C6 Behind the Pattern Books

The key turned in the lock of the side door as though someone had oiled it that morning.

I stood on the threshold for a moment with the cold of the lane at my back. Laurent House had been closed for three years, and I had half expected the air inside to taste of neglect. Instead it smelled of camphor and chalk and old wool, the way it always had, and the smell was so exactly my childhood that I had to put a hand on the doorframe.

The showroom floor was bare. The cutting tables were gone, the mannequins had been carted away, and the long mirrors my father used to watch customers from the back office had been stripped from the walls, leaving pale rectangles on the plaster. Light came in through the gaps between the boards in thin bars, and I walked through them slowly, past the place where I had once been scolded for sitting on a bolt of silk. I did not let myself stop. If I stopped, I would not get as far as the basement.

The stairs were stone, with the iron handrail my father used to polish himself on Sunday evenings. At the bottom a corridor ran back into the dark, lined with doors that had once held seasonal stock. Room four was at the far end, behind a steel door that stuck in its frame. I put my shoulder to it and it gave with a groan, and a smell of dry paper rolled out to meet me.

Shelves rose into the dark, packed with pattern books in muslin wraps, each labeled in my father's cramped hand with a season and a year. I used the torch on my phone, which the signal had abandoned the moment I came underground, and walked along them with one palm trailing the wood. Behind the pattern books, the note had said. I started at the left end of the third row and worked methodically, pulling out each bundle and setting it on the floor, until my arms ached and a fine grey dust had settled on my sleeves.

The panel at the back of the lowest shelf rang slightly hollow when I knocked. I would have missed it if I had not been listening for exactly that. It was held by two brass catches no bigger than coat buttons, stiff with age. When I forced them down, the board swung inward on a hinge, and behind it, wedged into a recess in the wall, sat a small steel strongbox painted green.

It took two attempts to fit the key. The lid came up with a sound like a held breath finally released.

Inside lay three things. A black ledger bound in cracked leather. A cassette tape in a plastic sleeve, labeled with a single date in my father's hand. And an envelope, cream and slightly yellowed, with my name written across it.

I sat down on the stone floor with my back against the shelves and opened the envelope first.

My dearest Vic, it began. If you are reading this, then I was right to be afraid, and I am sorry I was not brave enough to tell you while I could. I have signed papers I did not read as carefully as I should have. I have been lied to by people I trusted, and I do not yet know how many. The ledger records every meeting I could remember, with the names of everyone present. The tape is a recording I made the day I signed, because something in me knew I would need proof that I had not been alone in that room. Please do not give either to anyone who profits from my silence. Not anyone in a good suit, and not anyone who tells you it is safe to stop asking. You were always the cleverest person in this building, and I was too proud to tell you so. Your loving father.

I read it twice, and the second time the words went soft at the edges. My father had been dead for eight years, and I had only now been told he was proud of me. I let myself cry for a minute, quietly, with the letter flat against my knee, because the room was empty and there was nobody to be composed for. When it passed, I wiped my face on my sleeve, which left a grey smear on my cheek, and I picked up the ledger.

It was a bookkeeper's ledger, ruled in faint blue, and every page was filled in the same impatient slanting hand. The first entries were ordinary, supplier names and quarterly figures. Then the tone changed. Dates began to appear in the margin with notes beside them. Hargrove proposes restructuring, temporary, says bank will not wait. Cole to prepare documents. Asked to sign Thursday. Does not feel right. On the next line, in smaller writing, I have asked for the figures twice and been told they are being finalized.

The second page had a list. It was headed, in capitals, PRESENT, and beneath it ran a column of names, each with a time of arrival. G. Hargrove. R. Finch. M. Cole, with a small cross beside her name that I took to mean the signature. Two clerks I vaguely remembered from the bank. And at the bottom of the list, underlined three times, so hard that the pen had torn the paper, was a name I knew from every financial newspaper in the country.

E. Blackwood.

I sat with my finger beside it, not touching it, as though it might leave a mark.

Edmund Blackwood had founded Blackwood Holdings before I was born. I knew him the way everyone knew him, from a half dozen photographs of a heavy, silver haired man cutting ribbons and shaking hands with ministers. He had died four years ago, and his son had taken the chair. His son, who had stood outside this very building three days ago, studying the upper floors, and had told me he tried to buy it twice. His son, who had told me about Aurelian and Hargrove and Finch and a leak he had never traced. His son, who had not once mentioned that his father's name was written in my father's last ledger, underlined with enough force to tear the page.

I made myself go slowly. A name on a list of attendees was not a confession. Edmund Blackwood might have been a creditor, a lender, a witness, a man invited to look at the books. My father had underlined him, but a man who underlines a name may be afraid of someone or grateful to him. The sentence in the note rose up from the previous day, in handwriting I now knew was Margaret's. Ask him why he was there.

She had known. Margaret had put that line there on purpose, and she had said nothing across the cloister table, which meant she wanted me to read it first and ask afterward.

I turned back through the ledger and found two more mentions. Once, a month earlier, in the margin of a page about a bank meeting: E.B. offers bridge, declined, too expensive. And again, three days before my father's last entry, in the corner of a blank page, a single line. E.B. has seen the papers. Says do not sign. Hargrove says E.B. is a rival with an interest. Who do I believe?

There the entries stopped.

I closed the ledger and held it against my chest. I held the cassette, too, turning it over in its sleeve. There was no player in the archive, and there was no point asking one of Callum's people to find one, because the moment I did, I would be handing over the only proof my father had meant for me alone. I could take the ledger to Dr. Okafor. I could photograph every page. But the tape could not be copied by a phone, and the voice on it belonged to the day my father signed away his life's work, with all of them in the room, and I did not yet know what it would say about the man whose name I had just read.

I thought about the terms I had set in the car. Do not lie to me, not to protect me. Callum had accepted them with a care I had half believed. I thought, too, of what he would do if I laid the ledger on the table, how quickly and competently his people would fold it into their file, and how easily I would become one more name in the record of other people's investigations. I did not want to lose that room. I did not want to lose the six minutes in which my father had spoken to me alone.

So I decided on a compromise that was not entirely honest and not entirely dishonest. I photographed every page of the ledger, front and back. I slid the letter into the lining of my coat, where my mother used to keep her passport. I wrapped the cassette in my father's handkerchief from the strongbox and tucked it into the inside pocket of my bag, beneath my lipstick and a spare pair of gloves. The ledger I put back in the green box, the box behind the false panel, the panel behind the pattern books. Then I locked it all and kept the key.

On the stairs up, with my phone finally finding one bar of signal, I wrote a message to the number Callum had given me. I did not ask what he knew about my father. I did not say what I had found. I wrote only, Laurent House, side door on the lane, within the hour. I need to ask you something about your father, and I want to see your face when you answer.

I sent it before I could soften it. Then I sat down on the bottom step of the showroom stairs, with the bars of light moving slowly across the floor, and waited to find out whether the man I had chosen to trust would tell me the truth.