Chapter 4: What Rowan Found

The archive room smelled of paper and decades. Mr. Rennie produced the key — the same key, he explained, that Lord Hirst had held on the night of the house party. It had been in the solicitor's keeping since the estate entered probate. All seven of them went in. There was some safety in numbers, Yuna thought, though what exactly they needed safety from wasn't yet clear. The room was floor-to-ceiling shelves, each shelf meticulously labelled in Lord Hirst's angular hand. Business records, personal correspondence, property documents going back two centuries. And in the far corner, behind a shelf that had clearly been moved and replaced — the scratches on the floor were unmistakable — a section labelled simply: PRIVATE. The PRIVATE section contained forty years of correspondence between Lord Hirst and three other men. Yuna recognized two of the names from the dossier's guest list. The third was a name she recognized from somewhere else — public life, she thought, though she couldn't place it precisely. Bea could. "He was a senior partner at an infrastructure firm. He died in 2019. Heart attack while sailing." She pulled out a folder. "And the other two guests who died after the house party — one in a climbing accident in 2001, one in a house fire in 2008." "Three men who attended the 1984 house party, all dead," Hamish said. "All dead after this correspondence began," Bea corrected. "These letters start in 1985. The year after Rowan disappeared." Penny Osei, who had been reading quietly in the corner, looked up. "They're writing about a payment," she said. "Regular payments. Quarterly. To an account I can't identify from the number. For — they call it 'the arrangement.'" Yuna thought about Rowan MacPhee, twenty-six years old, coming back to this room at night because she'd found something she needed to look at again. She thought about what happened to researchers who found the wrong thing. "Rowan is in this archive," Yuna said. It was a guess, but she felt it land correctly. "Not metaphorically. There's documentation she left. Hidden. Because she knew she might not get out." The room was absolutely still. "Then we find it," Bea said. "That's what we're here for." They started searching.