Chapter 2 Wheat Starch

I did not open it at the lab. That was the rule I made on the stairs: not here, not under Aldous's lamp, not with the cleaners due at seven and the night porter's radio muttering in the foyer. A thing like this needed a table I owned.

So I put the envelope in my satchel between a bone folder and a roll of Japanese tissue, and I walked home through Port Alder in the early dark, with the harbour wind coming up Customs Row and the cranes standing against a sky the colour of a bruise going yellow. I counted the steps to the bus stop. Two hundred and six. I counted the stops. Seven. I counted the stairs to my flat, forty-four, because the lift had been broken since the summer and I'd stopped complaining about it around the time I'd stopped complaining about most things.

The flat was cold. It was always cold on Tuesdays; the boiler had opinions. I hung my coat on the second hook. The first hook held Emeric's, a charcoal wool overcoat with one button sewn on in the wrong thread, which I had never moved. People had suggested I might. Ruth had suggested it three times in two years, each time in a different voice, and each time I'd said *yes, soon,* and each time, in the morning, the coat had been there.

I put the kettle on and didn't make tea. I put the envelope on the kitchen table, under the lamp, on a clean sheet of blotting paper, and I sat down and looked at it the way I'd look at any object that had come into my care. I made myself do that. Material first. Then maker. Then history. Feeling, if there's any left over, at the end.

Paper: a cream machine-made wove, ninety gsm, a little foxed along the bottom edge. Not cheap, not precious. The sort of stock you'd buy at any stationer's by the quire. Chain lines faint to the light; no watermark. I held it to the lamp and found nothing, which was itself a kind of information.

Handling: soft at the corners, slightly bowed from lying against a body. A pocket, a jacket lining. Someone had carried it for a long time and had been careful. There was a faint brown crescent at the top left where a thumb had rested.

The pencilled *N.* I looked at under the glass. Left-handed, the stroke pulling down and away from the body, the long diagonal of it ending in a little flick. Emeric wrote every capital N as if he were halfway to saying something else.

And the seal.

I tilted the lamp until the light raked across it. Wheat-starch paste, applied with a fine brush; I could see the faint ridges where the bristles had dragged. The paste had dried to a hard, glassy film, slightly yellowed at the edges, with that particular fine crazing you only get when starch has aged and then been kept somewhere dry. It hadn't been sealed last week. It hadn't been sealed last year. If I'd been asked to put a date on that paste in a report I would have said: *between two and three years, probably closer to two.*

Which was exactly right.

I sat there for a long time without moving. The kettle clicked off. Somewhere below me, a neighbour's television laughed at something. I thought: *this is a trick.* I thought it in a clear, sensible voice. A man who'd known about the crosswords could know about the paste. A man who'd obtained Emeric's papers, his letters, his belongings, could have obtained a sheet of his stationery and an hour of his handwriting. I knew how easy it was to make a thing look old. It was half my profession's dark art, and the other half was catching it.

I took the bone folder out of my hair and slid it, very gently, under the flap.

You don't tear a seal like that. You ease it. The starch gave in a long soft sigh, and the flap lifted, and there was no tearing at all. Inside was a single sheet, folded in thirds, and when I opened it the handwriting was the same slanting, left-leaning, flicked hand as the *N.*, and I had to put my palm flat on the table.

*Nadi,*

*If Cassian Rook has found you, I'm gone, and I was right to be afraid.*

*I'm sorry about the first line. I tried writing it six different ways and they were all worse. You always said I buried the lead. You were right. I'm trying not to.*

*Look for Linden Ford. Volume Four. It isn't where it should be, and it isn't lost, and I think it's closer to you than you'd believe. Don't take it to the Trust. Not to anyone there. Not even to the ones you love. I know how that sounds. I've sat in this kitchen for six weeks trying to find a way to say it that wouldn't frighten you, and there isn't one. Please just believe me, this once, without the proof. I will explain everything as soon as I can.*

*If I can't, Rook will tell you what he can. He's careful, and he's honest in the way people are when they've decided to be, which is the only kind worth trusting. Let him help. He won't enjoy it.*

*I'm sorry I decided for you. I keep thinking if I'd just said it at breakfast, over the toast, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, we'd both have been so much braver than I was by myself.*

*I love you more than I know how to put on paper, and you know I can't leave a thing alone until it's right, so you'll have to forgive me for this one being wrong.*

*E.*

*P.S. You never did finish the crossword. Fourteen-across was always going to be the last one.*

I read it twice. Then I read it again, the way I read a document I already know by heart, searching not for meaning but for flaws. The ink: a blue-black gel, ordinary. The pressure: heavy at the downstrokes, as his always was. The hesitation before *Linden*, a pause you could see in a thickening of the stroke. A man stopping to think before he wrote a name.

I thought: *it's his.*

I thought: *it can't be his.*

I thought: *he sat in this kitchen for six weeks.*

I got up. I went to the sink and ran the tap and held my wrists under the cold water, because that is what my mother taught me to do when I was twelve and couldn't breathe, and then I stood there with the water running for far longer than any wrists needed.

When I could trust my hands, I took my phone from the table.

I should have called Cassian Rook. That's what a sensible woman does: asks the stranger who delivered the thing. But some animal part of me recoiled from it. If I called him, it would be real. If I called him, I'd be a woman with a stranger's number in her phone and a dead man's letter on her table, and the evening would fold itself around that fact and become permanent.

So I called my mother.

His thread sat just above hers in the list, as it always did, and I scrolled past it the way I always did. The last message in it was mine. *Home by 9? I've made too much.* Delivered, never answered. I have never deleted it. I don't know why I think a phone remembers things the way a person does.

Ruth picked up on the fourth ring.

"Nadia, love. Is something wrong?"

"No. Yes. Mum, I need to ask you something, and I need you to just answer it." I was standing at the window now, looking at the lights of the harbour. "Does the name Linden Ford mean anything to you?"

Nothing.

I want to describe this exactly, because I went over it for years afterwards. It wasn't the nothing of a bad connection, or of someone thinking. I could hear her breathing. I could hear a clock in the room behind her, the old brass carriage clock that had been Walter's, and a dull small sound that might have been a cup being put down on a saucer very carefully. It was the kind of silence a person makes when they're holding a door shut with their whole body.

"Mum?"

"I have to go, love." Her voice was perfectly normal. Too normal. A recorded message of a voice. "The oven. I'll ring you back."

She hung up.

I stood there with the phone against my chest. The oven. My mother had eaten at six every evening of her life, and I knew, as clearly as I knew my own name, that it was ten past nine and that nothing in her kitchen was on.

I made tea. I drank it standing up. I did not read the letter again, though I could feel it on the table behind me like a second heartbeat. I counted my breath, in for four, out for six, the way you count a slow lift. I got to the end of the second cup. And then my phone rang, and the screen said *Mum,* and I looked at the clock on the cooker.

Nine minutes.

I answered. "Hello?"

"Nadia." Ruth's voice was light, easy, wearing a little smile you could hear. The voice of a woman who'd had nine minutes to find the right face. "Sorry, love, the line went funny earlier. I didn't quite catch what you said. Which name was it?"

I hadn't repeated it.

I looked at the dark window, at my own reflection standing in it, small and pale and holding a cup, and I understood something I did not want to understand: that the line had not gone funny, that she had caught every word, and that my mother, who had never lied to me about anything larger than a birthday present, had spent nine minutes deciding what to say.

"Which name?" Ruth said again, gently, and I heard the thing that was under her voice, and it was fear.