Chapter 9: Ghosts in the Record

Asha was at her desk.

She had been, by the look of it, working continuously since they had left her — the pile of oilcloth-wrapped boxes on her desk had grown by perhaps half a dozen, each unwrapped, each opened, each in some stage of consultation. She did not look up when they entered. She held up a hand. They stopped at the threshold and waited, until she finished a line in her ledger, set down her pen, and looked up.

“Warden. Mr Marsh.”

“Asha. Three more questions, please.”

“Three more answers, then. If they exist.”

Petris, who had presumably had this kind of conversation with her many times before, did not waste the courtesy of an introduction. He laid out the new shape of the investigation in plain language: that the murder had not, in fact, been about a debt; that Maren Toll had been researching arrivals from his own period for a reason; that the reason was now believed to be — believed, on grounds that Petris did not, in this telling, defend — a piece of knowledge Toll had been carrying since before he came across to this train; that the killer had wanted that knowledge buried; and that they, Petris and Elliot, had ninety-something minutes to find what Maren Toll had found, or to locate, in his absence, the person to whom he had told it.

Asha listened. She did not, this time, do anything that wasn’t listening.

“You want,” she said, “to know what survives.”

“What survives, and what was around it.”

“And the second question?”

“Whom did Maren Toll see, in this room or near it, in the past three weeks. Whom did he look up. Whose records did he request. And the third —” Petris paused. “Whether there are records, anywhere on this train, that connect Maren Toll to a person you would not, on first instinct, think of as one of his colleagues. A person outside the administrative carriage.”

Asha sat very still for a moment.

“You are looking for a confidant,” she said.

“We are.”

“Not Mr Shen. Not Mr Vell.”

“Someone Mr Toll had reason to engage — quietly, over a period of years — without the engagement being suspicious in the records of either party.”

“Yes.”

She considered.

“That is a hard request, Warden. Engagements that are not suspicious do not, by their nature, leave traces. Receipts, perhaps. Small administrative favours. The kind of paperwork that goes unremarked. May I —”

“Yes.”

“May I speak first about what survives. The cuts in the arrivals ledger have removed forty pages. They have not, however, removed everything. A ledger of that period exists in three places, not one. The arrivals ledger itself, here, with its pages now cut. A summary index in the office of the green section’s residential warden — that is, you, Warden — though my recollection is that you do not keep summaries from before your tenure.”

“I do not.”

“No. The third copy is —” She paused. “An obscure place. The kitchens.”

Elliot looked up.

“The kitchens?” he said.

“A peculiarity of the Calloway. New arrivals’ first meals are tracked by the kitchen ledger. It was set up, several Conductors back, as a way of recording dietary peculiarities — what people would and would not eat, who needed care, who was unwell. The kitchen ledger has, for forty years, been kept in parallel with the arrivals ledger. The kitchen ledger is — by its nature — uninteresting to anyone who does not work in the kitchens. It has, to my knowledge, never been requested by an investigator or a senior administrator. It is consulted by the chief baker and by no one else.”

“The chief baker,” Petris said.

“The chief baker, yes. Currently, for the past nine years, a woman named Mette.”

The room was, for one second, very quiet.

Petris turned his head, slightly, toward Elliot. Elliot did not, in the same second, turn his.

“And Mr Toll,” Petris said, “did he, by your records, have any relationship with Mette.”

Asha looked down at her papers. She looked through them for perhaps thirty seconds. She turned over three pages and stopped at a fourth.

“Three years ago,” she said, “Mr Toll filed, on Mette’s behalf, an extension of her bread-vendor licence in the gold market. The licence was due. It had not, per protocol, expired — the clerk who would normally have processed the renewal had been ill, and the renewal had fallen behind. Mr Toll filed it under his initials, on a Tuesday. The form is attached. It was, by all available logic, a small favour. It is the only piece of paperwork I can find that mentions both their names.”

“One piece in seven years.”

“Asha.”

“Yes, Warden.”

“That is all the cooperation you have given me today. May I ask one more.”

“You may.”

“In the past three weeks, on Mr Toll’s three rest-day visits to this archive, did he, at any point, look at the kitchen ledger?”

She looked up at him. Her eyes — careful, dark — held his.

“No,” she said. “He did not. He did not need to. He had told me, in passing, on his third visit, that there was one record on this train he had decided not to disturb until the day he had finished disturbing all the others. He did not name the record. I assumed — and I was, I admit, in error in assuming — that the record was a personal one, possibly a will, possibly a letter. I see now that I was mistaken.”

“The kitchen ledger.”

“Which is, for the past nine years —”

“In Mette’s keeping, yes.”

Petris nodded. He did it slowly. He drew on the desk, with one finger, a small invisible diagram — a square, and beneath it, a circle, and a line connecting them. He looked at the diagram. He erased it with the same finger, against the desk’s grain.

“Mr Marsh,” he said. “We will go to the gold market. We will not go in haste. We will go the way two men go to a market when they have been thinking about buying bread.”

“Yes.”

“Asha.”

“Yes, Warden.”

“If we do not return, the note in my coat pocket goes to Tarn at the bar. He knows the routing.”

“I will, Warden, hope for your return.”

“Thank you. I will, Asha, hope for it also.”

He stood. Elliot stood. They left.

In the corridor, Petris said: “I had not thought of the kitchens.”

“Nor had I.”

“A small, established arrangement. The kind of quiet thing that runs, on a train, on a track no one inspects.”

“Yes.”

“Mette will be at her counter.”

“And she will have known, since first bell, that Maren Toll is dead.”

“Yes.”

They walked.