The second compass was a Husun No. 6 mariner's model, circa 1952, with a hinged brass lid worn to a pale gold at the hinge-point from frequent use. Nadia carried it to the window where the last of the evening light was still viable and turned it over in her hands slowly, the way she had learned over fifteen years of handling things that seemed ordinary until they were not.
She opened the lid.
The compass card was intact, the needle sleeping west. The bezel moved smoothly. Nothing taped to the underside of the lid, nothing scratched into the brass face. She was beginning to decide that the phone call had been a test — of her compliance, her reflexes, the length of her leash — when she tipped the compass to examine the interior rim at an angle.
There. A strip of paper, perhaps eight centimetres, rolled and tucked into the shallow groove between the bezel ring and the casing. She extracted it with the tip of a biro from her coat pocket, unrolled it against the windowpane.
A name: VOSSBERG.
Beneath it, one word: STILL.
She stood with the paper in her hand for four full seconds. Then she photographed it, replaced it in the rim, set the compass back on its stand, and left the drawing room without touching anything else.
She had encountered the name Vossberg once. Briefly. In a case summary she had been handed in error and asked to return unread, in 2017, six months before she resigned from the consultancy. She had returned it unread. She had also, in the forty seconds it took to walk it back down the corridor, read every visible word.
Vossberg was a name attached to a financial instrument — a trust, she had thought, or a holding architecture — used to move cultural assets across three jurisdictions without triggering provenance checks. The summary had been six pages. She had seen two. But she had seen the name, and she had seen, in the top right corner, a reference number that used a formatting convention she recognised as belonging to a unit that was supposed to have been dissolved in 1987.
Still, the paper said.
Not dissolved, then.
The inn at the village was called the Lantern and Keel and smelled of old timber and something baked that had been warm within the last hour. A man in his late sixties with an expression of professional incuriosity checked her in, showed her to a room on the first floor with a window facing the harbour, and left her to it.
She called Petra Voss at quarter past seven.
Voss answered on the second ring, which was unexpected. She had anticipated voicemail.
"Ms. Crane." Measured, as if the call had been expected. "How was the estate?"
"Instructive," Nadia said. "I have questions about access. Specifically, who has been admitted to the property in the thirty days prior to my arrival."
A pause. Not the pause of someone consulting records. The pause of someone deciding how much of the truth to deploy.
"The estate management firm had access for maintenance checks in February. A structural surveyor in early March. And there was one additional visit — a solicitor's clerk from our office, mid-March, to confirm the inventory of the top-floor safe."
"The safe containing the lower library key."
"Correct."
"And the clerk found it intact?"
"The key was noted as present." Another pause. "Why do you ask?"
