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James reached the landward end with his coat plastered to his back and his right hand pressed flat against the railing for balance. The blow to his skull had left him with a dull, insistent throb that sharpened every time he turned his head too quickly, and the three miles from the manor had been covered in a haze of hedgerows and ditches and the occasional pair of headlights that sent him flat into the wet grass until they passed. He had no clear memory of getting out of the cellar. The chain had given at the bracket, not at his wrist, and the iron ring still hung from the raw skin like a bracelet he could not remove. The rest was fragments: a door that had not been locked, a stretch of gravel he had crossed on hands and knees, the salt marsh beyond the garden wall where he had lain for what felt like an hour while the storm gathered itself overhead.
Now the pier stretched ahead of him into the churning black, and at the far end, beneath the Pavilion's shuttered windows, a figure moved in the half-dark.
He knew Siobhan's silhouette before he could make out her face. The way she stood, feet planted wide against the wind, one arm crooked around something bulky pressed to her chest. She had come up from somewhere beneath the decking. James could see the dark rectangle of an open hatch behind her, it's cover thrown back against the planks, and even at this distance he registered the particular way Siobhan kept glancing down at it, as though she expected the pier itself to reach up and drag her back.
He started toward her. The wind shoved him sideways and he let it, using the momentum to carry him past the first of the bench shelters. The sea was a continuous roar beneath the pilings, and the spray came up through the gaps in the decking in cold, intermittent bursts that stung his ankles. Fifty yards. Forty.
Then Marcus West stepped out from behind the Pavilion's service door, and everything that had been moving in one direction stopped.
West was not alone. Two men flanked him, both in dark coats, both with the same square, patient build that James remembered from the lighthouse. The black saloon was parked on the pier approach, its lights off, its presence a statement rather than a surprise. West himself looked different from the councilman James had interviewed three days earlier. The smoothness was gone. His collar was turned up against the weather, his hair plastered flat, and his right hand held something that caught the Pavilion's single remaining security lamp in a brief, ugly glint.
“Mr. West,” Siobhan said, and her voice carried across the distance with a clarity that the wind had no right to permit. “You're a long way from the planning committee.”
West ignored her. His attention was fixed on the object she held against her chest. A book, bound in dark leather, its edges swollen and warped. Water dripped from its lower corner in a steady, rhythmic patter that James could hear even through the storm.
“Give me the ledger,” West said. “And this ends here.”
Siobhan straightened. “Funny thing about that. I've been in this town forty years, and I never knew there was a compartment under the pier. Turns out the Vane family had all sorts of hiding places. Smuggling routes. False bottoms in the pilings. Places you'd only know about if your grandfather worked the boats in the fifties. Or if you read the right museum pamphlets.”
West took a step forward. The two men moved with him, spreading out to block the width of the pier. “You don't understand what you're holding.”
“I understand perfectly well,” Siobhan said. “Thomas Vane hid this ledger six years ago because it contains the financial records of every illicit transaction the family firm has conducted since Bartholomew Vane built the manor in 1952. The embezzlement, the wrecking, the smuggling routes. All of it. He hid it because he was going to use it as leverage, and then he died before he could.”
James was close enough now to see the ledger's spine. The leather had split along the crease, and the pages beneath were darkened with salt water, but the binding had held. Thomas had chosen his hiding place well. The compartment beneath the pier was above the high-water mark, sheltered by the decking, accessible only through a hatch that had been painted over and forgotten. Siobhan had found it because she had spent years tracing the exact routes the old smuggling families had used, and because she had paid attention when the museum acquired a set of harbour master's logs from 1953 that mentioned a sealed void beneath the pier's easternmost section.
“Thomas was a fool,” West said. “He thought he could walk away from the family and take the records with him. He thought Arthur would let him.”
“Arthur pushed him off a cliff,” James said.
West turned. The glint in his hand resolved into a short, heavy torch, the kind that doubled as a cosh. “You should have stayed in the cellar, Mr. Watt. Arthur was very clear about what would happen if you didn't.”
“Arthur's been clear about a lot of things. None of them have worked out the way he planned.”
The wind screamed through the Pavilion's ironwork, and for a moment the whole pier seemed to shudder. One of West's men stumbled, catching himself on the railing, and in that instant of distraction Siobhan moved. She did not run. She stepped sideways, toward the edge of the pier, and held the ledger out over the railing where the spray was heaviest and the drop was forty feet into black, churning water.
“Take another step,” she said, “and I drop it. The sea can have the truth. It's had everything else.”
West stopped. His face, already drawn, went very still. “You wouldn't.”
“I've spent three years cataloguing everything this town has lost to the North Sea. One more thing won't make a difference.”
She had been eyeing the service stairwell, the one with the rusted-through bracket that James had noted five days earlier. In one quick movement she put her shoulder against the door. It gave with a shriek of corroded hinges, revealing the narrow steps that led down to the understructure. She did not drop the ledger. She pulled it back against her chest and ran, and West lunged after her with a sound that was half shout and half snarl. His torch came down in a wide arc that missed her shoulder by inches and struck the railing instead, ringing out across the water like a cracked bell. Siobhan was already through the doorway. The door slammed shut behind her.
West's men came forward. James intercepted the first one, driving his shoulder into the man's midsection with a force that sent them both crashing into the bench shelter. The wood splintered. The man's elbow caught James across the temple, and the world went white for a half-second, but he held on, grappling for the wrist that held the cosh, finding it, twisting until something popped and the torch clattered to the decking.
He then turned his attention to West. He let West drive him backward, then stepped aside at the last moment so that West's momentum carried him into the railing. The impact bent the iron outward. West's torch went over the side and vanished into the spray without a sound.
The second man had Siobhan by the arm. She had come back out of the stairwell, the ledger still clutched to her chest, and he was trying to pry it from her grip while she kicked at his shins and cursed him in a steady, methodical stream that James could hear even over the storm. He started toward her, pulling the man off with one arm around his throat, and Siobhan broke free and stumbled toward James with the ledger held out like an offering.
“Take it,” she said. “Take it and go.”
He took it. The leather was cold and slick, and the weight of it was greater than it should have been, as though the water it had absorbed had added something more than mass. He tucked it inside his coat, against his ribs, and felt the shape of the watch still in his pocket press back.
West was on his feet again. His coat was torn, his face bleeding from a cut above his eye, and his voice when he spoke was ragged with something that was not quite fury. “You think this ends with a ledger? You think Arthur Vane spent thirty years protecting his father's legacy just to let a publican and a museum clerk tear it down?”
“I think,” James said, breathing hard “that you're standing on a pier in a force eight gale with two men who can't fight and a councilman's salary that isn't worth drowning for.”
West looked at James. Then at the ledger, visible as a dark rectangle beneath James's coat. The wind howled through the Pavilion's eaves, and somewhere out on the water, a small vessel's navigation lights blinked once and were swallowed by the swell. The sergeant, James thought. The one Arthur had sent to the wreck. He wondered if the man had made it back before the storm turned, and then he stopped wondering, because the sea did not care about the Vane family's schedules, and the sea was rising.
“This isn't finished,” West said. He was backing away now, toward the pier approach, and his men were gathering themselves with the slow, pained movements of men who had been paid for a simple job and found something else entirely. “Arthur will find you. He'll find all of you. And when he does, that ledger won't save you. Nothing will.”
He turned and walked. The two men followed, one cradling his wrist, the other limping. The black saloon's engine turned over, and its headlights swept across the pier in a long, yellow arc before it pulled away into the rain.
Siobhan let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I can't believe that worked.”
“It hasn't worked yet,” James said. He was looking at the ledger, at the water that still dripped from its pages onto the decking. “We need to get this somewhere dry. Somewhere Arthur can't reach.”
Siobhan nodded, “The Crab Shack. It's the wrong end of the promenade, and nobody goes there this time of year.” She paused. “Nobody ever goes there, if we're being honest.”
Siobhan was already moving, pulling her coat tighter, her eyes on the shore. “We'll need a reader. A microfilm reader. The museum has one, but it'll be locked until morning.”
“Morning might be too late,” James said.
She looked at him, and in the thin light of the Pavilion's single lamp, her face was set with a determination that had nothing to do with hope and everything to do with the same refusal he had felt in the cellar: the refusal to let Arthur Vane have the satisfaction of their silence. “Then we'd better work fast.”
The two of them started back along the pier, bent against the wind, the ledger a solid, waterlogged weight against James's ribs. Behind them, the sea hammered the pilings with a rhythm that sounded, in the darkness, like something ancient and patient and entirely without mercy.
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