The house smelled of dust and bergamot and something underneath both that Iris recognized immediately: old paper. Thousands of books will produce that smell — a sweet, faintly vanilla decomposition of lignin and cellulose, the slow exhalation of words returning to wood pulp.
She loved that smell. She would have bottled it if she could.
"Ms. Castellan?" The solicitor was a thin man named Probert who moved through Edmund Holloway's house as though afraid of touching anything. "The library is through here."
The library was magnificent. Floor to ceiling on three walls, with a rolling ladder and a mezzanine reached by a spiral staircase of wrought iron. Iris estimated eight to ten thousand volumes at a glance, with concentration in English literature, 1800 to 1960. Her practiced eye caught several spines worth investigating — a possible first-state "Bleak House" in the original parts, what looked like a signed Waugh, and an entire shelf of Brontë editions that made her fingers itch.
"The deceased's will specifies a full appraisal for potential sale," Probert said. "He had no family."
"How did he die?"
"Fell down the stairs. Three weeks ago. Eighty-seven years old."
Iris nodded, already pulling on her cotton gloves. She was reaching for the Dickens when Probert cleared his throat.
"There is one other matter. The, ah, locked room."
"Locked room?"
Probert led her down a hallway lined with framed letters — Iris caught autographs from Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and someone she couldn't identify — to a door reinforced with a steel plate and three deadbolts.
"The police have been and gone," Probert said. "They found nothing criminal. But the circumstances were... unusual."
He unlocked the door. Inside was a small room, perhaps ten feet by twelve, containing a single desk, a banker's lamp, and a manuscript box. The walls were bare plaster, painted white. There were no windows.
"They found Clara Voss here," Probert said. "Holloway's research assistant. Dead. Three days after Holloway himself died."
"Who found her?"
"The cleaning woman. The door was locked from the inside — all three deadbolts engaged. There's no other entrance. The police said heart attack, but..." He trailed off.
Iris looked at the manuscript box on the desk. It was archival quality, acid-free, the kind used for storing valuable documents.
"May I?"
Probert nodded.
She opened the box. Inside, on cream-colored cotton rag paper, lay a manuscript written in blue-black ink in a hand she recognized instantly. She had studied that handwriting for her master's thesis. She knew its loops and crosses the way a musician knows a composer's phrasing.
"This is Daphne du Maurier's handwriting," Iris said.
"Yes. That's what Ms. Voss told Mr. Holloway's solicitor before she died. She called it the discovery of a lifetime."
Iris looked at the first page. The title was "The Whispering Gallery." Below it, in du Maurier's unmistakable script: "Chapter One."
She turned the page and began to read.
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