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PROLOGUE
Nobody knows. (But…)
Nobody will find out. (They can’t. They won’t.)
Nobody can ever find out. (If they do, if they know, if they tell…)
Nobody will tell. It’s all in the past, buried, six feet under and rotting away. Nobody knows.
But what if someone looks?
ONE
November 1905
Jeremy Kite is a murderer.
Jem stared at the words. They sat stark and accusatory, too brutal for the typewritten letters that made them, or the thin cheap paper that bore them. The ink was a little faded, as though the typewriter’s ribbon was almost worn out. There was no date, no address, no signature, nothing but three lines of text.
Jeremy Kite is a murderer.
He killed Toby Feynsham.
Ask him why.
Jem turned the paper over, as if there might be more on the back. It rattled slightly, betraying the tremor of his hands. He turned it back again to the poisonous words, and looked up at MrLeighton, who sat across the mahogany acreage of desk, regarding him with disfavour.
‘I’m not.’ Jem put the letter carefully on the desk, facing MrLeighton. He lined up the top parallel to the wood’s edge, adjusting it with microscopic movements to be quite, quite straight. ‘A murderer, I mean. I didn’t kill Toby Feynsham.’
‘I did not ask you if you did,’ MrLeighton observed.
You handed me the letter rather than throwing it away. What was that meant to mean?
‘No, sir,’ Jem said aloud. ‘But I’m answering the question anyway.’
MrLeighton tapped his fingers to his lips. He wore a wide moustache, its ends twirled and pointed with wax that had stained the hairs a little yellow over the years. Most of the clerks in the Registrar-General’s Bureau at Somerset House wore similar facial adornments. Jem had followed that fashion for a couple of years, but he’d shaved clean as something to do in one of the endless weeks last summer and hadn’t been able to stomach growing it back. He found himself rubbing his naked top lip with a finger now.
MrLeighton exhaled. ‘You must see, Kite, that this is a most peculiar communication.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘It is hardly the kind of death notice with which we deal.’
‘No, sir.’ Jem could keep this up all day, the bland answers, the blank stare. He’d had practice. And if MrLeighton wanted to know something, then he could damned well ask, rather than waiting for Jem to offer it.
Jem had no doubt he would ask. They always did.
His superior frowned. ‘Why would anybody write this? Why would you be linked to the Feynsham case?’
‘I was at Oxford with him, sir.’
MrLeighton’s brows drew together. ‘I don’t think I was aware you were an Oxford man?’
‘I didn’t take a degree.’ Jem made himself meet the man’s eyes. Tempting though it was to simply rise, turn and walk away, he must not. He’d lose this post and then he’d have to summon up the energy to find another. He could sit through this. ‘I was one of Toby’s closest friends. If you know the case, you’ll have heard?—’
‘You?’ There was audible incredulity in MrLeighton’s voice. ‘Youwere one of—what was it they were called—the Seven Wonders?’
‘I took a First in Mods, sir. First-year exams,’ he added, because MrLeighton was not an Oxford man. ‘With a scholarship. I coxed for the college in Eights Week of ninety-four.’
