Siobhan leaned against the rail beside him, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her waxed jacket. She had not said much since they had walked off the pier the night before. Leo sat on an upturned crate a few yards away, nursing a paper cup of tea someone had pressed on him from the café that had opened early despite the damage. His apron was gone. He looked smaller without it.
"The NCA rang," Siobhan said. "They've got the ledger. Marcus West was picked up at his home an hour ago. Two others from the council as well."
James nodded. He had handed the ledger to the young detective constable who had arrived from Norwich at half past three in the morning, a woman with a quiet manner and a notebook she filled without once looking up. She had taken his statement in the back room of the lifeboat station while someone brought blankets and sweet tea. He had told her everything he could, and when she asked about Elena Vane he had said only that she had not been seen since the pier collapsed, and that he did not know where she was.
"She'll turn up," Siobhan said now, as if she had followed his thought. "Or she won't. People like Elena Vane don't vanish. They just choose when to be found."
Leo grunted. "Good riddance."
James did not answer. He reached into his coat pocket and closed his fingers around the watch. The metal was cold, the casing warped from the heat of the fire that had swept through the Pavilion's eastern wing before the sea had swallowed it. The glass was cracked, the face beneath it scorched black. The initials B.V. were still legible on the inside of the lid, though the engraving had softened at the edges, as if the silver had begun to forget.
He turned it over in his palm. The bloodstain that had darkened the seam when Elena first handed it to him in his office, three weeks and a lifetime ago, was now indistinguishable from the burn marks. The watch had travelled from Bartholomew Vane's pocket to his son's, from Thomas's dying hand to his widow's mailbox, from Elena's keeping to James's own. It had outlasted the men who had carried it.
"That's it, then," Leo said. He was watching James with the look of a man who had spent forty years reading faces across a bar and had not yet been surprised. "You're going."
"There's a bus at ten past one."
"London?"
"For a start."
Siobhan turned her head. "You'll come back." It was not a question.
"I don't know."
She nodded, once, and looked back out at the water. A gull landed on the rail three feet from her hand and regarded them all with a yellow, incurious eye.
James weighed the watch in his hand. The sea below the pier was the colour of slate, opaque and patient, the same sea that had closed over Arthur Vane's head and the same sea that had kept the Northern Star's secrets for thirty years in forty metres of darkness off Happisburgh Sands. It owed him nothing. It had been there before the Vanes, before the pier, before the town, and it would be there after all of them.
He drew his arm back and threw the watch as far as he could.
It arced out over the water, a brief flash of tarnished silver against the pale sky, and then it was gone. No splash reached them. The sea took it without ceremony and closed over it, and the surface resumed its slow, indifferent swell.
"Well," Leo said. "That's that."
Siobhan straightened up from the rail. "I'll walk you to the bus stop."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
They turned together, the three of them, and made their way up the concrete ramp past the workmen and the orange tape and the first curious onlookers who had begun to gather at the pier's entrance, drawn by the wreckage and the rumour of arrests. The church clock struck eleven. James counted the chimes this time.
At the top of the ramp, where the promenade opened out onto the street, a black car had pulled up. It was not the saloon that had idled outside his office, the one that had belonged to Arthur Vane's men and had fled the scene the night before. This car was newer, sleeker, its paintwork so deep and unblemished that it seemed to drink the morning light. A man was stepping out of the rear door as they approached.
He was in his fifties, impeccably dressed in a dark overcoat that fell to his knees, his shoes polished to a gloss that belonged in a city boardroom rather than on a Norfolk seafront. His hair was silver at the temples, combed back from a high forehead, and he carried himself with the kind of ease that came from a lifetime of being the most powerful person in any room he entered. He surveyed the wreckage of the pier with an expression that was not quite dismay and not quite calculation, the look of a man who had just discovered that a long-term investment had turned sour while his attention was elsewhere.
James slowed. The man's gaze swept past the workmen, past the ruined Pavilion, past the amusement arcade with its dark machines, and settled for a moment on the three of them. His eyes were dark and unreadable. He did not speak. He did not need to. His presence was a statement in itself: the Orsine Foundation had come to see what remained of the Vane empire, and what it saw was not enough.
"Who's that?" Leo muttered.
James watched the man turn away and speak to a younger associate who had emerged from the car's other side, a thin man with a tablet computer who nodded rapidly and began tapping at the screen. The older man did not look back at the pier. He got into the car, and the door closed with a soft, expensive thud, and the car pulled away along the seafront road, heading north out of town.
"Someone who's just realised the money's gone," James said.
Siobhan frowned. "The Orsine Foundation. I've seen the name in the museum's funding records. They've been linked to Vane Maritime Holdings for years."
"Not any more."
They walked on. The bus stop on Cadogan Road was a simple shelter with a bench and a timetable behind smeared perspex. Leo stopped at the corner and held out his hand. His grip was dry and rough, the hand of a man who had spent a lifetime hauling crab pots and pulling pints.
"You ever want a drink," he said, "you know where I am."
"The wrong end of the promenade."
Leo smiled, a brief, unadorned thing that reached his eyes without effort. "That's the one." He turned and walked back towards the seafront, his shoulders squared against the wind.
Siobhan waited with James until the bus appeared at the far end of the road, a double-decker in the familiar green and cream livery, its indicator winking as it pulled in to the stop. The doors opened with a hiss of compressed air.
"The pamphlet," she said. "Cromer's Hidden Coast. I'm revising it. The smuggling chapter needs updating."
"I'll send you my notes."
"You'd better." She held his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable, and then she stepped back. "Goodbye, James."
He climbed onto the bus and paid his fare and took a seat on the upper deck, by the window. The engine rumbled beneath him. Through the glass he could see Siobhan still standing at the stop, her hands back in her pockets, her hair lifting in the breeze off the sea. She did not wave. He did not expect her to.
The bus pulled away from Cadogan Road and turned inland, and the sea disappeared behind a row of guesthouses and a petrol station and a field of winter wheat that stretched flat and green to the horizon. James leaned his head against the window and watched the landscape unspool. The watch was gone. The ledger was in the hands of people who would use it. Arthur Vane was dead, Marcus West was in custody, and somewhere Elena Vane was either running or hiding or both. The Northern Star still lay in forty metres of water three miles off Happisburgh Sands, and its vault of smuggled goods would keep its secrets a while longer.
The bus picked up speed. James closed his eyes and let the motion carry him, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, the quiet inside him felt like something he had chosen rather than something he had been left with.
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