“Down,” James said, but Siobhan was already ducking below the dash, and Leo killed the lights and reached for the door handle on his side, the movement half instinct and half training that James hadn’t known the man possessed.
Four men came out of the dark saloon. A second vehicle, a dark van with no windows in the rear, pulled in behind it and stopped with its engine still running. The men moved without speaking, spreading across the compound in a pattern that left no gap, and James understood in the half-second before the first one reached the van that they had done this before.
Leo’s door came open with a shriek of metal. A hand reached in and took hold of his apron strap and pulled, and Leo went out sideways, his shoulder hitting the gravel with a sound that was softer than it should have been, muffled by his own weight.
James lunged across the seat. He got one hand on Leo’s wrist before something hard caught him above the right ear, a bright white pressure that became sound and then became nothing at all.
The world came back in fragments. Gravel pressing into his cheek. A boot sole inches from his face, the tread pattern sharp and clean. Siobhan’s voice somewhere behind him, shouting words he couldn’t parse. The salt taste of blood at the corner of his mouth. He tried to push himself up and his arms didn’t answer, and then hands were under his armpits and he was being lifted, his heels dragging through the wet grass.
“The girl stays,” someone said, and the voice was flat and uninflected, a man reading from a script he’d memorised long ago.
“Leo,” James managed, but the name came out wrong, the vowel stretched and blurred.
He was in the back of the saloon. The leather seat was cold against his face. Through the windscreen he saw Siobhan standing alone in the lighthouse compound, her coat whipping in the wind, her mouth open on a word the glass swallowed. Then the car turned and the lighthouse slid out of frame and there was only the road, unspooling in the grey mid-morning light.
The man beside him was large and silent, his hands folded in his lap as if he were waiting for a bus. James tried to sit up and the man put one hand on his shoulder and pressed him back down, not hard, not angry, just a fact of physics that James was in no condition to argue with.
They drove for what felt like twenty minutes. The road climbed and then levelled, and the light through the windows changed from the flat white of the coast to something filtered and green, the canopy of old trees closing over the car. James kept his eyes open by force of will. The blow above his ear had settled into a dull, rhythmic ache that pulsed in time with the engine, and he focused on that, on the small manageable pain, because it was something he could track.
The saloon slowed and turned between two stone pillars. The drive beyond was gravel, freshly raked, and it ran in a straight line through an avenue of beech trees to a house that rose up out of the morning like something from a colder century. Vane manor was grey stone and tall windows, three storeys of it, with a portico held up by columns that had weathered to the colour of old bone. Ivy had been trained across the eastern wing but nowhere else, as if the house permitted it only on sufferance.
The car stopped. James was pulled out and set on his feet, and a man on each side walked him up the shallow steps and through the front door, which was already open, held by a fifth man James hadn’t seen before.
The hall was large and cold and smelled of floor polish and cut flowers, the blooms too white and too perfect for the season. A staircase curved up to a landing where a window let in a slab of pale light. The men walked James past the stairs and through a door to the left, into a room that had been a library once and was now something else, the books still on the shelves but the furniture pushed back against the walls to make space for a single chair in the centre of the floor.
Arthur Vane stood behind the chair, his hands clasped behind his back.
He was dressed in a dark suit, the jacket unbuttoned, the shirt beneath it white and stiff. His face gave nothing away. He looked at James the way a man might look at a delivery he had been expecting but did not particularly want.
“Sit him down.”
The men put James in the chair and stepped back. James let his head fall forward and then lifted it again, the room swimming and then steadying. The back of his skull was wet. He could feel the blood matting his hair, the slow ooze that had not quite stopped.
Arthur walked around to face him. He was holding something in his left hand, a slim leather folder that he tapped once against his palm before setting it on a side table.
“You’ve been asking questions about my family, Mr. Watt. About my father’s ship. About a ledger that doesn’t concern you.”
James said nothing. His tongue felt too large for his mouth.
“I’m going to ask you once,” Arthur said. “Where is it?”
“Where’s Leo?”
Arthur’s expression didn’t change. “The publican is on his way to the coast. My men are taking him out to the Northern Star. He’s going to dive for me. Retrieve something from the wreck that my nephew was too stupid to leave alone.”
“Leo’s not a diver.”
“He’ll learn.”
James tried to stand. One of the men put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down, and this time the pressure stayed, a steady downward force that made his collarbone ache.
“The ledger,” Arthur said. “Thomas found it. He thought he could use it against me. He was wrong about that, as he was wrong about a great many things. But he hid it before he died, and I need to know where.”
“I don’t know anything about a ledger.”
“You were at the lighthouse with the Masters girl and the publican. You’ve been to the museum. You’ve been asking about the Northern Star and my father’s business and a watch that belonged to my family. You expect me to believe you’ve done all that without learning about the ledger?”
James looked at him. The man’s face was still composed, still calm, but there was something behind the composure now, a tightness at the corners of his mouth that hadn’t been there a moment before. Arthur Vane was a man who was used to being obeyed, and James’s silence was not obedience.
“Leo told me your father kept private records,” James said. “That’s all I know. He didn’t tell me where they were. He didn’t tell me what was in them.”
“And yet you were on your way to find them.”
“We were on our way to a storage facility. We had a receipt. That’s it.”
Arthur studied him for a long moment. Then he nodded, a small movement of his chin, and the man behind James shifted his grip from shoulder to throat.
The pressure was sudden and precise, a thumb and forefinger closing on either side of his windpipe. James’s hands came up and found the man’s wrist, but the wrist was thick and unmoving, and the pressure kept building until the room began to darken at the edges.
“I don’t believe you,” Arthur said, and his voice was very calm, very reasonable, the voice of a man discussing a point of contract law. “Thomas was my nephew. I knew him. He was weak and he was greedy and he kept things. He would have kept the ledger, and he would have hidden it somewhere he thought I wouldn’t look. You’ve been inside his life for days now. You’ve spoken to his widow. You’ve been through his things. You know something.”
The pressure released. James gasped and doubled forward, his hands going to his throat, and the air rushing back in was cold and sharp and tasted of the flowers in the hall.
“The publican doesn’t need to die,” Arthur said. “He’s useful to me at the moment. But usefulness has a limit, and once he’s brought up what I need from that wreck, his limit will have been reached. Whether he walks away from the beach or doesn’t depends on what you tell me in the next few minutes.”
James straightened. His throat burned. His head was pounding in earnest now, the ache above his ear spreading down into his jaw and up across his scalp. But the pain had cleared something, burned away the fog, and he was thinking again.
Arthur didn’t know where the ledger was. That was the fact that mattered. Arthur had money and men and a manor house with columns on the portico, and he didn’t know where his own nephew had hidden the evidence that could destroy him. Thomas had outmanoeuvred him from the grave.
And Leo was still alive. Arthur needed him to dive, which meant Leo had time, and time was leverage.
“I’ve got a receipt for a storage unit,” James said, and his voice came out rough and scraped. “Dated six years ago. Thirty-five pounds. That’s all I have. If Thomas hid something there, I haven’t found it yet.”
Arthur picked up the leather folder from the side table and opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper, typed, with a photograph paperclipped to the corner. He held it up so James could see.
The photograph showed the storage receipt. James’s coat pocket. Someone had taken it while he was unconscious.
“This tells me where the unit is,” Arthur said. “It doesn’t tell me what’s inside it. And it doesn’t tell me whether you’ve already been there and removed what Thomas left.”
“I haven’t.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for that.”
Arthur closed the folder and set it down again. He walked to the window and stood with his back to the room, looking out at the avenue of beech trees and the grey sky beyond.
“My father built this house in 1952,” he said. “He built it with money that came from the sea. Shipping, salvage, the movement of goods that certain parties preferred not to declare. He was a practical man. He understood that power is not about what you own but about what you know. The ledger was his record of that knowledge. Every transaction. Every partner. Every favour owed and every debt called in. When he died, it should have come to me. Thomas stole it.”
He turned back from the window.
“I have spent thirty years protecting what my father built. I am not going to lose it now because a private detective from Cromer decided to play hero.”
“I’m not playing anything,” James said. “Elena Vane hired me to find out what happened to her husband. That’s all.”
“Elena Vane,” Arthur said, and something moved across his face, a flicker of contempt that was there and gone, “is a grasping widow who saw an opportunity and took it. She gave you the watch because she knew it would lead you to me. She wanted you to do exactly what you’ve done: stir up the past, draw my attention, force a confrontation. She’s been trying to get leverage over this family since the day she married into it.”
James thought of Elena in his office, the careful grief, the way she had held the watch out to him as if it were an offering. She had known. From the beginning, she had known exactly what she was setting in motion.
“She’s missing,” James said.
Arthur’s expression didn’t change. “I’m aware.”
The room was very quiet. The man behind James had stepped back, but James could still feel him there, a bulk of heat and stillness at the edge of his peripheral vision. Outside the window, a bird crossed the grey sky and was gone.
“You’re going to stay here,” Arthur said. “Until I have what I need from the wreck, and until I’ve searched that storage unit, and until I’m satisfied that you’ve told me everything you know. After that, we’ll discuss what happens next.”
“And Leo?”
“The publican will be released when he’s no longer useful. Assuming you cooperate.”
Arthur nodded to the men. Hands closed on James’s arms and lifted him out of the chair, and his legs took his weight this time, though his knees felt loose and unreliable. They walked him out of the library and back through the hall, past the staircase and the cut flowers and the front door, and then down a narrower corridor to a door that opened onto stone steps leading downward.
The air changed as they descended. The floor polish gave way to something older, salt and damp and the faint mineral smell of stone that had been wet for a long time. The steps were worn in the centre, hollowed by feet that had passed this way over decades. At the bottom, a heavy door stood open on a darkness that smelled of the sea.
They pushed him through and closed the door behind him, and the bolt shot home with a sound that was final and metallic and very loud in the stone chamber. James stood in the dark, listening to the retreating footsteps on the stairs, and then to the silence that followed, and then to something else: the sound of water, somewhere below him, moving against stone with a patience that had no end.
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