Isabel gave her the name in the car, forty minutes outside Edinburgh, with the rain beginning properly and Callum driving and not looking at either of them.
The name was Aurelia Vass. Latvian, sixty-three years old, currently resident in Edinburgh under a work visa attached to a cultural consultancy that had no clients Nadia could immediately trace. Before Edinburgh: Riga, Amsterdam, a three-year period in Vienna that Isabel noted without elaborating on. Before that — and here Isabel paused, as if deciding how much of the shape to give at once — a family.
The Vass family had owned the navigational atlas. The seventeenth-century Dutch one. The one Salthouse had watched change hands in a Bern hotel corridor in 1981. The one that was entry number one in the ledger.
"Her grandfather commissioned it," Isabel said. "It was in their house in Riga from 1931 until 1944, when it was taken with the rest of the collection during the occupation. The family survived. The objects did not — not as far as anyone was prepared to document officially. After the war, several pieces were traced into private collections in Western Europe. The atlas ended up in a Geneva storage facility attached to a private foundation that did not acknowledge its provenance."
"And Vossberg moved it from Geneva," Nadia said.
"Vossberg moved it from Geneva to a private buyer in 1981. Which is the transaction Salthouse witnessed." A pause. "Aurelia Vass found it — the entry in the ledger — four years ago. She found it because she had been looking for the atlas for her entire adult life through every legitimate channel available to her, and every legitimate channel had been closed, lost, or made deliberately opaque. She found the ledger because she had found Salthouse."
Nadia turned her head. "She knew about this archive."
"She was the one who told Salthouse that Vossberg had been reactivated. She had been watching the pipeline herself. She had been watching it for three years before she came to him." Isabel looked at her hands. "He told her to wait. He said he was building something durable. She waited until he died, and then she stopped waiting."
The car moved through the rain for a moment with no one speaking.
"She moved the object last month," Nadia said. "Through the London auction house."
"She placed it for sale under a false provenance document in order to pull it into the public record. Once it's sold with a documented trail — even a false one — it can be contested. Legally. By name. She was creating a paper surface she could then challenge." Isabel's voice was precise, with the quality of someone who had rehearsed this explanation more than once. "It is not legal. It is also, under the circumstances, not incomprehensible."
Callum said, from the front: "She's in Edinburgh."
"Yes," Isabel said. "She contacted me yesterday morning. She knows we opened the library. She wants to meet."
The safe deposit facility was in a Georgian building on a side street off Princes Street, the kind of address that had no sign outside and required an appointment made by letter. The woman at the desk — middle-aged, efficient, showing no particular interest in why they were there — led Nadia down two flights to a vaulted room of numbered doors and left her with a key and a courtesy period of forty-five minutes.
The box was exactly where Salthouse's letter had described. Nadia opened it.
Inside: a pre-addressed padded envelope, sealed, with her name on the front in Salthouse's handwriting. A folded card that read for the copies with two blank keys beneath it. And a separate envelope, unsealed, containing a single index card: a list of names with brief biographical lines beside each one — eight names, three of which she recognised from public life, two from professional context, and one from a context she would not have expected. She photographed the card, replaced it, and began the process of copying and filing the ledger pages and photographs she had carried from the estate in a document case under her arm.
