Read Chapter 10: A Verdict of Accidental

The fire marshal was a stout man with a clerk’s patience and a bureaucrat’s smile. He stood in the scorched remains of the manuscript room, clipboard in hand, while Eleanor hovered at the threshold like a solicitor awaiting a verdict.

“Faulty wiring,” he said, tapping a line on his report. “The junction box behind the west shelving unit. Old copper, poor insulation. It’s a miracle the whole wing didn’t go up.”

Eleanor stepped forward, ash crunching under her shoes. “That junction box was inspected three months ago. I saw the certificate myself. There was no fault.”

The marshal shrugged. “Certificates lie, Dr. Ashworth. Ask any landlord in Cambridge.” He flipped the page. “Cause: accidental. That’s my ruling.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m thorough. And until forensics tells me otherwise, this is what the official record will say.” He handed her a carbon copy, tipped his hat to the college porter, and left through the fire door, his footsteps echoing down the stone corridor.

Eleanor stood alone in the wreckage. The shelves had been gutted, the manuscripts she and Marcus had salvaged now sealed in conservation boxes in a vault she no longer trusted. The diary was somewhere in her flat, wrapped in a tea towel, hidden behind her mother’s suitcase. Her mother, who had arrived yesterday with questions Eleanor couldn’t answer and a suitcase that smelled of lavender and fear.

Marcus found her ten minutes later, in the archive reading room, staring at a photocopy of the fire marshal’s report.

“Accidental,” she said without looking up.

“I heard.” He pulled the chair opposite her, sat down close enough that she could smell the smoke still clinging to his jacket. “The college will say the same. Whitmore will make sure of it.”

“Whitmore doesn’t control the fire marshal.”

“No. But he controls the bursar’s budget, and the bursar’s budget funds the forensic review. If he wants this buried, it will be buried.” Marcus lowered his voice. “We know it was deliberate. The accelerant, the figure on the footage. But that footage is already gone.”

Eleanor’s head snapped up. “Gone?”

“I checked this morning. The security server had a purge scheduled for 3 a.m. Last night’s files were included. Standard maintenance, they say.”

“Standard maintenance that conveniently erases the only visual evidence of arson.”

Marcus nodded slowly. “Which means whoever set that fire has access to the server. Or has friends who do.”

Eleanor looked at him for a long moment. His face was open, tired, worried—genuinely worried, she thought. But then she remembered what he’d told her about his grandmother, the college librarian, the photograph she’d taken of the diary’s case. She remembered that he was the archivist who knew every lock and camera in this building. That he had proposed running to Norfolk.

That he could have set the fire himself and staged the rescue.

She hated herself for thinking it. But she thought it.

“Sarah Chen was in the library that evening,” she said.

Marcus blinked. “What?”

“I checked the borrowing ledger—the paper one, not the digital. She checked out a book at 19:42. *The Architectural Drawings of Inigo Jones.* It’s a folio, oversized, kept in the locked annex.”

“The annex is two rooms away from the manuscript storage.”

“Exactly.” Eleanor tapped the report. “And she’s David Chen’s sister. She vanished too, remember? Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe she’s been here all along, watching.”

Marcus shook his head slowly. “Sarah’s on leave. She went to Singapore to see her parents after David’s disappearance. I checked with the faculty office.”

“She could have come back quietly. Flights from Singapore land at Heathrow every hour.”

“Why would she burn a library to bury her brother’s secret? She was the one who asked me to help you, remember? She wanted the diary found.”

Eleanor leaned back in her chair. The logic was sound. And yet—

“She withdrew her support last week,” Eleanor said. “I got an email from her office, cc’d to the master and the bursar, saying she could no longer endorse my research on the chancellor’s papers due to ‘methodological concerns.’ I didn’t tell you.”

Marcus’s face tightened. “When was that?”

“Tuesday. Three days before the fire.”

“And you didn’t think to mention it?”

“I thought it was Whitmore leaning on her. I didn’t think she was involved in the theft.” Eleanor met his eyes. “But now I’m not sure what I think.”

The silence between them stretched. Outside, the chapel bell tolled four. The evening light slanted through the high windows, casting long bars of gold across the reading tables.

“You suspect me,” Marcus said quietly.

Eleanor didn’t answer.

“You think I staged the fire so I could look like the hero and get closer to the diary.” He said it flatly, without accusation. “You think my grandmother’s story was a fabrication designed to earn your sympathy.”

“I don’t know what to think.” Her voice came out smaller than she intended. “You’re the only one who knew the security code for the west wing. You told me yourself you replaced the keypad two weeks ago.”

“I replaced it because the old one was glitching. Whitmore approved the order.”

“And no one else knows the new code.”

“The security officer knows. The master’s office knows. Whitmore knows. And I wrote the code down in the maintenance log, which isn’t locked.”

Eleanor pressed her palms against her eyes. She was so tired. The fire, the diary, her father’s amended death certificate, her mother asleep on the fold-out couch in her flat, pretending not to know why Eleanor had gone pale at the sight of her.

“I don’t want to suspect you,” she said. “But I can’t afford not to.”

Marcus was quiet for a long moment. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He slid it across the table.

“The maintenance log entry for Tuesday,” he said. “The day before the fire. Someone initialed a check on the manuscript room’s smoke detectors. The initials are S.C.”

Eleanor picked up the paper. The handwriting was neat, all caps, the carbon smudge faint on the cheap paper. S.C.

“Sarah Chen,” she whispered.

“Or someone who wanted me to think it was her.” Marcus stood. “I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to check the facts before you condemn me. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You check the facts.”

He walked to the door, then paused. “My grandmother’s house in Norfolk has a cottage at the back, out of sight from the road. The key is under the third flowerpot on the left. If you decide you need somewhere safe, it’s there. No one else knows about it.”

He left. Eleanor sat alone in the reading room, the maintenance log in her hand, the photograph of her father’s manacled wrists burning in her memory.

Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number:

*Sarah Chen landed at Heathrow at 15:20 today. She’s back in Cambridge. She’s coming for you.*

Eleanor’s blood went cold. She looked toward the door Marcus had just exited.

Then she looked at the maintenance log again.

S.C.

Her mother was waiting at the porter’s lodge, the diary was hidden in her flat, and every direction she turned offered another face that might be lying to her.

She dialed Marcus’s number. It went to voicemail. She tried again. Voicemail.

The bell tolled the half hour. Outside, the shadows lengthened across the quad, and somewhere in the darkness beyond the chapel, a figure was moving toward St. Cuthbert's.

Eleanor gathered her bag and slipped out the fire exit, heading not for her flat but for the porter’s lodge, where her mother waited with questions Eleanor had never been allowed to ask, and where she now feared she’d finally get the answers—whether she wanted them or not.