Read Chapter 32: The Ex-Detective's Choice

The pub was called The Red Herring, which Marcus had always found amusing given the number of lies he’d told there. He sat across from Adam in the back booth, nursing a whisky he hadn’t touched, his eyes doing that thing they always did when he was about to say something he regretted.

“You look like shit,” Marcus said.

Adam’s throat produced nothing but a dry rasp. His voice had been gone for three weeks now, and the doctors said it might never come back. The scar tissue inside his vocal cords had healed wrong, they said. The counter-vow had burned through him like acid through copper, leaving only silence in its wake. He wrote on a napkin: *That’s why we’re here.*

Marcus read it, then folded it into his pocket. “Right. The deal.”

The deal. Such a clean word for what they’d constructed. Adam wouldn’t expose the buried witness statement from 2012, wouldn’t destroy Marcus’s career and the carefully constructed lie that had protected Adam from a conspiracy larger than either of them had understood. In exchange, Marcus would feed him information from inside the Met. A working relationship, built on mutual ruin.

“I pulled the files you asked for,” Marcus said, sliding a manila folder across the sticky table. “Three disappearances. All flagged as unsolved, all officially closed. But there’s a pattern that shouldn’t be there.”

Adam opened the folder. Photographs stared up at him—faces of the missing. A painter from Camden, a sculptor from Hackney, a composer from Greenwich. Different ages, different backgrounds, but each photo had a similar notation clipped to the back, written in the same bureaucratic hand: *Subject reported a contractual obligation before disappearance.*

Contractual obligation. Adam’s blood went cold. That was the Covenant’s language, the same phrase Mortimer had used to describe the vows binding the missing beneath the Thames.

But the Covenant was dead. Adam had collapsed its power source himself, watched the cavern fill with black water and the remains of two centuries of occult machinery. Whatever had taken these people, it was something else.

He wrote on a fresh napkin: *Who flagged these?*

“That’s the interesting part.” Marcus leaned forward, lowering his voice. “The flagging system wasn’t used by anyone in Missing Persons. It’s an old protocol, pre-digital. I had to go to archives to even find out what it meant. It was used back in the eighties, during the original investigations into the Covenant.”

Adam’s hand paused over the napkin. Original investigations. The Covenant had been on the police’s radar before? That contradicted everything he knew. For thirty years, the disappearances had been written off as random, unconnected tragedies. That was the entire reason he’d stumbled onto the truth alone, chasing ghosts while his superiors called him paranoid.

*Who ran the original investigation?*

Marcus hesitated. Then he slid his phone across the table, showing a scanned document. Adam recognized the signature at the bottom before he even read the name—a looping, old-fashioned scrawl he’d seen once in a cabinet of curiosities belonging to a man who’d died with a shackle pin through his throat.

Lawrence Voss. The same name from the 2012 file. The man Marcus had buried the witness statement to protect Adam from.

“Voss was a detective inspector,” Marcus said. “He worked the Covenant cases in the eighties, then vanished from the force in ’91. No termination record, no pension, nothing. The file was sealed by a superintendent who’s been dead for twenty years.” He paused. “The same superintendent who reviewed your Hargreaves case in 2012 and ordered the evidence buried.”

Adam processed this. The higher power Marcus had mentioned, the one who’d pulled the evidence from the Hargreaves case—he’d been doing the same thing thirty years earlier. Which meant he wasn’t just corrupt. He was either part of the Covenant itself, or he’d been silencing anyone who got too close to it.

But the Covenant was dead now.

Adam wrote: *Where is Voss now?*

“That’s the thing.” Marcus’s face tightened. “I ran the name through every database I can access. There’s no record of a Lawrence Voss existing after 1991. No death certificate, no criminal record, no passport. He just…” Marcus spread his hands. “Stopped being traceable.”

Not dead, then. The truly dead left trails of paperwork and grief. A man who vanished so completely had either been killed with considerable resources or had chosen to disappear as thoroughly as the Covenant’s missing bell.

Adam sat back, staring at the photographs. Three artists, three contractual obligations. The painter had vanished from her studio in Camden two months ago, leaving behind a canvas with a single word painted in black: *BOUGHT.* The sculptor had gone missing after receiving an inheritance letter he’d described to his sister as “a commission from an old patron.” The composer had left a half-finished score with the title *Payment Due.*

They were all creators. Artists. And whatever had taken them wanted what they made.

Eleanor’s voice echoed in his memory: *The Covenant traded in souls, Adam. But they weren’t the only ones at the table.*

He wrote: *I need to see these artists’ last works. All of them.*

“That can be arranged.” Marcus finished his whisky in one swallow, grimacing. “But Adam, there’s something else. Something I didn’t want to put in a file.”

Adam raised an eyebrow.

“There’s a fourth name. Not in the official record—it was in Voss’s old case notes, buried in a footnote so obscure the archivists almost missed it.” Marcus pulled out a folded piece of paper, slid it across the table. “The Hargreaves case. Your case.”

Adam unfolded it. A name, written in Voss’s handwriting: *Adam Harlow. Witness. Do not contact.*

The air left his lungs. Voss had flagged him, back in 2012, as a witness worth protecting. Not a suspect, not a loose end—a witness. Which meant Voss had known about the Hargreaves boy’s disappearance before it happened, known that Adam would stumble onto the truth, and had somehow arranged for the case to be buried to keep Adam out of the Covenant’s crosshairs.

Marcus’s protection hadn’t been a betrayal. It had been the second layer of a defense Voss had built years earlier.

Adam looked up at his former partner, his ruined throat burning with questions he couldn’t voice. He wrote, hand shaking slightly: *Voss was protecting me. From what?*

“I don’t know.” Marcus’s voice was steady, grim. “But I found one more thing. Voss had a personal address—a flat in Deptford, registered to a shell company that’s still technically active. Rent’s been paid automatically for thirty years.” He slid a key across the table, worn brass, cold. “Somebody’s been paying to keep his secrets dry.”

Adam stared at the key for a long moment. Then he pocketed it, along with the folder of photographs and the name that had become his obsession.

In his pocket, the folded napkin from the pub bore a single line he’d written while Marcus was retrieving the key: *I’m in. Full-time.*

No going back now. He was no longer a consultant for the police, no longer a disgraced ex-detective chasing redemption. He was something else entirely—a hidden detective, operating in the spaces between what London’s official institutions could see and what lurked beneath them.

He would be the ghost Marcus couldn’t be, the finger on the scale that the occult societies of London had never accounted for. And if Lawrence Voss was still alive, still protecting secrets beneath the surface, Adam would find him and learn why a man who’d investigated the Covenant for a decade had chosen Adam as his witness.

But first, he needed to see those last works of art.