Mav is the only one who's tall enough to reach the top of the bookcase. He feels around for a few seconds and produces a large, dusty key.
We make sure no one's watching us, and we open the door to go into John’s office.
The books on the shelves are all old, clearly never opened or read by John. They’re all just here for show, part of the decoration that he had imported from some castle, Shade told me.
The three guys are searching the walls. I look out at the window that overlooks the garden for a moment before I turn around and take stock of the desk. There's not much on top. The paperwork that I find and leaf through are just general household expenses that Stevens needs a signature for.
The middle top drawer is mostly pens and sticky notes with a couple of envelope openers that look like daggers. All the rest of the drawers are unlocked and hold nothing of interest, except for the one at the very bottom.
'There's a drawer that's locked here,' I say to the guys who are still looking through the shelves.
Blake comes over immediately, producing a small case with all of his tools inside. He unzips it and takes a couple of the thinnest ones out. Kneeling down, he quickly picks the lock. I hear the click, and the drawer opens.
Inside are several folders, which we get out and spread over the desk.
'Here,' I say, pulling one out of the pile. 'Fussell & Meyer. Is that the lawyer you were talking about?'
Shade nods. ‘Yeah, that’s them.’
I open the file, but it's empty and I let out a noise of annoyance. ‘Where else could he have put everything?’ I mutter, drawing a blank.
‘I don’t know,’ Shade answers. ‘As far as I know, everything should be in here. Pop didn’t keep papers anywhere else.’
Mav flicks through the other folders. ‘There’s nothing in the rest of these that’s important, at least not to us.’
‘Wait. What’s this?’ Blake asks, bending over the drawer, reaching back, deep into its depths.
He comes back up with a ripped and rumpled piece of paper that looks like it got stuck and lost at the bottom. It has the lawyer’s name on it.
He puts it in his pocket without looking at it. ‘Let’s go. The longer we’re in here, the more chance someone will see us, and I, for one, don’t know how I’d explain why we’re rifling through a dead rich guy’s office.’ He glances at Shade. ‘No offence.’
Shade frowns. ‘None taken,’ he mutters dryly.
We leave the office, making sure there's no one lurking in the hallway. I re-lock the door, and Mav puts the key back on the tall shelf outside. I say a quick goodbye to Stevens, who tells me again that he’s glad I’m alright. Then we leave my late stepfather's estate.
On the way back to Richmond, Blake pulls out the scrap of paper that he found in the drawer and stares at it.
‘Well?’ I ask. ‘Is there anything useful on it?’
‘It says your name,’ he mutters, and I snatch it from his fingers.
I peer down at it and, right there, amongst the legal phrases I don’t understand, it says, ‘Marguerite Evans’.
‘What could it be about?’ I mutter to myself.
Mav takes it from my hand and stares at it. ‘It says ‘Winters’ too.’
‘So, it’s something to do with my mom, maybe?’ I ask dubiously.
No one answers, but it’s clear we’re all annoyed that we didn’t find more in John’soffice.
We get back to Sauvage's hotel and find Lu waiting in the lobby.
She rushes to me with a gleeful shriek.
'Where were you?' she practically snarls in my face, shaking my shoulders. 'I was so fuckingworried.'
My teeth rattling, I extricate myself from my bestie’s grip and step back. 'I’m sorry you were worried. I was sort of kidnapped and taken back to England,’ I whisper, conscious of the strangers around us.
