He had not worn a suit in five years. The one he wore now had been retrieved from the back of the wardrobe in his flat, a charcoal wool that still carried the faint scent of mothballs and the creases of long storage. The collar of his shirt was a half-inch too loose. He had noticed it in the mirror before leaving and had done nothing about it.
A doorman in a brass-buttoned coat pulled open the heavy glass door, and the noise of the gala spilled out onto the pavement, a wash of chamber music and polished laughter and the particular clink of good crystal against good crystal. James stepped inside.
The ballroom had been dressed to suggest a kind of faded Edwardian glamour, all white tablecloths and silver candelabras and tall arrangements of hothouse flowers that had no business blooming in February. The guests moved through it in slow, deliberate circuits, the men in black tie, the women in gowns that caught the candlelight and threw it back in small sharp glints. James took a glass of something sparkling from a passing tray and did not drink it. He stood near a pillar at the edge of the room and let his gaze travel across the crowd, cataloguing faces he recognised from the local paper, from the council offices, from the better sort of shopfronts along the high street.
He found Marcus West near the centre of the room, one hand resting lightly on the elbow of a woman in emerald silk, his head inclined toward a man James did not know. West was laughing at something, his teeth very white against the tan he had brought back from wherever councilmen went in January. He looked comfortable, James thought. He looked like a man who had never in his life been asked a question he could not deflect with a smile and a reference to procedure.
James set his untouched glass on the pillar's ledge and crossed the floor.
West saw him coming. The laugh faded in stages, and the hand on the woman's elbow dropped away. He said something to his companions that James could not hear, and by the time James reached him the other two had melted back into the crowd with the practised ease of people who understood that some conversations were better had at a distance.
“Mr. West.”
“You again.” West's smile was still in place, but it had tightened at the corners. “The private investigator, looking into the death of Thomas Vane, among other things.”
“Then you'll know that the other things I'm looking into include the Northern Star.”
The smile did not move, but something behind it shifted, a door closing in a room that had been briefly left ajar. West's gaze flicked to a point over James's shoulder and then back again. “The Northern Star was a shipping tragedy. 1987. I'm not sure what that has to do with Thomas.”
“It has to do with Bartholomew Vane,” James said. “And with a smuggling operation that ran out of Cromer for decades. Electronics. Medical equipment. Cargo that never appeared on the official manifests.”
“That's a very serious allegation.”
“It's a very serious ledger.”
West's face did not change, but his right hand went to his cufflink and turned it, a small unconscious rotation that drew the fabric of his sleeve tight against his wrist. “I'm a councilman, Mr. Watt. I deal in planning permissions and waste collection rotas. If you have evidence of historical criminal activity, you should take it to the police.”
“I'm asking you.”
“And I'm telling you I can't help.” He straightened his jacket, a gesture that was meant to signal the end of the conversation. “Now, if you'll excuse me.”
“The manifests are dated October 1987,” James said. “The same month the Northern Star went down. The same month Bartholomew Vane died. You were on the council then, weren't you? Junior position. Something in licensing.”
West stopped. He did not turn back, but he stopped, and for a moment the only sound between them was the chamber music and the low murmur of the room.
“I don't know what you think you've found,” he said, and his voice had lost its polish. “But you're making a mistake.”
“Am I.”
“You're digging into things that don't concern you.”
James watched the back of West's neck, the way the skin above his collar had gone a dull, hot red. “Someone put a watch in Elena Vane's mailbox. Silver. Initialled B.V. You wouldn't know anything about that.”
West turned then, and his face was a careful blank, the expression of a man who had spent decades learning how not to react. “No,” he said. “I wouldn't.”
A voice came from behind James, low and dry and perfectly composed. “Councillor West. I see you've met our local inquiry agent.”
James turned.
Arthur Vane was taller than he had expected, and thinner, the kind of leanness that came from discipline rather than deprivation. His dinner jacket was black, his shirt a white so sharp it seemed to repel the candlelight, and his face was a long, narrow construction of bone and shadow that gave away nothing at all. He was holding a glass of whisky, the ice unmelted, the liquid barely touched. His eyes moved over James with the unhurried assessment of a man who had been weighing other men for decades and had rarely been wrong.
“Mr. Watt,” he said. “I've heard a great deal about you.”
“I don't believe we've met.”
“We haven't. But I make it my business to know who's asking questions about my family.” He took a sip of the whisky, and the gesture was so economical it might have been rehearsed. “My daughter-in-law is grieving. I'd hoped the community would respect that.”
“She came to me.”
“Yes. I know.” Arthur Vane's gaze settled on James's face, and something in it sharpened, a blade pressed gently against the skin. “She's vulnerable. Widows often are. They reach for answers because answers feel like control. But not every question needs to be answered, does it.”
It was not a question.
James held his ground. “She wanted to know how her husband died.”
“Thomas fell from a cliff. The coroner was clear.”
“The coroner didn't find a blood stained watch in her mailbox.”
Arthur Vane's expression did not alter. He looked at James for a long moment, and then he looked at West, who had taken a half-step backward and was studying the contents of his own glass as though it contained something more interesting than champagne. “Marcus,” Arthur said, “would you give us a moment.”
West went. He did not walk so much as dissolve, his departure so swift and so silent that James wondered if he had been waiting for the excuse since the conversation began.
Arthur Vane waited until the councillor was out of earshot. Then he set his glass down on a nearby table, aligning it precisely with the edge of a silver coaster, and folded his hands behind his back. “You're a former RAF pilot,” he said. “Attached to something quieter after that, I understand. The kind of work that doesn't appear on a CV. And now you're here, in Cromer, taking photographs of cheating husbands for forty pounds an hour.”
James said nothing.
“I'm not a man who makes threats, Mr. Watt. Threats are untidy. They leave a record. But I will offer you a piece of advice.” He leaned in, and his voice dropped to a register that was meant for James alone. “The Vane family has been part of this coast for three generations. We've weathered storms that would have broken lesser concerns. A private investigator with a head wound and a rented office is not a storm. He's a gust of wind. And gusts of wind have a way of blowing themselves out, if they're sensible.”
He straightened. The smile he gave was a thin, bloodless thing, the kind of expression a man might wear while closing a ledger on a column of figures that displeased him. “Enjoy the rest of the gala.”
And then he was gone, moving through the crowd with the easy, unhurried grace of a man who owned every room he walked into, and James was left standing by the pillar with the noise of the party washing over him and the coordinates of the Northern Star burning in his mind like a flare over dark water.
He did not stay. He crossed the ballroom floor, past the candelabras and the hothouse flowers and the faces that turned toward him and then away, and he pushed through the glass doors into the cold February night. The fog had thickened while he was inside, and the floodlamps on the façade had turned it into a wall of diffuse white light that swallowed the cliff road and the sea beyond. He stood on the top step and breathed the wet air until the ache in his skull receded to something he could think through.
Arthur Vane had known about the head wound. He had known about the office, the rate, the RAF. He had known, and he had wanted James to know that he knew, and the black Rolls Royce that had been parked across from the office for days had never been about intimidation. It had been about information. Arthur Vane had been watching him from the beginning.
James walked down the steps to the pavement. His car was parked two streets over, the tyres having been replaced, in a side road where the streetlamps were older and the fog lay thicker, and as he walked he turned the facts over in his mind the way Siobhan had turned the cylinder of microfilm between her fingers. The Northern Star had gone down with a cargo that did not match its manifest. Bartholomew Vane had died the same month. The watch had surfaced three weeks after Thomas Vane's death, a message that could only have come from someone who knew what the watch contained, and Arthur Vane had just confirmed, in his precise and bloodless way, that the family's reach extended into every corner of the town James had thought was his refuge.
He reached the car and unlocked the door and sat for a moment in the cold dark of the driver's seat, his hands resting on the wheel. The microfilm was in his coat pocket, wrapped in the handkerchief Leo had pressed against his head on the pier. The coordinates were in his head, a string of numbers that pointed to forty metres of cold North Sea water and a wreck that had kept its secrets for three decades.
He started the engine. The headlamps cut two pale tunnels through the fog, and he pulled out into the empty street and drove north, toward the coast road, toward the place where the numbers in his head intersected with the dark.
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