Curtain Call at the Lantern

Rain came down on Saltmarsh the way it always did, as if the sky owed the city money and had decided to pay in small, cold coins. Third floor, above a dry-cleaner's on Bell Street, the sign on the frosted glass read VOSS SOCIAL INVESTIGATIONS. Below that, in smaller letters you'd once have paid a university to read: Everybody is playing a part. I find out who wrote the script.

You are Ada Voss: ex-lecturer, ex-tenure, ex-illusions. Across the room, Jonah Pike, eighteen years old and seven weeks into the job, was trying to make the kettle boil by staring at it. He still carried his A-level results in his wallet like a lucky coin. Jonah asked the questions you'd stopped asking. That was the point of him.

The phone rang once. You knew the voice before it spoke. Detective Inspector Callum Rook, tired the way only honest policemen get tired.

"Sir Edwin Fairweather is dead in Box Four at the Grand Lantern," he said. "Interval, gala night, six hundred witnesses and not one of them saw a thing. The coroner's van isn't here yet. The press is. Come before the story writes itself, Voss."

You looked at the window. From a satellite, Saltmarsh was a tidy grid of roads and docks and borders. From the street corner, it was a hundred thousand people lying to each other politely. You had always preferred the street corner.