5. The Dutiful Daughter

The interrogation room at Harrow Street Station had been designed to resist comfort. Grey walls, grey table, grey light filtering through a frosted window that revealed nothing of the world outside. Julian Croft sat with his back to the door, his hands folded on the table, his expression that of a man who had done this before and knew the choreography. Clara Vance sat opposite, a folder of photographs between them, still closed.

“Thank you for coming voluntarily,” Clara began. “This isn’t a formal interview. You’re free to leave at any time.”

“And yet I suspect leaving would be noted,” Julian said, with a thin smile. “Let’s not pretend, Inspector. You think I know something about Helena Sinclair. Ask your questions.”

Clara opened the folder and slid a photograph across the table. It showed Helena Sinclair at a community legal clinic in Northwood, dated three years earlier. She was tall and angular, her dark hair cropped short, her eyes carrying the same sharp intelligence Clara had seen in the Grenville College photograph of Margaret.

“You told me you knew of her,” Clara said. “This photograph suggests rather more than that. You’re standing beside her in the background.”

Julian glanced at the image and nodded slowly. “I wondered when you’d find that. Yes, I knew Helena. She volunteered at the Northwood Community Law Centre for about eighteen months. She was brilliant with clients—patient, incisive, utterly committed. She helped us draft the initial complaint against Edmund’s map.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this earlier?”

“Because I didn’t want you to make the obvious leap.” Julian leaned back, his chair creaking. “Helena Sinclair was deeply involved in the legal challenge against Edmund Fairfax. She provided strategic advice, she knew the constitutional arguments better than anyone, and she had a personal grudge against Edmund that went back decades. If I’d told you that, you’d have assumed she was the murderer. And maybe she is. But I wanted you to find the evidence first, before the narrative crystallised around the easiest suspect.”

Clara studied him. Julian Croft was either an exceptionally honest man or an exceptionally skilled liar. “Tell me about the personal grudge.”

“That’s not my story to tell. But I can tell you about her work in Northwood.” Julian’s voice grew more animated. “When Helena arrived, the redistricting had just been announced. People were panicking. They didn’t understand how a map could strip them of their political voice. Helena explained it in terms anyone could grasp. She drew diagrams on napkins in community centres. She stayed until midnight answering questions. She was the best advocate we had.”

“And then she left?”

“Eighteen months ago. Abruptly. She said she’d done all she could and that the legal process would have to take its course. I tried to stay in touch, but she changed her number. I assumed she’d moved on to another cause. She was like that—intense, then gone.”

Clara made a note. Eighteen months ago placed Helena’s departure roughly at the time Edmund’s health began to decline. “Did she ever mention her sister? Margaret Fairfax?”

“Only once. I asked her why she’d never married, and she said something strange. She said, ‘I watched what marriage did to my sister, and I decided I’d rather keep my soul.’ I didn’t press further.”

Clara filed that remark beside the other fragments she had gathered. A brilliant sister who had watched another brilliant sister subsume herself into a marriage that demanded erasure. A grudge that spanned decades. A disappearance that coincided with the slow poisoning of a man both sisters had reason to hate.

“Did Helena ever mention aconite? Monkshood? Anything about poisons?”

Julian’s expression flickered. “No. But she knew a great deal about plants. She had a small garden behind her flat. Lavender, mostly. She said it reminded her of home.”

Lavender. The word landed in Clara’s mind like a stone in still water. Margaret’s gown at the gala. The perfume that lingered in the hospital waiting room. The colour that kept appearing, a signature stitched through the fabric of the case.

“I’ll need the address of that flat,” Clara said.

“I can give you the building. The landlord might have records.” Julian wrote an address on a scrap of paper and pushed it across the table. “Inspector, if Helena is dead, then someone wanted her silenced. And if she’s alive, she’s probably terrified. Either way, I hope you find her before anyone else does.”

Clara took the paper. “Who else might be looking for her?”

“I don’t know. But Helena wasn’t just involved in the redistricting case. Before Northwood, she worked on something called the Locke Inquiry. I don’t know the details—she never spoke about it. But whatever it was, it changed her. She came to us already angry.”

The Locke Inquiry. Clara’s mind raced to the letterhead in Edmund’s safe: Locke & Calder. Isadora Locke, the mistress, whose law firm had done work for the Fairfax campaign. The connections were beginning to form, thin threads weaving into something that might become a rope.

“One more question,” Clara said. “The safe in Edmund’s study. You told me about it. How did you know it existed?”

Julian’s gaze was steady. “Because Helena told me. She said Edmund kept his real records there—not the official ones, but the private notes that showed how the map had been designed. She wanted me to know, in case anything happened to her.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me this before?”

“I was waiting to see if you were thorough enough to find it. You were.” He stood, the chair scraping against the floor. “Now, if there’s nothing else, I have a community to hold together and a Supreme Court ruling to wait for.”

Clara let him go. She had what she needed for now, and pressing further would only make him more guarded. But as the door closed behind him, she made a note to investigate Julian Croft’s own background more thoroughly. A man who knew so much about aconitine and safes and missing women deserved closer scrutiny.

That afternoon, Clara drove to the address Julian had provided: a red-brick building on the northern edge of Northwood, its façade streaked with the grey residue of old pollution. The landlord, a stooped man with the weary air of someone who had seen too many tenants come and go, led her to a flat on the third floor.

The door was unlocked. Inside, the flat was sparse and immaculate—a single bed made with military precision, a bookshelf of legal texts, a kitchen that showed no signs of recent use. But on the desk by the window, Clara found what she had been looking for: a stack of notebooks, their pages filled with the same compressed handwriting that had appeared in the margins of Edmund’s journal.

She began to read.

The notebooks covered a period of roughly two years. The earliest entries described Helena’s arrival in Northwood, her initial hope, her growing anger at the systemic obstacles facing the community. But halfway through the second notebook, the tone shifted. Helena had begun to research Edmund’s past—not just his political career, but his personal history. She had interviewed former colleagues, former opponents, former lovers. She had compiled a dossier on what she called “the Fairfax method”—a pattern of identifying talented women, extracting their intellectual labour, and then discarding them when they became inconvenient.

One entry stopped Clara cold. It was dated three years earlier, and it described a meeting between Helena and Margaret:

“I went to the estate today for the first time in a decade. M looked thinner, paler, like a watercolour left in the sun. She moves through that house like a ghost. When I asked her why she stayed, she said, ‘Because if I leave, he wins, and I have nothing left but the winning.’ I told her about Northwood, about the map. She listened without speaking. And then she said something I cannot forget: ‘The garden is my only consolation. I grow things that are beautiful and patient. They ask for nothing, and they give everything.’”

Beautiful and patient. Clara thought of the monkshood, nodding in their measured rows. Seven years of cultivation. Seven years of patience.

She continued reading. The later entries grew darker. Helena had discovered something she called “the Locke connection”—a relationship between Edmund’s campaign and the law firm where Isadora Locke was a partner. She suspected impropriety, possibly illegal coordination between the redistricting effort and private interests that stood to benefit from the new boundaries. She had written to the Bar Ethics Committee. She had requested an investigation.

And then, abruptly, the notebooks stopped. The final entry was dated eleven days before Edmund’s death:

“Someone knows. My flat has been searched—nothing taken, but things moved. I am being followed. I have sent copies of everything to the only person I trust. If I disappear, the truth will not disappear with me. Edmund Fairfax will pay for what he has done. Not just to the voters of Northwood, but to every woman whose mind he plundered and whose spirit he crushed. Including my sister.”

Clara sat in the silent flat, the notebook open in her hands, and felt the case reorganising itself around a new axis. Helena Sinclair had not merely been a legal volunteer with a grudge. She had been conducting a private investigation into Edmund Fairfax, and she had uncovered something dangerous enough to get herself followed, her flat searched, and possibly her life ended.

Who had she sent the copies to? Who was the “only person” she trusted?

Clara’s phone buzzed. The station. She answered.

“Inspector, you’re going to want to come in. We’ve got a positive ID on a body found in the canal near Eastwick. Female, late forties. Dental records match Helena Sinclair.”

The world contracted. Clara closed her eyes. “Cause of death?”

“Blunt force trauma to the head. Not drowning. She was dead before she hit the water. And Inspector—there’s something else. She was holding something when she went in. A pendant. Sapphire and diamonds.”

The pendant from Edmund’s safe. The gift for Isadora Locke. Found in the hand of a dead woman who had spent two years trying to bring him down.

“I’m on my way,” Clara said.

She left the flat, the notebooks sealed in evidence bags, and drove toward the morgue through streets that were greying into dusk. The threads were tightening now, pulling together, and somewhere at the centre of the web was a woman in lavender who had spent seven years growing beautiful, patient flowers.

Helena Sinclair had promised that the truth would not die with her. But whoever had killed her had not yet realised that the truth had already been set in motion, like a slow poison spreading through the veins of a political dynasty.

Clara pressed the accelerator and watched the lights of Northwood flicker past. She was no longer investigating a single murder. She was investigating a system—a pattern of predation that had consumed at least two brilliant sisters, and possibly many more. And the only person who could explain it all was Margaret Fairfax, who was waiting in her walled garden, surrounded by flowers that asked for nothing and gave everything.