Chapter 12: The Address

The address the chess player had given him was in London. Specifically, in the Farquhar townhouse — the property that had passed to Mrs. Farquhar's nephew upon her death and that was, according to the death records, currently empty pending estate proceedings. The 'obvious to the right person' hiding place, Crane had concluded after two days of consideration, was the workshop in the townhouse's basement. The place where she had built the chess player. The place where a person who understood automata would look first. He returned to London. The nephew had not yet secured the property; the estate proceedings were in their early stages. Crane presented himself to the solicitors managing the estate as an independent assessor engaged to catalog the mechanical contents — a plausible credential, backed by a letter from a Royal Institution contact who owed Crane a favor. The workshop was extraordinary. Three large worktables, each occupied by a different project at various stages of completion. Tools organized with the precision of someone who had been working in this space for decades. And on the central table, in pieces that were clearly deliberate rather than accidental, a mechanism Crane recognized as the chassis of a second chess player — this one's instruction set unfinished, waiting for whoever came next. The documents were in the chess player's chest cavity. Not in the completed one — in this one. In the space where the instruction mechanism would eventually go. Three sealed envelopes, labeled in Mrs. Farquhar's handwriting: VALUATION, CONSORTIUM, MINUTES. Crane opened each carefully. The evidence was comprehensive, current, and legally sufficient. He assembled it on the worktable and felt, for a moment, the presence of a mind that had known it would not be there to present what it had built.