“The more pressure they put on me to find the embroidery, the more I started to notice that nothing there was what it seemed like.Not everyone there was working on manuscripts. They were doing other things that they were secretive about. Then I started to have trouble from one of my colleagues’ husbands, a guy called Paul. It was nice at first to connect with him because I was lonely when I arrived, but it became scary. He got obsessed with me, sent me lots of notes, always trying to talk to me if I saw him in the street, which was often, because St. Andrews is a very small place. He told me he believed we were soulmates, but I hardly knew him. He had even followed me on the day I decided to disappear. It was frightening, and he nearly ruined everything.”
“Did you ever confront him?”
“No. I lived alone. I tried not to engage with him. If I’d stayed longer, I would have reported him, because it was getting scary. I had started to keep a record of everything he did.”
It didn’t wholly explain why Zofia had left in such a dramatic way. Clio pressed her on it.
“A new hire started this time last year. September 2023. A woman called Minxu Peng. After she’d been there a little while she confided in me what I already suspected: that some of the women in the department were not really academics. She said they were involved in stuff that seemed dodgy. They hired her to scrub the internet and set up secure networks for them, or something like that. I didn’t really understand what she told me, I’m not an IT person, but it validated what I was already suspecting, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. Minxu was afraid of them, too. She told me she was planning to leave as soon as the academic year was over. She wanted to go home to her family. She missed them. I hope she managed to do that. Do you know?”
“I don’t,” Clio said. “But I’ll look into it.”
She paused to look back over her notes. She circled the words “embroidery” and “expert on textiles.”
“Would you mind taking a look at something if I send it to you?” she asked.
Olivia
Olivia Macdonald’s phone was ringing. There weren’t many people she dropped everything for, only her husband, Judge Henry Macdonald, or another senior member of the Order of St. Katherine. It was the latter calling.
She stepped out of the church where she’d been helping to arrange displays of fresh produce for the harvest festival service and took the call in her Range Rover. It was a crisp, fresh morning, the parking lot and graveyard littered with the first fallen leaves, still bright and pretty, a light mist lingering in the folds of the valley.
Olivia appreciated none of it the way she usually would. She was stressed. The Order of St. Katherine was facing an unprecedented crisis. Information from the nurse, Viv, who they’d placed with Rose Brown had revealed a hole in their intelligence gathering and created a new set of problems.
Her contact didn’t bother with niceties: “Diana Cornish has been murdered.”
Heavens, Olivia thought. She was profoundly shocked. She hadn’t seen that coming. There had been so many bodies. Eleanor Bruton picked off by the Larks and possibly the academic from China, too. Then there were the problematic individuals the Kats had disposed of themselves. How many more?
“Who did it?” Olivia asked. Nobody in the Katherinite Order had given the command, so far as she knew, and it was the sort of decision she would expect to be involved in. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end as the caller described how and where Diana had been found. “They mean it to look as though we’ve done it.”
“I agree,” Olivia said. She had the horrible sense that everything was slipping through their fingers.
Through the Range Rover’s windshield Olivia’s eyes tracked a woman walking past hand in hand with her child, who held the sweetest little basket of apples for the church display, but her mindwas miles away, already thinking about what it would take to mop this mess up—it absolutely had to be kept out of the press because of the St. Katherine link—and what it meant. “It’s a provocation,” she said. “They’re escalating. Why?”
“If Viv’s information is correct, and the Larks have hired Anya to study her father’s collection, it could mean that some of the manuscripts survived the fire at his library. Otherwise, why take her up to Scotland and have her work in such secrecy?”
“I agree,” Olivia said, through gritted teeth. If true, it was painful to admit that they hadn’t known or even guessed at this until now. They should have. It would have changed everything. Now they were vulnerable, and the Larks were ahead of the game.
She tried to focus on the issue at hand. “Is the supposition that they killed Diana in this way to divert our attention while Anya closes in on the prize?”
“Maybe. I’m confident that we can manage the fallout from Diana’s death so it doesn’t touch us. But what we really have to think about is whether this means that the Larks are close to findingThe Book of Wonder. If some of those books survived the fire, they may have been able to unite the embroidery with whatever we suspect Rose Brown hid in Magnus Beaufort’s collection.”
“I’m not sure we suspect any longer,” Olivia said. “I think weknow.” There was silence on the other end of the line. She wasn’t the only person finding this painful. “We were so close to getting toThe Book of Wonder, and now we have nothing,” she said.
“Our information wasn’t good enough. But we can’t dwell on it.”
“No,” Olivia said quietly. “We can’t.” Her mind was racing, seeking solutions. “We can still use Rose Brown,” she said. “Just differently.”
“Indeed, and I want to talk about that, but before we do, there’s something else you need to know. Before she died, Diana Cornish and Charlotte Craven met with Bridget Farley, at Commerz Credit in London. Now, if Bridget’s involved, it likely means they’re readyto put funding in place for their foundation, which indicates that things are happening much faster than we anticipated. Their time scale has shrunk. To me it’s another sign that Anya Brown may be close to a breakthrough on finding the book and they think they’re going to cash in.”
“How do you know this? Is one of ours married to a Commerz Credit banker?” It was nice to know that their intelligence gathering was effective in some areas at least.
“Yes, but we assumed the Larks would be alert to that connection,” her colleague said. “So we placed some catering and reception staff there. A coffee lady brought us this information.”
“Ha,” Olivia said. For all their work for women’s rights, the Larks’ Achilles’ heel was social prejudice. Laughable, really, but she was in no mood for levity. Her thoughts were sharpening into strategy. It was time to play their trump card.
“We must tell Viv to abduct Rose Brown now,” she said. “It’s time to exert some leverage over Anya.” A controlled excitement was building in her. Was it too much to imagine that kidnapping Rose could allow them to flip Anya?
“That’s exactly what I thought. Good. I’ll give the order.”
