CHAPTER 8 #3
“Sometimes. Conservation assistant.”
“Officially.”
Romy looked at him.
He ignored her.
Anika opened the biscuit tin.
Custard creams.
Leo stared.
“No.”
Anika looked puzzled.
“What?”
“Nothing. Bad history.”
Romy took one.
The biscuit snapped cleanly.
“Structural improvement.”
Leo groaned.
Anika watched them.
“How long have you worked together?”
“Two days officially,” Leo said.
“Feels longer,” Romy added.
“Much longer,” Ellis said.
For a few minutes, the pantry became an ordinary workplace kitchen.
Tea.
Biscuits.
A leaking tap.
Leo told Anika about a wallpaper sample containing three generations of repair paste.
Anika countered with a manor-house owner who had insisted mould staining was historic patina.
Romy laughed because the stories belonged to a world she understood.
Materials misidentified.
Repairs misunderstood.
Clients confidently wrong.
Problems solved by looking carefully enough.
Then Anika said, “That is why I don’t like theories before samples.”
Romy looked at her.
“People see the person first,” Anika continued. “Then they make the material agree.”
Ellis said, “Sometimes people matter.”
“Of course. But fibres do not know who you dislike.”
Romy felt the sentence settle.
She liked Anika for the same reason she had begun liking Ellis, though the comparison irritated her.
Neither offered comfort by agreeing.
They followed what could be shown.
“So if the fibres resemble Marcus’s felt,” Romy said, “that matters only after comparison.”
“Yes.”
“If the particulate looks like recent combustion residue, that matters only after analysis.”
“Yes.”
“If both connect to his objects?”
“Then we ask who had possession, access, opportunity, and what happened to the materials after they left his hands.”
Romy nodded.
No clever leap.
Material first.
Person later.
She could work with that.
They returned upstairs shortly after noon.
Anika wanted one more examination of the plate-warmer before the scene team packaged it for laboratory transfer.
This time she focused on the pierced side openings.
Inside one curve, she found a tiny black fragment lodged against the brass.
She collected it.
Then another.
Separate containers.
Romy watched.
“Charcoal?”
Anika looked at her.
“Visually compatible with charred material.”
Ellis nodded approvingly.
Romy said, “You two deserve each other.”
Anika ignored that.
“The laboratory can determine more.”
She checked the interior again.
“Surface distribution is the interesting part.”
“Why?”
“The newer particulate is concentrated low inside the vessel and around airflow openings.”
Ellis said, “Meaning something burned inside.”
Anika gave him a look.
“You see? Detectives leap too.”
He accepted the correction.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the distribution is consistent with a recent internal source. I did not say what source or how it was used.”
Romy glanced toward the silk panel.
The grille packed close.
Burgundy fibres compressed at the backing.
An object containing fresh dark residue beside the desk.
A room with no operating combustion source.
The shape of a method was beginning to appear.
The killer was not.
Marcus owned the warmer.
Marcus owned distinctive burgundy felt.
Marcus had carried both toward the service corridor.
Marcus had also been publicly visible by 7:05.
Sebastian was demonstrably alive at 7:03.
If Marcus had created the conditions beforehand, his speech was not an alibi to the setup.
It was only an alibi to standing beside Sebastian when he collapsed.
That distinction mattered.
Ellis looked at her.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That is never true.”
“I’m respecting material evidence.”
Anika closed a sample vial.
“Excellent. It’s contagious.”
Adrian had remained near the door through most of the final examination.
Now he said, “If the building didn’t cause this, I want that recorded.”
“It will be,” Ellis said.
“The committee is already acting like operations failed.”
“Your lie about the corridor did not help.”
“I know.”
Romy looked at Adrian.
For the first time since Sebastian’s death, he seemed less like the engineer of the method and more like what he had claimed to be.
A man who had done one foolish, suspicious thing during a night when something far worse happened nearby.
That did not clear him.
But the building was no longer pointing toward him.
The movable objects were pointing elsewhere.
The scene team began preparing the warmer for removal.
Anika packed her swabs, fibre samples, photographs, and notes with precise care.
Romy stood beside her.
“You’ll compare the fibres?”
“Yes.”
“With Marcus’s felt?”
“If police obtain a reference sample.”
Ellis said, “We will.”
“And the residue?”
“Microscopy first. Then composition work as needed.”
“How fast?”
Anika looked at Romy.
“Faster if nobody asks me that again.”
Leo laughed from the doorway.
Romy smiled.
“Fair.”
Anika latched the hard case.
Then she looked once more toward the brass plate-warmer.
The humor left her face.
Not replaced by alarm.
By professional certainty.
She rested one hand on the case.
“Somebody burned something in that plate-warmer very recently.”