Tampons
Makeup
Clio took a moment to process what she’d read.
With Eleanor Bruton dead, too, possibly murdered because she had the embroidery in her possession, she was starting to think that the fragment of embroidery might be lethal. Unfortunately, there was no sign of it among the list of things recovered with Diana’s body. It would have been helpful if it were. She might have got some answers from it.
She replied to Izzy, telling her about Eleanor Bruton and the embroidery, as well as the connection between them and Diana Cornish’s place of work, and she attached a link to the British Museum fragment for context. She omitted explaining how she’d found out about Eleanor. She didn’t want to mention Lillian just yet. She asked if they’d discovered where Diana had been staying in London or been able to retrace any of her movements yet.
The reply was brief: “Thanks! No. I’ll let you know when we do.”
She looked up a number for Lady Arden’s home in Wiltshire. The butler was on leave for the day; she left a message, asking if he could call her back and let her know if he’d found the name of the person who had visited asking after the embroidery.
Clio thought about Eleanor Bruton. She remembered the overduelibrary book she’d seen in her office and picked up the phone to call Salisbury Library. They confirmed that there were ten books overdue on Eleanor Bruton’s account, all special orders. Eleanor was supposed to have returned them over a year ago. They read Clio a list of titles. They included books on medieval symbolism, the fabric trade in medieval Italy (Clio remembered that book), early clothing, and medieval bookbinding techniques.
She thought of Eleanor Bruton’s poem sewn into the curtains in Scotland and looked again at the list of items recovered from Diana’s bag.
“Sewing kit” stood out. Her eyes kept returning to it. It wasn’t something you’d expect to have in your bag unless you’d had a recent use for it, an occasion to sew.
Coincidence? Probably. But stranger things had happened.
She sent a reply to Izzy Adefope: “Any chance I can inspect the evidence?”
Chapter Ten
Sid
Sid said goodbye to Paul and watched as he walked away. The man looked broken.
He was unsure where to go. If he believed everything he’d heard, he had to consider the possibility that the cottage was under surveillance and his and Anya’s devices were, too.
He checked his phone. Anya had sent a slightly cryptic message:You wouldn’t believe how my day is going. I’ll call later.He wrote back:Same!He was dreading telling her what he’d learned. It felt more important than ever to do it in person.
The possibility of surveillance at the cottage was a problem he didn’t know how to solve, but he knew how to operate online without leaving a trace. He had a USB with the Tails operating system loaded on it.
He went back to the cottage, changed out of his wet clothes, and decided he didn’t feel like being there at all. Even if he could evade any online monitoring, the idea that he might be being watched was too creepy. He grabbed his laptop and the USB. They’d work just as well anywhere else. In Oxford he could have gone to a cybercafé, but he knew there were none in St. Andrews, so he walked back to the computer science department, deep in his head.
The lab was opposite the Jack Cole building, housed in a low, bunker-like structure on a square plan, constructed from brown brick punctuated with tall, tinted windows, through which it was just possible to glimpse rows of desks and computers.
He used his new pass to get inside and settled down in a discreet corner.
Once he’d inserted the USB into his laptop, and booted into Tails, his fingers hovered over the keyboard. It was important to be smart and methodical about this. He decided on the question he wanted to answer first: What was the Institute hiding? He started by reminding himself what theywereletting people see online.
From their website he noted the full names of the staff members and their specialties. He ran searches for every name, and it was just as Anya and his neighbor had said: there wasn’t much to find.
Two scholarly articles by Karen Lynch came up, and a photograph of Diana Cornish at a society event seven years prior. He tried searching archived pages, just as he’d done for Min, but got nothing. If these women had been scrubbed from the internet, someone had done a better job for them than they had for Min.
He mustn’t forget Zofia. He needed to get her surname from Paul, and he should probably do that in person. For now, he made do with searching for “Zofia missing Scotland,” but nothing came up.
Time to change tack. He returned to the Institute’s website, screenshotted headshots of the staff, then ran a reverse image search on the picture of Sarabeth Schilders.
She appeared on a website linked to Amsterdam University, promoting a conference for academics involved in finance. It had taken place in 2003. Sarabeth was listed as a professor of economics. The Institute’s website said her specialty was Renaissance women. So she’d had two decades to make a career change, from finance to medieval history. It was a hell of a coincidence that she and Min had both made such radical career moves and both ended up with the same specialty and working at the same place.
He did the same search for Giulia Orlando. Her photograph appeared embedded in an article about young cryptocurrency dealers. Giulia was in the background of a picture that had been, according to its caption, shot at a party on a private Caribbean island. She was standing behind a famous model and looked almost unrecognizable. Her hair was ironed straight and worn long and loose. She wore the skimpiest of dresses. Her face was flushed and painted with flowers, which framed her eyes and had tendrils that curled across her temples, circling small, sparkling jeweled dots. She couldn’t have looked more different from the Giulia he’d met, who dressed conservatively and had given no hint that she was hosting this party animal.
He read the article, noting that it was written in 2018. The “hedonism”-themed party was an exclusive event for cryptocurrency workers and influencers. The article dropped the names of some high-profile celebrity attendees and described a sumptuous menu involving enormous amounts of fresh seafood and cocktails that had been specially created to match. Sid could only imagine the industrial levels of drug-taking going on off camera. This was a universe far removed from the Institute and from the Giulia he’d met.
He wondered why these images hadn’t been scrubbed. Had someone left them online on purpose? If not, it was a hell of an oversight.
