each movement stirred them against one another. The old flour chute passed through a hole in the floor and ended in a room they could not see. Beyond the racks, a closed door marked DRYING in letters ghosted onto the paint. Ms. Doe took the wrong turn once before she found Harrow again.

“We searched the accessible rooms from the street side,” Neris said. “Not that one. Calder’s key doesn’t fit.”

Theo examined the keyhole without touching it. “New cylinder in an old plate.”

“Could your card open it?” Ms. Doe asked.

“A locksmith could open it with less damage.”

Harrow sent for one. While they waited, Ms. Doe followed a line of scuffed flour toward a shelf near the back wall. Some marks belonged to the fire crew. One was narrower, cut before the latest dust settled. At its end the powder stopped at a brick partition, though the wall continued on both sides.

She put her ear to it. The stone held the afternoon cold. Somewhere within the building, a loose metal part struck twice in the gust from the roof vent.

“Anything?” Harrow asked.

“A wall. Less generous than I hoped.”

He did not smile. She had not expected him to.

The locksmith came with a roll of tools and a complaint about being called to a condemned property without being told the cylinder was recent. He opened it in minutes. Harrow made him show where the pins had caught before the door moved; a later witness might otherwise claim the police had damaged a secured room and made its contents impossible to trust.

Air came out of the drying chamber cold enough to make Ms. Doe’s teeth ache.

The room had a sloping brick floor and a roof cowl that pulled its air upward. Paper cartons were stacked along the left wall. On the right, a row of empty canvas trays rested on iron rails. The first tray was clean. The second had a blue ribbon caught beneath one wheel.

In the seams around the rails lay a flour so pale it turned blue under the lamp. The fire supervisor showed Harrow the old sacks: whitening mineral had been mixed into the drying stock here, a cheap way to give dark grain a better color. The loft dust was ordinary grey. Harrow took samples from both rooms and marked the tins separately.

Mrs. Vale had been waiting in the loft with Sabine. When Harrow asked them to remain at the door, she did, though her attention stayed on the ribbon.

“Della wore that color,” she said. “She wore three different blues together and insisted they matched.”

Harrow lifted the corner of the third tray. Something beneath it had been covered with two flour cloths, tucked in around the edges. He replaced the corner and asked the women to go downstairs.

Sabine did not move.

“I need you to tell me whether it is Della,” she said.

“After I have secured the room.”

“You can say a person is there.”

Harrow looked at her. “A person is there.”

Mrs. Vale guided Sabine to the stairs. Ashgrove had expected Sabine to resist with a key or a rule. She went when Mrs. Vale asked and gripped the handrail all the way down.

Harrow uncovered the woman. The cold had slowed what death had done to her, though there was no mistaking it. A wound lay beneath her hair, where the skull had met something hard. Her right hand still held a few torn paper fibers. A black thread crossed one cuff and ended abruptly where the rest of it had broken away.

Ms. Doe found herself attending to the ribbon because it was easier than attending to the hand. The blue had been stitched badly to the collar of a dark dress. Della, who had wanted a millinery partnership, had sewn it herself, or had asked someone with less skill than Nella. No one in the room could tell her now.

The police surgeon would decide the cause of death. Harrow recorded what they could see and assigned a constable to keep the drying-room door. He did not put a name in the first line of his notes. He wrote “adult woman” and the place where they had found her.

“She was moved,” Ms. Doe said.

“The cloths suggest it. Show me more.”

They found a drag mark underneath the leftmost tray, then darker flakes where the floor dipped toward the drain. An unlocked records room across the passage had a blood mark on the corner of a waist-high stone table, scrubbed but still lodged in a chip. Its shelves carried claimant ledgers bound in black cloth. One iron rack ran on low wheels against the rear wall; storage racks elsewhere in the building used the same design. One gap was the width of a book; its label read 418/9.

“That is the number from her letter,” Ms. Doe said.

Harrow compared the label to the rubbing he had taken from the letter’s margin. He did not let anyone touch the neighboring volumes.

Theo crouched near the stone table and held a magnifier over a loose piece of dark thread. “Same class of binding as the ledgers. I cannot tell you which volume lost it from this fragment.”

“Della went to the office with a binding needle,” Ms. Doe said. “She saw a leaf moved in a book. She may have opened it here.”

“She may,” Harrow said. “We need the book.”

“Sable took one from here on Tuesday.”

“He said his firm did. I have requested the movement record.”

The answer irritated Ashgrove because it was careful, and because she could not improve it. Sable’s presence in his own leased room proved little. His candor about the wrapper stock might be candor; it might also be a way to explain a piece of paper the police already held.

The search continued under the pressure of finding Nella alive. Neris brought the ochre thread from the attic in its evidence sleeve. Beyond the broken span, the same heel size appeared in a dusting of lime on the loft boards. Near the records room, someone had spilled water recently enough to darken the porous mortar. A chipped cup sat behind a sack of files, its rim marked with a thumbprint too blurred to identify.

“Could be for a prisoner,” Ms. Doe said.

“Could be for a clerk,” Harrow replied.

“You’re determined to ruin a theory before I’ve enjoyed it.”

“You’re free to enjoy it. You cannot write it down as fact.”

At the far end of the room, a cast-iron pipe passed along the wall above the old proofing ovens. It warmed bread once by carrying heat through a row of chambers. Its alchemical lining had been removed during the bakery’s closure, leaving an ordinary empty conduit with branches sealed or forgotten inside the masonry.

Theo tapped the pipe lightly with the wooden end of his ruler. The sound went farther than it should have through a wall so thick. He took out a narrow brass path needle, then put it back.

“No live working,” he said. “We can trace the pipe with a hammer and ears.”

The supervisor heard him from the doorway. “You may trace it. You may not strike the oven wall until I have checked what stands on it.”

Their search of the visible ovens found soot, old inspection tags and a nest abandoned by something small. The floor plans showed six proofing recesses. Harrow’s men opened six. Every one was empty. A seventh mark on the plan belonged to a vent, or perhaps to a correction made later in a different ink. From inside the room they could find neither a door nor a cavity large enough to hold a person.

Ms. Doe put her palm against the cold brick and counted the joints. Two courses were younger than the rest. She asked Neris to check the repair record before anyone opened the wall. He brought back three entries for the oven bank, none with a drawing. She had a difference in mortar and no safe place to put a chisel.

“We should speak to the men who closed this bakery,” she said.

“One retired to Northmere,” the supervisor answered. “The other died. I can bring the repair ledger in the morning.”

Harrow had already asked for a night search to continue. The supervisor allowed it in the braced rooms and refused the unshored drying loft. Neris took the first watch with another constable. Mrs. Vale went back to Thorne House to tell the residents what had been found. She asked Sabine whether she wanted to come. Sabine said she would tell them herself.

No one spoke for a while after she left.

Ms. Doe remained beside the pipe. Rain rattled the roof cowl above the drying chamber. A cart moved along Linnet Row, its iron rim knocking irregularly against the stones. She waited for it to pass, then struck the pipe with the ruler in a pattern she had no reason to expect anyone to know: two quick taps, a pause, one more.

Theo lifted his head. Harrow came back from the door.

From somewhere inside the old proofing line came one tap.

Ms. Doe struck again, changing the interval.

The answer changed with it.