4. The Unheard Frequency

Tom Balfour was dead.

Helena heard the news from Marcus, who had gone to the crypt entrance at seven in the morning to resume the skeletal analysis and found the postgraduate student's tent collapsed inward, its canvas torn along one seam as though something had dragged across it from the inside. At first, Marcus had assumed an animal—a badger, perhaps, or one of the feral dogs that roamed the valley. He had called Tom's name. When no answer came, he had unzipped the tent flap and looked inside.

Tom lay on his sleeping bag, his body arranged with a precision that was immediately, nauseatingly familiar. His feet pointed inward, toward the centre of an invisible circle. His head had been rotated on its axis, the cervical vertebrae twisted beyond the tolerance of living flesh. And in his mouth, placed with the care of a sacrament, was a folded scrap of vellum.

The camp dissolved into a chaos that Helena experienced as a series of disconnected images. Lena, her face the colour of old paper, backing away from the tent with her camera hanging forgotten at her side. Iris, already on her phone, speaking to emergency services in a voice so steady it seemed borrowed from someone else. The Aethelgard lawyers, clustered at the edge of their territorial boundary, their usual professional detachment cracked open by something that looked like genuine fear. And Tom, poor Tom, twenty-three years old, who had been so excited to find the void behind the wall, lying still and silent in the morning light.

Detective Inspector Callum Nash arrived forty minutes later, accompanied by the same two uniformed officers and a forensic team that moved with the quiet efficiency of people who had done this too many times. He looked at the body for a long moment, his face betraying nothing, and then he turned to Helena.

"Tell me everything that happened since I left."

She told him. The arrival of the Aethelgard legal team, the court order, the courier from the National Archives, the excised catalogue entry, the Morrow Trust. Nash listened without interruption, his notebook forgotten in his hand. When she finished, he was silent for a long time.

"The vellum in his mouth," he said eventually. "Was it the same as the page you found on the spoil heap?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen it. Marcus called me and I didn't—I couldn't—"

"I understand." Nash's voice was unexpectedly gentle. "Wait here."

He walked to the forensic tent that had been erected around Tom's campsite and disappeared inside. Helena stood in the cold morning air and tried not to think about the fact that Tom had been sleeping fifty metres from her own tent, that she had heard nothing, that she had been awake half the night reading and rereading the National Archives documents and had not once looked outside to check on the student who had been entrusted to her care.

Iris appeared beside her, holding two mugs of tea. Helena took one automatically. "The lawyers are calling their head office," Iris said. "Severin looks rattled. I don't think she expected this."

"Did any of us expect this?"

"No. But she expected to control the situation. A death on site removes control. It brings in outside authorities. It creates records that can't be sealed or excised." Iris sipped her tea. "Whoever killed Tom may have done it to frighten us. Or they may have done it because Tom knew something. But either way, they've made Severin's job harder. That's worth noting."

Helena stared at her. "A student is dead. One of our students. And you're talking about it like it's a strategic development."

"I'm talking about it like it's evidence. Because that's what it is." Iris met her gaze without flinching. "Tom was the one camped directly above the crypt. Tom was the one who found the void. Tom slept through the police arriving but someone managed to enter his tent, kill him, and arrange his body without anyone hearing a sound. That's not a crime of passion. That's a crime of precision. And precision tells us something about the person who did it."

"What does it tell us?"

"That they've done it before. Not recently, perhaps. But the arrangement of the body—the feet inward, the twisted neck—that's a reproduction of the skeletons in the crypt. Someone wanted Tom to be found in the same posture as the eleventh-century victims. Someone wanted us to understand that this death belongs to the same story."

Nash emerged from the forensic tent, his face grim. He walked over to Helena and Iris and stopped, his notebook finally open in his hand.

"The vellum in his mouth has the same notation as the page from the spoil heap. Same hand, same ink, same linen strip. And there's an inscription." He consulted his notes. "'Qui cantum furatur, animam occidit.' The forensic linguist is still working on it, but Dr. Fell identified it as the same phrase from the crypt manuscript. 'He who steals the song kills the soul.'"

"That was on the page Helena found," Iris said. "The threat. 'You must die.'"

"This one is different. The inscription on Tom's vellum reads: 'Primus ex vobis.' The first of you."

The words fell into the morning air like stones into water. The first of you. Not the last. Not a warning completed. A promise continuing.

Helena felt her knees weaken. She sat down on a nearby equipment case, the tea sloshing over her fingers, and tried to breathe steadily. "Tom didn't know anything. He was a postgraduate. He was here to dig test pits and catalogue pottery. He wasn't even in the crypt when we opened the reliquary."

"Are you certain of that?" Nash asked.

"I—" She stopped. She had been the first into the crypt. Marcus had followed. Then Iris. Then Lena with her cameras. Tom had been behind her, hadn't he? She remembered his voice in the chamber, the nervous laugh. 'Well, that's not ominous at all.' He had been there. He had seen the manuscript. He had heard Marcus read the inscription aloud.

"He was there," she said. "He saw everything we saw."

"Then he knew enough." Nash closed his notebook. "I'm going to need to interview everyone on site. Separately. Including the Aethelgard personnel. No one leaves until I've spoken to them."

The interviews took the rest of the morning. Nash commandeered the farmhouse kitchen, and one by one, the members of the camp filed through. Helena watched from the window as each person emerged—Marcus, gesticulating; Lena, pale and subdued; the junior lawyers, their briefcases clutched like shields; Severin, her composure reassembled but visibly thinner than it had been. Iris went in last, and her interview lasted longer than any of the others.

When it was Helena's turn, she sat across from Nash at the scarred wooden table and answered his questions with a numbness that made her own voice sound distant to her ears. Yes, Tom had been in the crypt. Yes, he had seen the manuscript. No, he had not expressed any particular concern about the inscription. Yes, he had been asleep when the police arrived the previous time. No, she could not think of any reason why anyone would want to kill him.

"Someone left a death threat on your spoil heap two nights ago," Nash said. "Did you post a guard?"

"We didn't think—"

"You didn't think the threat was credible."

"We didn't think it was a threat. We thought it was—" She stopped. What had she thought? That it was a prank? A warning? A piece of theatre orchestrated by someone who wanted them to leave? She had not thought it was a promise. She had been wrong.

"Dr. Voss." Nash leaned forward, his voice dropping. "I need you to be honest with me. Is there anyone on this site who you believe could have done this?"

Helena thought of Iris, with her unsettling knowledge and her careful silences. Of Lena, documenting everything for an archive no one else would see. Of Marcus, with his thirty years of academic grievance and his proprietary hunger for the manuscript. Of Severin, who had arrived with a court order before the police had finished their investigation. Of the Morrow Trust, faceless and ancient, manipulating events from behind sealed records and non-disclosure orders.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know any of them as well as I thought I did."

Nash nodded, as though this was the most honest answer he had received all day.

By evening, the forensic team had completed their work and Tom's body had been removed. The camp settled into an uneasy quiet, everyone retreating to their tents and their silences. Helena could not bear to be inside. She walked the perimeter of the site, following the path she had taken on the night she found the vellum, and tried to understand.

The crypt held eleven skeletons, killed in the ninth century, their deaths covered by a thousand years of earth and silence. The manuscript attributed their work to Oswin, a name that challenged the entire Dunmoor orthodoxy and the Aethelgard copyright empire built upon it. The Morrow Trust had suppressed evidence of Oswin since at least 1958, excising pages from archives and sealing records behind non-disclosure orders. Someone in the camp was feeding information to Aethelgard. Someone had left the vellum page for her to find. Someone had killed Tom Balfour and left him arranged like one of the ancient dead.

And then there was the sound. The low frequency that had no source, that pressed against her eardrums and made her vision swim, that had stopped the moment she dropped the vellum. Marcus had called it exhaustion and suggestion. Iris had called it a pattern. Helena did not know what to call it, but she knew it had not been imagined.

She found herself at the entrance to the trench. The work lights had been dimmed, but enough glow remained to illuminate the ladder descending into the earth. She stood at the edge, looking down, and felt the cold air rising from the crypt like exhalation.

"Dr. Voss."

She turned. Iris was standing a few metres away, her arms wrapped around herself against the cold. In the half-light, her face looked older than it had in the morning, the bones more prominent beneath the skin.

"I need to show you something," Iris said. "Something I didn't tell Nash."

"Why didn't you tell him?"

"Because I need to understand it first. And because I think—I think it changes what we're looking for."

She led Helena to the equipment farmhouse and unlocked the door. Inside, on the table where they had laid out the photocopies from the National Archives, was a laptop. Iris opened it and turned the screen toward Helena.

"I've been cross-referencing the Morrow Trust against the Valdorian corporate registry. It's not easy. The trust is structured as a series of nested holding companies, each one registered in a different jurisdiction. But I found a thread." She clicked through several pages of dense financial data. "The trust's primary asset is a music publishing company called Dunmoor Editions, registered in the Canton of Valdoria in 1922. Dunmoor Editions acquired the rights to the Godric corpus in 1924, from a private collector named Heinrich Voss."

Helena felt the floor shift beneath her. "Voss."

"Yes. Your family name. I checked. Heinrich Voss was your great-grandfather."

The room was very quiet. Helena could hear the blood rushing in her ears, a sound like the sea heard from a great distance. Her great-grandfather. A private collector. The man who had sold the Godric rights to the entity that became Aethelgard.

"He was a musicologist," she said, her voice not quite her own. "I knew that. My father mentioned him once. He collected medieval manuscripts. But I never—I didn't know he owned the Dunmoor rights."

"He didn't just own them." Iris clicked to another page. "He was the one who established the Godric attribution. Before 1924, the Dunmoor corpus was attributed to 'Anonymus Dunmoriensis'—the Anonymous Composer of Dunmoor. Heinrich Voss was the scholar who argued, in a monograph published in 1922, that the works were the product of a single, identifiable genius: Godric of Dunmoor. He provided the documentary evidence that convinced the academic community. Two years later, he sold the rights to Dunmoor Editions for a sum that, adjusted for inflation, would be worth several million today."

Helena sat down. The chair creaked under her weight, a small, ordinary sound in a world that had stopped making sense. "My great-grandfather created the Godric attribution. He invented the copyright that Aethelgard has been enforcing for a century."

"And then he sold it. And the trust that bought it has been suppressing contrary evidence ever since." Iris closed the laptop. "I don't think it's a coincidence that you're the one leading this excavation, Dr. Voss. I don't think it's a coincidence that the vellum page was left where you would find it. Someone knows who you are. Someone wants you to understand what your family did."

"Or someone wants me to pay for it."

The words hung in the cold air of the farmhouse. Outside, the wind had risen, rattling the loose boards of the barn and making the priory ruins hum with a low, almost inaudible frequency. Helena thought of Tom, arranged like a ninth-century monk, a vellum scrap in his mouth and the promise of more deaths to come. She thought of Heinrich Voss, her great-grandfather, whose scholarship had created a century of fraud. She thought of the Morrow Trust, waiting in the shadows, manipulating the excavation toward an outcome she still could not see.

"We need to tell Nash," she said.

"We will. But first, there's something else." Iris reached into her bag and produced a small leather notebook, worn at the edges and tied with a linen strip. "I found this in the crypt yesterday, during the skeletal documentation. It was wedged behind the plinth where the reliquary sat. I didn't mention it because I wanted to read it first. It's in Latin. A personal account, written by someone who was there."

"Someone who was there in the ninth century?"

"No." Iris opened the notebook to the first page. "Someone who was there in 1924. The year your great-grandfather sold the rights. The year the Morrow Trust was founded."

She turned the notebook around. The handwriting was cramped and hurried, the ink faded to a pale brown, but the words were clear. Helena leaned forward and read the first line, her heart beating hard against her ribs.

I have done what was asked of me, and the bones are silent. But the song remembers. The song will always remember.

Below it, in the same hand, was a single word repeated three times, as though the writer had been trying to convince himself of something: Oblivio. Oblivio. Oblivio. Oblivion. Oblivion. Oblivion.