Curtain Call at the Lantern

You folded the cheque and put it in your pocket. It was a great deal of money. It was the easiest thing you'd ever done. Blackwood didn't say thank you; the thing about real power is that it never has to.

Rook made his arrest that afternoon: a boy from Slack Lane. The Sentinel gave him a headline: TERRACE TERROR. The city read it, nodded, and turned the page. Nobody asked what Sir Edwin had been about to say. Nobody asked why anyone would kill a man on the brink of telling the truth.

Jonah left at the end of the month. He didn't make a speech. He left his key on the desk, and beside it, on a torn scrap of paper, one line in his careful, schoolboy hand: "Who wrote the rules?"

You told yourself you didn't know what he meant. You kept the scrap for years.