Read Chapter 28: The Missing Person Returns

The fluorescent lights of Cambridge Central Police Station hummed like a trapped wasp. Eleanor sat on a plastic chair that had probably witnessed a thousand confessions, her fingers still grimy from the server room, her mind replaying Whitmore's collapse on loop. The poison had been fast. Professional. The firm didn't leave loose ends.

She'd given her statement—the third rendition of it, each version further from the truth. Detective Sergeant Okafor had narrowed her eyes at the mention of Whitmore's "sudden illness" but let her go with a warning to stay contactable. As if.

On her way to the exit, a corkboard caught her eye. Missing persons. The usual faces—runaways, the elderly, the occasionally reckless. But one poster stopped her cold.

DAVID THORNE. 34. Last seen: St. Ives, Cornwall. If you have information, please contact…

The photo was from three years ago, before he'd grown the scruffy beard, before the paranoia had set in. David. Her mentor, her collaborator, the man who'd introduced her to the diary in the first place. The man she'd watched the police pull from a burning cottage. The man whose funeral she'd attended, whose eulogy she'd given with shaking hands.

His body had been recovered. Identified. Buried.

Except—she stared at the poster's date stamp. This was new. Two weeks old. A fresh report.

Her phone buzzed. Private number. She almost ignored it—the last private number had nearly gotten her killed—but something made her open the text.

*They think I'm dead. I need to tell you the truth. Meet me at the old granary. Come alone. No phone. No tracking. —D*

The old granary. A converted Victorian mill on the edge of the Fens, abandoned for decades, a known shortcut for students cycling from the colleges to the river. She'd been there once, years ago, on a drunken dare.

Her thumb hovered over the reply field. This could be the firm. A trap, baited with her dead mentor's name. But the text's phrasing—*they think I'm dead*—was too precise. Too intimate. The firm wouldn't know about the St. Ives connection, not unless they'd read Eleanor's file, which they'd had every opportunity to do.

She pocketed the phone and pushed through the station's double doors into the damp Cambridge evening.

---

The granary loomed at the end of a gravel track, its brick walls stained dark with two centuries of weather. The river slid past behind it, black and patient. No cars in the lot. No lights in the windows. Just the wind rustling through the reeds and the occasional call of a waterfowl.

Eleanor had left her phone under a bush a hundred meters back, her purse with it. She'd told no one—not Priya, not Marcus. Marcus. The thought of him, wounded and recovering in that Travelodge, sent a spike of guilt through her. He'd betrayed her once. She was still learning to trust him again. But this was David. David, who'd taught her everything, who'd died protecting the diary—

The granary door was unlocked. It swung open on oiled hinges, revealing a cavernous interior where the milling machinery had long since been stripped, leaving only rusted bolts and the ghost of grain dust. A single lantern burned in the center of the space, casting long shadows across the concrete floor.

A figure stepped out of the darkness.

David Thorne was thinner than she remembered. His face had the hollowed-out look of a man who'd been running for years, his beard white-streaked now, his eyes sunk deep in their sockets. But he was alive. Undeniably, impossibly alive.

Eleanor's legs went weak. "You're dead. I went to your funeral. I gave the eulogy."

"I'm sorry." His voice cracked. "I'm so sorry, Eleanor. I never wanted you to mourn. But I couldn't let them know I'd survived. It was the only way to keep them from going after everyone I loved."

"Who? The firm?"

He nodded. "It started when I found the second copy of the diary—the one the bursar didn't know existed. The chancellor's original, the one with the full annotations. I realized it wasn't just about the college's founding. It was about the Crown. Direct lineage. There are people alive today whose entire claim to power depends on that document never seeing daylight."

"The peer," Eleanor said. "Marcus said the peer might be in possession of it now."

David's face twisted. "Marcus. You've been working with him?"

"He betrayed me once. He's trying to make it right." The defensiveness in her voice surprised her. "He was framed by the same people. His mother—"

"His mother is alive." David said it flatly, without emotion. "I've seen her. She's been moved three times in the past month. They keep her sedated, but she's alive. The firm was using her to control him, but she's never been dead. That was the lie they told to buy his obedience after the exchange went wrong."

Eleanor's heart lurched. "He thinks she died years ago. He's been carrying that guilt—"

"Then he'll be glad to hear the truth. Once we're done." David reached into his jacket and pulled out two things. The first was a worn leather journal, its spine cracked, its pages yellowed. The second was a battered Moleskine notebook, its cover covered in coffee rings and scribbled annotations.

"The journal first." He pressed the Moleskine into her hands. "I kept records. Every job the firm has done for the last seven years. Every client. Every university they've shaken down. I documented it all—dates, payments, the people who ordered it. There's a list of alumni who funded my disappearance. They thought they were paying to keep a secret buried. Instead, they paid for me to build a case against them."

Eleanor flipped it open. The pages were dense with handwriting, abbreviations, account numbers. "This is… this is everything."

"The diary." David held up the second volume. "The original. I stole it back from the fire before the arsonist arrived. I replaced it with a decoy—a blank book with a similar binding. The firm thinks they have the real thing. They've been protecting a forgery."

Eleanor stared at it. The leather was the same deep oxblood that had appeared in the archival photos. The pages were intact. Untouched.

"The diary alone won't do it," she said slowly. "We need to prove provenance. We need letters, land records, the ecclesiastical correspondence—"

"I've got those too." David smiled, a thin, tired smile. "I've been building this for six years, Eleanor. I have everything they used to destroy the original records. Everything they tried to burn. I only need one person to carry it across the finish line. I'm too compromised. Too many people know my face." He pressed the diary into her hands. "Finish what we started. Publish it. Burn them all."

His grip on her hands was cold, urgent. "There's something else. The firm knows you have the server files. They're going to force the Iceland provider to take them down—they have lawyers in Reykjavik who've done it before. You need to get the word out before the upload goes dark. Do you understand? Once that server shuts down, the only copies left are the one in your head, the one on Whitmore's desk"—he paused—"and this."

The diary felt impossibly heavy in her hands. "How do you know about the Iceland server?"

"I have moles inside the firm. They've been feeding me information for years." He glanced toward the door, his eyes scanning the darkness beyond the lantern light. "Which is how I know they sent a team to the Travelodge where you've been hiding. They found the room empty—your friend's phone was still there, pinging its location. They've got a man on the river road right now, heading this way."

Eleanor's blood went cold. "Marcus. He's still there—"

"He's alive. But he won't be for long if we don't move." David reached into his other pocket and produced a set of keys. "There's a punt moored behind the mill. We can reach the far bank before they find your abandoned phone and triangulate our position. We need to go. Now."

The door to the granary slammed open.