INHERITANCE OF LIES

Chapter 5

She sat at Eleanor's desk until the light changed.

This was how she knew time had passed, not by any clock, not by hunger or tiredness, but by the angle of the light through the east-facing window shifting from the flat grey of early afternoon to the particular amber that happened in March at around four o'clock, when the low sun caught the bare branches of the garden elm at the exact angle required to cast long thin shadows across the study floor like the lines of a manuscript she hadn't learned to read yet.

She had read seven letters.

She had turned each one face-down on the desk when she finished it, in the order she'd found them, the way she handled fragile documents at work, always face-down when not actively reading, always sequenced, always in condition to be returned to their original arrangement as though they had never been disturbed. This was professional habit. It was also, she was aware, a way of managing the accumulation. Face-down meant filed. Filed meant processed. Processed meant she was still in control of the intake, still the archivist, not the subject.

She stood up from the chair and her lower back complained about it and she realised she had not eaten since the cheese sandwich on the train, which felt like it had happened in a different chapter of her life. She walked to the window and looked at the garden and tried to decide what she knew.

What she knew: Eleanor had been visited in January 1971 by a woman named Renard. Renard had shown her a photograph of a child not yet born and had told her that child, Nora, would need protecting from a threat not yet visible. Eleanor, trained cryptographer, professionally sceptical, had not dismissed this. She had instead done what Nora would have done, probably, she had turned it into a project. A system. Something manageable. She had begun writing letters to a granddaughter she had not yet met, disguising intelligence files as love letters, building across thirty years an archive that was simultaneously an act of devotion and a piece of evidence that might one day be used in court.

What she did not know: why. What the threat was. What Renard wanted in return. What Eleanor had agreed to, and what it had cost, and whether the cost included Thomas.

The second letter's final paragraph sat in the back of her mind like a splinter she had not yet managed to locate precisely enough to extract. I was in the room when they decided to kill him. Seven words that had reorganised every childhood memory she owned, not violently, not all at once, but quietly and permanently, the way a word shifts its meaning when you learn its etymology and can no longer unknow it.

She pressed her forehead briefly against the cold glass of the window.

Then she went to find Mrs. Byrd and ask about dinner.

Mrs. Byrd had made soup. It was the kind of soup that communicated, without sentimentality, that the person who made it understood what the person eating it was going through and had decided that the appropriate response was carbohydrate. Nora ate it standing at the kitchen counter because the kitchen was the warmest room in the house and she had not yet worked out how the heating operated and did not want to ask.

Mrs. Byrd moved around the kitchen with the efficiency of someone who had worked in it for years and knew its habits, which burner ran hot, which drawer stuck, where the good knives lived versus where they got put by people who didn't know better. She did not make conversation. Nora found this restful in the way she sometimes found archives restful, the comfort of a space that did not require her to perform ease.

"How long did you work for her?" Nora asked, eventually.

"Fourteen years." Mrs. Byrd dried a pan without looking up. "Though I'd known the house longer. My mother was here before me."

"Did she talk to you? Eleanor. About the house. About what she was working on."

A pause. Not evasive, considered. "She talked about the garden. She talked about the weather and about what needed fixing and about Thomas, when she was in the mood for it. She didn't talk about her work."

"Did you know about the letters?"

Mrs. Byrd set the pan on the rack and turned to face her for the first time. Her expression was the expression of someone who has decided to be truthful and is marshalling themselves to do it without embellishment.

"I knew there were letters," she said. "I knew she wrote them. I never read them and I never asked about them. She was clear that they were for you, and that I was to see you received them in the correct order, and that nobody else was to have access to that study until you arrived."

"Nobody?"

"Mr. Marsh asked, when he came to deal with the estate paperwork. She had already written instructions about that too. He wasn't to go in."

Nora looked at her soup.

"She planned for him specifically," she said. It wasn't a question.

"She planned for everything specifically," said Mrs. Byrd, and turned back to her drying-up with the manner of a woman who had said exactly as much as she intended to and not one syllable more.

After dinner Nora did what she always did in unfamiliar environments: she catalogued.

This was not a conscious decision. It was the way her mind settled itself, by moving through a space and noting what was in it, building an internal index, establishing the relationship between objects and their container until the container became legible. She did it in archives. She did it in hotels. She had done it, once, in a hospital waiting room, cataloguing the magazines by year of publication while her mother was in surgery, arranging them into a timeline as though the act of sequencing could impose order on the situation occurring behind the double doors at the end of the corridor.

She moved through Haverstone room by room with her phone in her hand, not photographing, not yet but noting.

Preliminary Survey · Haverstone Estate · N. Voss · 14 March 2024

01.

Ground floor drawing room. Furniture covered in dust sheets except one armchair by the east window, recently used, impression still visible in the cushion. Beside it: a small table with a ring stain consistent with regular mug placement. One book, face-down, spine cracked at approximately pg. 180: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Le Carré. 1963 first edition.

Note: she was rereading it. The spine cracks are old but the dust on the cover is not.

02.

Dining room. Table set for one at the far end, not the head, the far end, facing the door. Place setting left in situ. One wine glass, one plate, cutlery correctly placed. Unused. The meal was not eaten.

Note: date of last use unclear. Ask Mrs. Byrd.

03.

Library. Floor-to-ceiling, three walls. Approximately 2,000 volumes, mix of fiction and reference. One section, east wall, third shelf from top, noticeably disrupted: books replaced at incorrect angles, some backwards, one lying horizontal across the others. Recent disturbance. Not Eleanor's doing; she was meticulous.

Note: someone has been looking for something in this section. Recently.

04.

Guest bedroom assigned to N. Voss. Bed made. Window latch oiled recently, the hinge moves without resistance and the others in the house do not. On the bedside table: a framed photograph of Thomas Voss, age approximately 25, laughing at something out of frame. Behind it, half-hidden, a smaller photograph: Nora, age approximately 8, reading in a garden that is not Haverstone's.

Note: Eleanor had photographs of me I never gave her. This requires revisiting.

05.

En-suite bathroom, guest bedroom. Standard fittings. Medicine cabinet empty except one item: a prescription bottle, label removed, containing four tablets of unidentified type. Cabinet mirror: see separate note.

Note: the mirror requires a separate note.

She stood in the en-suite bathroom with her phone raised and looked at what was written on the mirror in what appeared to be, she leaned closer, careful not to touch it, red grease pencil, the kind used for marking documents, the kind Eleanor had kept in the study's top drawer alongside the fountain pens and the magnifying glass and the other tools of a woman who had spent her life working with paper.

It had not been there this afternoon. She was certain of this because she was an archivist and she had walked through this room when Mrs. Byrd showed her to it and she had catalogued it in the background of her mind the way she always did and there had been nothing on the mirror. There was nothing on the mirror at four o'clock. It was now seven forty-three.

She photographed it.

THE STUDY DOOR DOES NOT LOCK FROM THE OUTSIDE.

CHECK BEFORE YOU SLEEP.

— E

Nora's annotation:

Written in red grease pencil. Consistent with the pencils in the study desk. Impossible for Eleanor to have written this after her death. Possible explanations:

(1) written some time ago and I missed it.

(2) Mrs. Byrd.

(3) someone else is in the house.

Ranking these by probability in ascending order: I did not miss it. Mrs. Byrd has no motive I can currently identify. Someone else is in the house.

She went back to the study and checked the lock.

The study door locked from the inside. There was a bolt, old iron, solid, the kind that did not slip. She slid it across and felt it seat in the keep with the finality of something that meant what it said. Then she stood in the locked study in the dark for a moment, because the light was off and she hadn't moved to turn it on, and she listened to the house.

Old houses spoke. She had spent enough time in them to know their vocabulary, the particular settling creak of a structural beam responding to temperature change, the different note of a floorboard under weight versus a floorboard cooling, the way a pipe knock moved through a building's bones in a direction you could track if you listened. She listened. The house spoke the ordinary language of its age and she parsed it carefully, item by item, and found nothing that meant footstep or door or someone who is not supposed to be here.

This was not entirely reassuring. The best people in houses you were not supposed to be in were silent.

She turned on the light and went back to the letters.