CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Cassius
Here's the state of the board on the eleventh.
Two vehicles came up the Halloran road behind us. One of them held a nineteen-year-old girl with a Massachusetts number in her phone.
And a man called Nesbit, who I put into a rowan tree in Rimebrook and who told me, laughing, through a broken spine: You think this is Lucien? Lucien's been putting money into that locker for a year and getting names out of it. He doesn't run it. He's subscribed to it.
I go to Vespera at eight.
She's in the leather chair with a cup of tea she isn't drinking, and there's no one else in the vault, which never happens, and I understand that I've been expected.
"You look terrible," she says.
"It's been a fortnight."
"Mm. Sit down."
I sit down. That's how bad it is.
"Aurek Vane," I say, "is under a nail salon in Salem, Massachusetts, walled in with wards cut by five women of the Verity line in 1813, and somebody has been quietly removing the ward-timber from a house in Rimebrook for at least eleven years, and every feeder on the list in locker 114 is dead except the one I put on a bus. "
Vespera Thorne sets down her tea.
For the first time in the hundred and ninety years I have known her, she puts a hand over her mouth.
"Say the first part again," she says.
◆ ◆ ◆
The Matriarch of Ashmoor does not panic. She does something worse: she becomes organised.
By midnight there are two of ours on a plane to Boston. By the next night there's a surveyor's report on a single-storey building at 14 Peabody Street, Salem — built 1961, basement filled with rubble and concrete in 1974, no access. By the thirteenth she has bought it.
"Cash," she says. "Through three companies. It took nine hours and I had to speak to a man in Delaware, which I resent."
"Have you sent anyone down?"
"No. And I won't until I understand what's holding him, because if the answer is nothing but timber then the last thing I'm doing is putting a hole in a floor." She's standing, which she never does. "Cassius. The girl's book."
"It's in her possession."
"I want it."
"No."
The vault goes very quiet.
"I beg your pardon."
"You want it," I say, "and you can't have it, because it isn't a document about him, it's a document about her, and the moment it's in this building she stops being a person with a claim on her and becomes a person with an inventory.
" I hold her eye, which nobody does. "You'll get what's in it.
She'll tell you herself. She's more use to you willing than filed. "
Vespera looks at me for a long moment.
"You've changed," she says.
"Yes."
"I'm not certain I like it."
"No," I agree. "Neither am I."
She sits back down and picks up her tea, and something in the room comes down about a degree.
"Halloway hasn't been in this building since the Friday," she says.
"I know."
"He has not missed a Friday since 1863. He kept the minutes through two pandemics and a fire.
" She holds the cup near her face. "And I have been sitting here for four days working out what it means that the last thing he ever heard in this vault was a woman standing up and explaining the Long Hunger to eight people, and I have not enjoyed a single one of those four days. "
◆ ◆ ◆
The letters start coming back on the twelfth.
Vespera reads three of them out to me in the vault with her reading glasses on, which I have not seen since the eighties.
The Matriarch of Providence wants a joint delegation to Salem and a copy of everything.
The head of the Ferrow house — an old woman in Baltimore who has not spoken to Ashmoor in nine years except through an attaché — writes four sentences, of which the last is: if the Verity line is not extinct then a great many of us have been lied to about a great many things and I would like to know by whom.
The third is from a man called Sabine in Montreal, who was made in 1841 and who has never in his existence caused anybody any trouble.
His letter says: Is it true that it can be undone.
That's the whole letter. Seven words and a signature.
"That's the one," Vespera says, taking her glasses off.
"Yes."
"That is the one that ends us, Cassius, and it isn't from an enemy, it's from a perfectly pleasant man in Quebec who reconditions pianos.
" She folds it and puts it in the drawer.
"Because the honest answer is no, not for you, not ever — and there is not one of nine hundred people on this continent who will accept that on my word, and every single one of them will want to hear it from the only one who was ever strong enough to do it in the first place. "
"Which is Aurek."
"Which is Aurek," she agrees. "Halloway is not an aberration. Halloway is the first."
◆ ◆ ◆
Marisol Ocampo rings me at ten past midnight on the thirteenth and does not say hello.
"Her van's on Fennick Lane," she says. "Doors open. Phone on the seat. And Cassius — there's a drop cloth on the ground. Like the ones we use. Like somebody laid it down so there wouldn't be anything left on the road."
◆ ◆ ◆
Fennick Lane is a hundred and forty feet of wet tarmac with a wall at the end and no doors on it, which is why it's the only road in South Ashmoor I'd have picked.
Her van's at the wall with both doors open. Her phone's on the passenger seat with eleven per cent battery and a text from Mari that says where r u, nanay made too much rice.
And there's a drop cloth on the ground.
Marisol is right — it's one of theirs, blue polythene, corner-weighted, the kind they lay under a lift-out. Somebody spread it on the road before they took her so there'd be nothing to find.
That's not a hunter. A hunter doesn't care what's left on the road.
That is somebody who has been watching how she works.
"Cassius." Mari's voice is very small. "Can you feel her?"
And here it is. The thing I have been not looking at since the phone rang.
"Yes," I say.
"Then—"
"Northeast. Two, two and a half miles. Not moving.
" I have my hand flat on the roof of the van because I need something to be solid.
"And Marisol, she is frightened, and she has been frightened for about forty minutes, and I have been standing in my own house feeling it and telling myself she was having a bad night about me. "
Mari makes a sound.
"Two miles is four hundred buildings," I say. "It gets me a direction and nothing else. It's a compass, not a map. I can walk it down — an hour, maybe two, quartering — and in two hours it will be three in the morning and I will have three hours of dark left."
"Then start walking."
"No." I'm already moving. "First I'm going to find out who owns a Range Rover."
◆ ◆ ◆
It takes forty minutes and it takes Ravensdale, who has spent ninety years being a Ferrow attaché in a city that doesn't want him and who turns out to be extremely good at parking enforcement.
The car's in a residents' bay off Ivory Hill with a ticket already on it, because the residents' scheme on Ivory Hill is enforced with a religious intensity, and there is a photograph of the driver on the warden's body camera.
He's a man called Denny Pike, and he is Lucien Ivo's driver, and he has been for nine years.
I go through the door of the club on Vane Street at twenty past two and take it off the hinges, and there are about forty humans in there having a Thursday night, and I find Denny Pike behind the bar with his hands up before anyone has finished screaming.
"Where."
"Marlowe Terrace," he says instantly. "Number four. He's got a house, nobody knows about the house, he's never taken anyone to the house—"
"Is she alive?"
"She was at eleven o'clock, man, I swear on my kids—"
"Is there a threshold?"
Denny Pike, who is thirty-eight and has three children and has spent nine years driving a dead man to nightclubs, starts to laugh, and it's the laugh of somebody whose life has just ended in a way he hasn't caught up with.
"It's his house," he says. "Of course there's a threshold. Nobody gets in there. Nobody's ever been in there. He doesn't invite people, that's the whole—"
I'm already out the door.
Because he's right, and because it's twenty to three in the morning, and because sunrise is at six-eleven and Marlowe Terrace faces east.