3. Ten Little Jurists

The train to Glenskeld left from a platform that seemed to have been forgotten by the rest of the station. Milo bought his ticket from an automatic machine that spat out a slip of paper thin as a communion wafer, and he stood alone beneath the soot-blackened iron arches, watching a pigeon limp along the tracks with one broken foot. The rain had stopped, but the air was thick with the smell of wet iron and diesel, and the gray light filtered through the glass roof as if through deep water.

He had two hours before the next train, so he sat on a bench and read the morning papers. The death of Horace Thwaite dominated every front page. The Standard had given it a banner headline: RETIRED JUSTICE FOUND DEAD AT FOREST RETREAT—POLICE BAFFLED BY 'THEATRICAL' SCENE. The accompanying article, again by Lachlan Minter, described a discovery that had rattled even the hardened officers of the Northern Constabulary. Thwaite had been found in the dining room of a lakeside lodge called The Refectory, a private club for retired members of the judiciary. He was seated at the head of a long table set for ten, though no other guests had been present. A single glass of sherry stood before him, half-empty. His face was unmarked, his expression almost peaceful. The medical examiner had declined to comment on cause of death pending toxicology, but Minter had already drawn the connection: Anthony Marston, the first victim in And Then There Were None, had died of cyanide poisoning, a glass of whiskey slipping from his hand. The parallels were undeniable.

Milo folded the newspaper and stared out at the empty tracks. Greer had been right. The killer was moving fast. Too fast. And the choice of a retired judge—a man who had sat on the appellate bench during the early hearings of the copyright case—was not random. Thwaite had been one of the three justices who had ruled, in a preliminary opinion, that the annotations were the intellectual property of the state. That opinion had been overturned on appeal, but Thwaite's name remained attached to it, a signature on a document that had, for a time, made the law the exclusive property of the government.

The train arrived with a shriek of brakes. Milo boarded and found a compartment near the back, empty except for a woman in a green wool coat who was reading a book with the dust jacket removed. She did not look up when he entered, and he chose a seat by the window on the opposite side. The countryside rolled past in a blur of sodden fields and bare trees, the sky a single unbroken shade of slate. He thought about the list in his pocket, the five novels that formed the killer's syllabus. Three murders remained, if the pattern held. Three more bodies, three more echoes of fiction, and somewhere in the margins, the hidden truth Edgar Tyne had embedded in the criminal code. He wondered if Cecily Dallow knew what her grandfather had done. He wondered if she was already on the train.

Glenskeld Forest was not a forest in the ancient sense. It was a managed woodland of pine and birch, planted in orderly rows by the Forestry Commission after the war, its paths marked with signposts and its boundaries fenced against the deer that had once roamed freely. The village of Glenskeld itself was a cluster of stone cottages around a single pub, The Stag's Antler, where Milo stopped to ask directions. The barman, a man with the red-veined cheeks of a lifelong drinker, drew him a map on a napkin. The Refectory was two miles up the lake road, past the old sawmill. The police had been there since dawn, the barman said, and they weren't letting anyone through. "Whole place is cordoned off. My cousin's wife works the kitchens up there, and she says they've been told not to speak to the press. Not that it matters. The press are already sniffing around like foxes at a henhouse."

Milo thanked him and walked up the road. The air was colder here than in the city, sharp with the scent of pine resin and wet earth. The lake appeared through the trees after half a mile, a long sheet of gray water ruffled by the wind. The Refectory stood on its northern shore, a Victorian hunting lodge converted into a retreat for judges who had served their terms and wanted to spend their remaining years in quietude, away from the courts they had once commanded. It was a grim building, all dark stone and mullioned windows, with a copper weathervane shaped like a gavel that creaked in the wind.

The police cordon was visible from the road. Two constables in yellow rain capes stood at the gate, their breath misting in the cold. A cluster of reporters had gathered on the opposite verge, their cameras aimed at the lodge's front door like a firing squad. Milo approached slowly, keeping to the trees. He had no official credentials, and he knew that invoking the Directorate would earn him nothing but suspicion. His only hope was to find someone who might speak to him off the record, someone on the inside of the investigation who had already begun to sense that this was not an ordinary murder.

He found that someone twenty minutes later, in the form of Detective Inspector Isla Voss. She emerged from the lodge's side door, a slim woman in her early forties with dark hair pulled back into a severe knot and eyes that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. She wore a plain gray suit beneath her raincoat, and she walked with the deliberate gait of someone who had learned to navigate spaces dominated by men. Milo watched her dismiss a constable with a few quiet words and then pause at the edge of the terrace, staring out at the lake as if searching for something beneath its surface.

He stepped out from the trees. "Inspector Voss?"

She turned, and her expression did not change, but her hand moved to the pocket of her coat in a gesture that suggested she was carrying a weapon. "Who are you, and how do you know my name?"

"The reporters," Milo said, nodding toward the gate. "One of them mentioned you. I'm not press. My name is Vance. Milo Vance. I worked for the government once, a long time ago, and I may have information that bears on your investigation."

Voss studied him for a long moment. Her eyes were the color of peat, and they gave away nothing. "You worked for which government department?"

"The Domestic Assessment Directorate. It no longer exists."

"I know what it was," Voss said, and something shifted in her voice—not quite recognition, but the acknowledgment of a shared vocabulary. "You people were dissolved after the Thorne Inquiry. Half of you went to prison, the other half vanished. Which half are you?"

"Neither," Milo said. "I was a translator. I read Russian cables and wrote summaries. I was dismissed before the Directorate fell. I have no prison record and no enemies that I know of, except perhaps the ones who sent me a note last night warning me to stay away from a murder investigation."

Voss removed her hand from her coat pocket. "Tell me about the note."

Milo told her, leaving out only the name of Elspeth Greer and the details of his meeting at the Baltic Coffee House. He described the watermarked paper, the typewritten message, the mention of a debt. He described the copy of Crime and Punishment left beside Edgar Tyne's body and the list of novels that now seemed to be a map of intended murders. Voss listened without interruption, her gaze fixed on the lake. When he finished, she was silent for a count of ten.

"You're describing a conspiracy," she said finally. "A killer who uses literature as a blueprint, who targets individuals connected to a copyright case, and who has access to classified information about a defunct intelligence directorate. That's a very large claim, Mr. Vance."

"I'm not making a claim. I'm telling you what I know."

"And what do you want in return?"

"Access," Milo said. "To the crime scene. To whatever the police have found. I need to understand what the killer is reading, because I believe the annotations in the criminal code contain a message, and that message is what the killer is trying to expose—or to bury."

Voss turned to face him fully. The wind had picked up, and it pulled strands of hair loose from her knot, whipping them across her cheek. She did not brush them away. "You're asking me to compromise an active investigation. Why would I do that?"

"Because you've already seen the inside of that dining room," Milo said, "and you know that what you saw doesn't make sense. Ten places set at a table for one dead man. A glass of sherry that may or may not contain poison. A scene that quotes a novel published sixty years ago. You're not dealing with a simple murder, Inspector. You're dealing with a performance. And performances have scripts. I can help you read it."

Voss held his gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then she made a small sound that might have been a sigh. "Follow me. Stay close, and don't speak to anyone. If someone asks, you're a consultant from the Commonwealth Attorney's Office. I'll deny I said that if you repeat it."

She led him around the side of the lodge to a service entrance, past a kitchen that smelled of old grease and disinfectant, and into a narrow corridor lined with landscape paintings. The Refectory's interior was as grim as its exterior: dark wainscoting, heavy velvet curtains, the faint odor of pipe tobacco embedded in the carpet. They passed a closed door marked PRIVATE, and Voss paused with her hand on the knob.

"The body has been removed," she said. "The scene has been photographed and sampled. But the arrangement—the chairs, the glasses, the plates—has been left exactly as we found it. I want you to see it before anyone decides to clean it up."

She opened the door, and they stepped into the dining room.

It was a long, narrow space with a high ceiling crossed by oak beams. The table ran its full length, a slab of dark wood polished to a dull sheen. Ten chairs were placed at even intervals, each with a setting of bone china and silver cutlery. At the head, where the judge had sat, the plate was empty. A single sherry glass stood beside it, the liquid inside a pale amber. A small white card lay beneath the glass, and on it, in careful block letters, a single word had been written: ONE.

Milo circled the table slowly. The remaining nine places were untouched. But at the opposite end of the table, on the plate closest to the door, he saw something that made his pulse quicken. A slip of paper, folded once, identical to the one that had been left in his room on Sillitoe Street. He picked it up before Voss could stop him.

"Evidence," she said sharply.

"It's not police evidence," Milo said. "It's a message." He unfolded the paper. The same courier font, the same watermarked stock. The message read: The second is judged. The third writes laws. The fourth prints lies. Look to the margin where ink forgets its name.

He handed the paper to Voss, who read it with a furrow deepening between her brows. "What does that mean?"

"It means the killer is following a sequence, and the sequence is drawn from the annotations. Every murder is linked to a section of the criminal code that Edgar Tyne helped write. The margin notes—Tyne's private annotations—contain a cipher. I think the killer is using it to select victims."

"How many more?"

"Three," Milo said. "If the pattern holds."

Voss folded the note and placed it in her coat pocket. "Then we have three chances to catch him before he finishes his performance." She looked at Milo with an expression that was not quite trust but was no longer hostility. "You said you received a similar note. Do you still have it?"

"I burned it."

"Naturally." She walked to the window and stared out at the lake, her silhouette sharp against the gray light. "I'll need to bring you in officially. There are procedures. But first, I want you to look at something else. Something we found in Thwaite's bedroom."

She led him up a narrow staircase to the second floor, where the judge's private quarters occupied the eastern corner of the lodge. The room was small and spare: a single bed with a wool blanket, a writing desk beneath a window, a bookshelf filled with legal treatises and, incongruously, a collection of detective novels. On the desk, beside a half-finished letter, lay a copy of And Then There Were None. The book was old, its spine cracked, its pages yellowed. A bookmark made of a torn strip of paper marked the chapter in which Anthony Marston dies.

"Open it," Voss said.

Milo did. The book fell open to the marked page. The text was familiar—Christie's description of the gramophone record accusing each guest—but something had been added. In the margin, in tiny, spidery handwriting, a different set of words had been written. Milo recognized the hand from the carbon copies Greer had shown him. It was Edgar Tyne's handwriting.

The margin note read: The law is not a text but a map. The annotations are the key. Those who hide the key are the first to be punished. Thwaite ruled for silence. He drank what he brewed.

Milo closed the book and handed it back to Voss. "Tyne wrote this. He annotated his own copy of the novel, years before he died. The killer is using his words as a guide."

"But Tyne is dead," Voss said. "Who could know his annotations well enough to use them?"

"The granddaughter," Milo said. "Cecily Dallow. She works in the National Repository. She has access to all of Tyne's papers. And she found her grandfather's body."

Voss was already moving toward the door. "Then we need to find her before the killer does. Or before she becomes the next chapter."

They left The Refectory as the light was beginning to fail, the lake turning the color of iron under a darkening sky. The reporters had not moved from their vigil at the gate, but Voss led Milo out through the kitchen again, avoiding their cameras. At the edge of the trees, she stopped and handed him a card with her telephone number.

"Find the granddaughter," she said. "Bring her to me. And Vance—if you're lying about any of this, I'll make sure the Directorate's dissolution looks like a tea party compared to what happens to you."

"I'm not lying," Milo said. "I'm trying to pay a debt."

He walked back down the lake road as the first drops of a new rain began to fall. Somewhere in the forest, an owl called twice and fell silent. The pines swayed in the wind, and the sky pressed down like a gray lid on a box of secrets. And as he reached the village, Milo had the sudden, unshakable sensation that he was being watched—that somewhere among the trees, a figure in a green wool coat was standing perfectly still, waiting for him to make the next move.