Chapter 14 What Her Father Signed

Cormac walked home the long way, which for him meant the way that passed the printing district, and by the time he reached his rooms over the stable on Vandam Street his anger had burned down to something colder and harder and more useful, which was the state he did his best work in. He did not sleep. He took out the copy of the memorandum he had made at the bank, and the payroll slips, and the letter in Percival Hollingsworth's hand, and he spread them on the table under the lamp and read them the way he had once read a suspicious statement, looking for the one thing that did not belong. It came to him at three in the morning, and it came not from the memorandum but from the letter. *The men are right. I have known it for a year and I could not say it, because to say it was to admit that I had sold them. I am not asking you to forgive me. I am asking you to finish it.* Cormac had read that sentence a dozen times and had taken it for the confession of a guilty man. Now he read the date at the foot of the letter, and the date was the ninth of September, which was three weeks before Percival Hollingsworth died, and he read the line above it, which said: *I have told Thorndike that I will not sign the second agreement, and he has told me what that will cost me.* The second agreement. There was a first agreement, and it was the one in the bank box, the memorandum between Thorndike and Selwyn. There was a second agreement, and it was not in the box, because Percival had refused to sign it. And if the first agreement was the plan to let the Clarion fail and sell it to the Bugle, then the second agreement was — Cormac turned it over and over in his mind — the second agreement was the thing that would have made the plan irreversible. It was the sale itself. Percival had refused to sign his own paper away. And then, three weeks later, he had died. Cormac sat very still in the cold room and let the thing arrange itself. He was not a man who believed in murder; he had seen too many deaths from drink and cold and the trade to believe that rich men were killed for their papers. But he believed in pressure, and he could see the shape of a man who had been pressed, week after week, by his oldest friend and his banker, to sign a document that would end his life's work, and who had refused, and who had gone on refusing until his heart gave out. He could see it because he had watched men pressed in exactly that way in the shops, until they signed or broke, and neither one was a death the law would ever call anything but natural. He put on his coat and went out into the dark. --- The light was on in the works office at half past four, which was itself a kind of confession. Gresham, the works manager, was at his desk with a bottle and a ledger, and he looked up when Cormac came in and did not seem surprised to see him. "I thought you would come," Gresham said. "Sit down. Or do not. I do not much care." Cormac did not sit. "You paid Gormley's men to burn the composing room," he said. "You poured the oil yourself or you had it poured, and you wrote the entry in your own hand, and it is the stupidest thing you have ever done, and I want to know who told you to do it." Gresham looked at him for a while. He was a fleshy, tired man of fifty who had spent his life between the owners and the men and had never been trusted by either, and there was something in his face that Cormac had not expected, which was relief. "Mr. Thorndike did not tell me to burn it," Gresham said. "He told me to make sure the composing room was closed for a few days. He said there was a piece coming in the Bugle, and that it would be better if the Clarion could not answer it for a week. I poured the oil because I was drunk and because I wanted the trouble to be over, and if you tell the law that, I will deny it, and it will be your word against mine and I have a coat and you do not." "You have a coat because you have been stealing from the press-room expenses for two years," Cormac said. "And you will not deny it, because I am not going to the law. I am going to the men." Gresham's face changed then, and Cormac saw the first real fear come into it. "That is not a threat," Cormac said. "It is a fact. The men of the Row will decide what to do with a manager who set their trade on fire with a can of oil, and I will tell them the truth, which is that you did it because you were told to make the room dark and you had not the courage to say no. And then I will tell them the other truth, which is that you are not the man who wants the Clarion. You are only the hand. The man who wants it is Thorndike, and the man who prints for him is Selwyn, and you are going to help me prove it, because the alternative is that two hundred men decide what to do with you in a room with no windows." Gresham sat with his hands on the desk and did not answer for a long time. Then he opened a drawer, and took out a folder, and pushed it across the desk. "I kept copies," he said. "A man in my position always keeps copies. That is the second agreement, the one the old man would not sign. Thorndike had it drawn three times. The third time, the old man's heart gave out, and he never signed it, and Thorndike has been trying to get the daughter to sign the same paper ever since." Cormac took the folder and opened it, and there, on the first page, was the agreement to sell the Clarion Printing and Publishing Company to the Morning Bugle, in a form that needed only one signature to become law. And on the last page were three lines in a hand he knew from a hundred pages of account book, dated the day before Percival Hollingsworth died. *I will not sign this. Tell Thorndike that I will not sign it, and that he may do what he likes, because I have finally found out what I am.* Cormac stood in the cold office with the folder in his hands and understood, at last, the whole shape of the thing. The old man had found out what he was, on the last day of his life, and had died without telling anyone. And the daughter had spent four weeks finding out the same thing, alone, in a house full of his papers. He had accused her of deciding without him. He had walked out of the Aldermere and told her not to follow. He put the folder inside his coat and went out and walked the whole way across the city in the dark, and it was fully morning by the time he reached the square, and there were lights in the windows of the house, and the door opened before he could knock. "I was coming to find you," Cornelia said. "I know," Cormac said. "I brought you something. It is what your father signed and what he would not sign, and it will settle the board, and it will ruin Thorndike, and I should have trusted you with it before I said half of what I said last week." She looked at him for a moment, and then she stood aside and let him into the house, and that, too, was an answer. ---