Chapter 24 The Third Prediction

The third prediction arrived on the twenty-eighth of February, two days before the date it named. It came in the same cipher, by the same quiet route, a short transmission logged as routine by an operator who had no idea what he was holding, and Margaret decoded it at her desk with the same steady hands she had used to decode the first one, four years earlier, in the cold of a January morning. The fire returns on the first of March. Look to the dead. She did not need to read it twice. She had been expecting it, or something like it, ever since she had seen the grey coat in the records hangar, and the certainty of it settled into her like a key turning in a lock. The first prediction had told her she would die by fire, and Hayes had come for her with the fire planned and the message already planted as his alibi. The second prediction, this one, was not a warning. It was a promise. Edith Crane was not coming to the hangar to burn the records. She was coming to finish the work that Hayes had begun, to put the fire in the world that had been promised to Margaret Chase in the winter of 1943, and to make sure that everything that connected her to the ghost keys went up in smoke with it. Brennan listened to her explanation in silence, and when she had finished, he said: You are not going into that hangar alone. I am the one she is coming for, Margaret said. If I am not there, she will know it is a trap and she will walk away. She has been walking away for five years. This is the only chance we will have to make her stop. It was not the whole of her reasoning, and they both knew it. The records were already safe. That afternoon, under Brennan's orders, the box containing Alan Pemberton's notebook had been removed from the hangar and locked in a vault at Scotland Yard, along with the key logs for the winter of 1942 and every other piece of paper that could be used to prove that Edith Crane had ever existed. In their place, in the cabinet where the originals had stood, sat a decoy: a box of the same size, marked with the same labels, filled with blank paper and weighted with a brick to feel convincing when it was lifted. The trap was simple. Margaret would hide among the filing cabinets at the far end of the hangar, where the light from the single bulb did not quite reach. Edith Crane would come through the loading door at the back, which the night watchman had been instructed to leave unlocked, and she would make her way to the cabinet where the decoy waited. She would take the box, or set her fire beside it, and in that moment, before she could leave, Margaret would stand up and Brennan's men, waiting in the old guardroom across the yard, would close the doors behind her. There was no second exit from the hangar. There was no way out except the way she came in. It was a good plan, Margaret thought. It was a careful plan. It had only one flaw, which was that it required a woman who had survived five years of hiding by trusting no one to walk into a room that had been prepared for her. Dorothy came to see her that evening, in the small room at the edge of the facility that Margaret had been given for the night. She brought a thermos of tea and a pack of cigarettes that neither of them smoked, and she sat on the edge of the cot with her hands folded in her lap. You do not have to do this, Dorothy said. You have already given them more than anyone had the right to ask. I know, Margaret said. But this is not about what anyone has the right to ask. This is about the message. The first one, in 1943. Margaret Chase will die on December the fifteenth. The fire will take her. It was written for me, Dorothy. It was written to make me afraid, and I was afraid, and I let that fear carry me through four years of looking in the wrong direction while the woman who wrote it walked free. I want to look at her face. Just once. I want her to know that I was not taken by the fire, and that I am not afraid of her now. Dorothy was silent for a long moment. Then she said, I will be outside with Brennan. If anything goes wrong, I will come in. Margaret smiled, a tired smile that did not reach her eyes. I know you will. The night of the first of March was cold and still, the kind of night when sound carries for miles and the stars are hard and bright overhead. Margaret took her position in the hangar at half past eleven, settling into a narrow gap between two banks of filing cabinets near the far wall, where the shadows pooled deep and the single bulb at the entrance threw only a faint, smoky light. She had a torch in her coat pocket, and a whistle, and nothing else. Brennan had offered her a revolver, and she had refused it. She did not want to carry a weapon into a room full of paper. She did not want the fire to have a second excuse. The hours passed slowly. Margaret listened to the building settle around her, to the creak of the roof and the scuttle of something small in the rafters and the distant, regular hum of the trains on the line beyond the fence. She thought about Thomas Webb, who had gone down to the water to watch and had been silenced for it. She thought about Alan Pemberton, whose notebook had been cut to pieces by a woman who wanted his work to die with him. She thought about the message that had started it all, and about the fire that had been promised, and about the long night that had been waiting for her, patient as the dead. At half past one, she heard the loading door. It opened slowly, with the careful, practiced silence of someone who had opened doors like it before, and the cold air came in with it, and then the footsteps came. They were light footsteps, the footsteps of a woman, moving across the concrete floor with the unhurried confidence of someone who had already walked this room a hundred times in her own head. Margaret did not move. She did not breathe. She watched through the narrow gap between the cabinets as a figure in a grey coat and a headscarf crossed the circle of light and stopped in front of the cabinet where the decoy waited. The figure stood there for a moment, perfectly still. Then she reached out, very gently, and laid her hand on the box. It was the gesture of a woman confirming that something precious was still where she had left it, and for a single, terrible second Margaret understood that Edith Crane was not afraid of the hangar, or of the night, or of anything that walked through either of them. She had been waiting for this. She had been waiting for Margaret to come back. Then the figure turned, and the light fell across her face, and Margaret saw her. A woman of perhaps twenty-five, with plain, unremarkable features and pale eyes that looked straight into the darkness where Margaret was hidden, as if she knew exactly where she stood. And she smiled, and struck a match, and the flame flowered in the dark between them. The third prediction was not a warning. It was an invitation. And Margaret Chase had walked into the trap that had been laid for her from the very beginning. ---