The manuscript was extraordinary.
Iris spent four hours in the locked room reading it, forgetting lunch, forgetting Probert, forgetting the dead woman who had been found in this same chair. "The Whispering Gallery" was set in Cornwall — of course it was — in a crumbling estate perched above the sea, and it concerned a young widow who discovers that her dead husband's study contains a hidden door leading to a series of underground chambers.
It read like du Maurier. Not an imitation — Iris had seen plenty of those — but the genuine article. The prose had that particular quality du Maurier achieved in her best work: a surface of elegant restraint beneath which something wild and dark moved like a current. The imagery was precise. The dialogue was period-perfect. The psychological tension ratcheted with a clockmaker's patience.
But the paper was wrong.
Iris knew paper the way a sommelier knows wine. This was modern cotton rag, machine-made, probably manufactured within the last five years. She could tell by the fiber distribution, the calendering, the way it held the ink. Du Maurier had died in 1989. This paper hadn't existed when she was alive.
And the ink. Iris held the first page up to the banker's lamp. Iron gall ink, traditional for fountain pens, but with a slight purple undertone that suggested a modern formulation — probably Diamine or Rohrer & Klingner. The oxidation pattern was consistent with writing done within the last two years.
Someone had written 412 pages in perfect imitation of Daphne du Maurier's handwriting, in prose that matched her style with uncanny fidelity, on brand-new paper with brand-new ink. It was the finest forgery Iris had ever seen.
Or it was something else entirely.
She found the first clue in Holloway's study, buried in a filing cabinet between tax returns and dental records. A leather-bound notebook, small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, containing dates, initials, and cryptic references.
"Meeting of the Scribes — 14 March 2024 — A.R. presented Draft 3 of the 'Missing Hemingway.' Consensus: insufficient interiority. The old man would not have used semicolons in interior monologue after 1940."
The Scribes. Iris turned pages, finding entries spanning decades.
"17 June 1998 — E.H. completed the Austen. 'Sanditon' continuation, 89,000 words. J.P. says the free indirect discourse is flawless. Ready for the archive."
"3 November 2011 — Debate: can the Brontë project proceed without access to the Heger letters? C.V. argues the Brussels period is essential for tonal calibration."
C.V. Clara Voss. The dead woman.
Iris sat back in Holloway's desk chair and tried to understand what she was looking at. A secret society of literary forgers who didn't sell their work — who created, as far as she could tell, for the pure intellectual exercise of it. They studied dead authors with scientific rigor, internalizing their styles until they could produce new work indistinguishable from the original.
It was brilliant. It was insane. And someone, apparently, was willing to kill for it.
She photographed every page of the notebook, then called the one person she trusted to help her make sense of it: Detective Sergeant Abeo Okonkwo of the Metropolitan Police, her ex-husband, who owed her a favor the size of a continent.
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