Chapter 5: What Rowan Left

The hidden cache was in the lining of a chair. Not the archive — they'd spent an entire afternoon on the archive and found the correspondence but not the thing Bea had intuited Rowan must have left. It was Penny who found it, returning to the drawing room for a forgotten cardigan and noticing that one of the armchairs had an unusual stiffness at the back, an irregularity that a furniture person would catch and others would miss. Penny had, it emerged, refinished furniture as a hobby for thirty years. The lining concealed a flat oilskin packet — smaller than the one in the archive, but more carefully sealed. Inside: twelve pages of handwritten notes, dated across a three-week period in July 1984, in a hand that Dr. Yuna Park identified from the estate's employment records as Rowan MacPhee's. They gathered around the dining room table while Yuna read aloud. Rowan had been cataloguing the estate's historical papers when she'd found a set of documents misfiled under what appeared to be routine estate correspondence: the records of a business transaction from 1979. A substantial transaction — the sale of mineral extraction rights to a portion of land that was legally designated as protected. The protection was not public. It was private — a heritage preservation covenant registered in 1932 that obligated the estate and, by extension, any subsequent sale or development of its holdings, to maintain the land in its natural state. Lord Hirst had inherited the estate along with the covenant. The 1979 sale had violated the covenant. The violation was documented in the papers Rowan had found. The profit from the sale had been distributed among four parties, all of them named. "She found evidence of fraud," Douglas said. "She found evidence of something worse," Yuna said. "Look at the date of the sale. 1979. Look at the party names." She turned the page toward them. "Three of these names appear in the correspondence from the archive. They were at the 1984 house party. And one of them was Lord Hirst himself." "He sold the rights to himself?" Hamish said. "To a company he controlled through two intermediary structures." Yuna looked at the notes. "Rowan had found that out. She'd traced the corporate structure. And then she'd come back to the archive at night to photograph the original documents." Bea looked at the notes quietly. "She didn't disappear," she said. "She was silenced. And someone locked the archive and pretended she'd simply left." The room was very still. "There are people still alive who were in this house in 1984," Westfield said. "Yes," Yuna said. "That's why we're all here. One of them is in this room right now."