Chapter 7: The Concert Preparations

The concert hall was, by the standards of a train hurtling across a continent at speed, ridiculous. Elliot felt this should be stated plainly, because the alternative was admiration, and admiration felt like a betrayal of Carriage 74 and its metal grating and its communal stove plate and its dog.

Two carriages had been joined by removing the connecting wall — an engineering feat that Elliot tried not to think about, because thinking about it meant calculating the structural compromises required to merge two moving sections of a train into one open space, and that calculation led to the conclusion that either the engineers were geniuses or the laws of physics were being politely ignored, and he wasn’t sure which was more unsettling.

The result was a long, high-ceilinged room with a stage at one end and tiered seating that folded out from the walls like the petals of a mechanical flower. The seats were upholstered. Upholstered. In dark red fabric that matched the corridor carpet, which meant someone had made a deliberate aesthetic choice about the colour scheme of an entertainment venue on a moving train, and that person had been allowed to execute that choice, and the choice had involved matching the seats to the carpet, and none of this was normal. Elliot had been to theatres in Bristol. He’d been to the Old Vic once, on a date that had gone badly for reasons unrelated to the play. Neither experience had prepared him for the cognitive dissonance of finding a proper concert hall inside a machine that also contained goat stalls and an open-plan dormitory where a hundred people slept three feet apart.

Crystal light fixtures hung from the ceiling on cables thick enough to hold in a storm. The floor was actual wood — not the metal grating he’d grown accustomed to, not the compressed material of the middle carriages, but polished hardwood that creaked gently with the train’s motion and bore the faint scuff marks of years of formal shoes and concert programmes and the small, precise feet of musicians who knew how to walk on a moving stage without losing their balance.

Someone was testing the acoustics. A woman stood at the centre of the stage, playing a violin, and the sound of it — bright, clean, achingly beautiful — stopped Elliot in the doorway the way the carpet had stopped him in the corridor. He stood there, one hand on the doorframe, and the music went through him with the efficiency of something that had been designed to reach the exact part of a person that was too tired to defend itself.

He hadn’t heard music like that since he’d died. The open carriages had music — someone was always humming, always tapping, always making noise that qualified as music in the sense that enthusiasm is a valid substitute for talent. But this was different. This was trained, precise, the sound of an instrument being played by someone who understood it the way Plum understood a clarinet’s mechanisms: from the inside.

The violinist didn’t look up. She was lost in whatever she was playing — a slow, climbing phrase that built and turned and found a note that hung in the air like smoke — and the hall, empty except for Elliot and Albion and a scattering of stagehands arranging chairs, held the sound the way a cupped hand holds water.

Albion didn’t stop. Albion didn’t seem like a man who stopped for things, and if he did, music would not have been high on the list. He was already halfway down the centre aisle, heading for a cluster of people near the stage who were doing the things people do when they’re preparing for an event they care about: standing in small groups, pointing at things, having the kind of urgent, low-voiced disagreements that looked casual from a distance and contained, up close, enough interpersonal tension to power a small engine.

Elliot followed. The music faded behind him as they moved forward, and the practical noise of preparation replaced it — hammering, the scrape of furniture being moved, the particular beleaguered tone of someone explaining something for the third time to someone who was not listening for the third time.

“Hartley-Voss,” Albion said quietly, and indicated with the slightest motion of his head a man standing at the foot of the stage with a clipboard.

The clipboard was the first thing Elliot noticed, because it was a clipboard, and the clipboard was being held with the particular intensity of a man who believed that the clipboard was both his weapon and his shield and that the information on it was the only thing standing between civilisation and chaos. Elliot recognised the posture immediately. He had worked with this man. Not this specific man, obviously, but this type — the middle-management archetype, the keeper of lists, the person who had been given authority over a complex operation and had responded by generating paperwork in volumes that suggested either thoroughness or panic, and usually both.

Hartley-Voss was tall, thin, and dressed with an attention to detail that had crossed the line from careful into anxious. His collar was high and stiff. His coat was dark, pressed, buttoned in a pattern that allowed no room for error. His hair was combed in a way that suggested it had been combed several times that morning, each time in response to a new worry. He was, Elliot estimated, in his late fifties, and he had the tightly wound energy of a man who had been running on stress and duty for so long that relaxation would require a formal decommissioning process.

He saw Albion and his face did something complicated. Relief and wariness arrived simultaneously, like two guests who hadn’t known the other was invited, and the result was an expression that was trying to be welcoming and vigilant at the same time and succeeding at neither.

“Albion. Good. Yes.” He clutched the clipboard to his chest the way you’d hold a child in a crowd. “And this is—?”

“Assisting,” Albion said, which was technically true and comprehensively uninformative.

Hartley-Voss looked at Elliot. The look was brief, dismissive, and comprehensive — it took in the work clothes, the open-carriage boots, the general air of a man who had been dressed by circumstance rather than choice — and arrived at a conclusion that Elliot could read as clearly as a project status update flagged red: not one of us, not important, tolerated because Albion brought him.

“I see,” Hartley-Voss said, in a tone that conveyed the opposite. He turned back to Albion, physically angling his body to exclude Elliot from the conversation, which was a move Elliot had seen in a thousand meetings and which had always told him more about the excluder than they intended. “I’ve prepared the access log, as requested. The key inventory is updated through this morning. I can assure you that every key is accounted for and that my procedures—”

“We’d like to see the hall,” Albion said. “And the preparation areas. Kitchens. Staging.”

“Of course. I’ll have someone—”

“Personally.”

Hartley-Voss’s clipboard hand tightened. His jaw did something small and unhappy. He was a man who delegated, and being told not to delegate was, for him, roughly equivalent to being told not to breathe. But Albion’s requests were not requests, and both of them knew it, and so Hartley-Voss swallowed whatever he’d been about to say and replaced it with a nod that looked like it cost him several internal organs.

“This way,” he said, and began walking with the brisk, slightly too-fast pace of someone who is not comfortable with the situation and is compensating with speed.

The tour was thorough, because Hartley-Voss was a thorough man, and thorough men cannot help being thorough even when the thoroughness is being used against them. He showed them the hall — the seating layout, the stage, the lighting rig that was operated from a small booth at the rear. He showed them the backstage area — a narrow space behind the stage where performers waited and instruments were kept during rehearsals. He showed them the corridor to the storage room, which Elliot had already seen but walked again because seeing things twice was the project manager’s equivalent of reading the fine print: you noticed what you’d missed the first time.

And he talked. Not like Fixer — Fixer talked the way water flows, naturally and in all directions. Hartley-Voss talked the way a machine runs: with purpose, with structure, and with the faintly grinding quality of something that has been running too long without maintenance.

“The concert is the premier social event of the circuit,” he said, leading them through a connecting corridor toward the service areas. “The Conductor’s personal commission. It brings together the finest musicians on The Meridian for a programme of — well, you wouldn’t understand the repertoire.” This was directed at Elliot, who found that he didn’t mind, because people who dismissed you stopped watching you, and people who stopped watching you missed what you were looking at. “Preparations begin three months out. Staging, catering, programme selection. The gramophone was central to the evening’s design — it was to open the second half of the programme. A particular recording. Very rare. The owner—” He stopped. His mouth closed around whatever he’d been about to say the way a door closes around a secret. “The owner is a patron of some significance.”

“Tell me about the people who had keys,” Elliot said.

Hartley-Voss looked at him as though a piece of furniture had spoken. The look was not hostile — Hartley-Voss didn’t have the energy for hostility, because all his energy was being used for anxiety — but it was startled, the look of a man whose mental hierarchy had been disturbed by input from an unexpected source.

“The keys are documented in my—”

“Not the documentation. The people.” Elliot had found, in a decade of project management, that documentation told you what should have happened, and people told you what actually did. The gap between the two was where the interesting things lived. “Six keys. Six people. Tell me about them.”

Hartley-Voss looked at Albion. Albion looked at a point in the middle distance. This was, apparently, Albion’s way of delegating: he simply declined to participate, leaving a vacuum that someone else had to fill. It was, Elliot had to admit, an extremely efficient technique.

“Very well.” Hartley-Voss adjusted his grip on the clipboard. “Myself — obviously. My key has been on my person at all times. Madame Courcier, the programme director and lead violinist. An exceptional musician and an exceptionally difficult person, but beyond reproach in matters of — I’ll say property.” He said the word as though it were the most important word in the language, which for Hartley-Voss it probably was. “Fen, my staging manager. Reliable. Has been with me for four concert seasons. Lotz, head of catering. Professional. Temperamental, but professional. And the maintenance key — Voss.”

He said the name differently. Not louder, not with emphasis — but with a slight tightening of the jaw, a small muscular event that told Elliot everything the tone didn’t.

“Tell me about Voss.”

“Jonas Voss is a handyman employed in the First Carriages for general maintenance and repair work. He has access to the storage room corridor as part of his duties. He is—” Hartley-Voss paused, and the pause was the most eloquent thing he’d said all morning. “He is competent. I would not describe him as conscientious.”

“Has he been near the storage room recently?”

“He’s been near everything recently. That’s the nature of maintenance work — he goes where the work is, and there’s always work. During concert preparations, more so.” Another pause. “Multiple people have mentioned seeing him in the corridor near the storage room. Including the evening the gramophone was last accounted for.”

Elliot filed this. The name Voss was becoming a shape in his mental map of the problem — a shape that was prominent and obvious, the way a large rock is prominent and obvious in the middle of a stream. Everyone could see it. Everyone was pointing at it. And Elliot had learned, through years of troubleshooting systems that failed in ways that seemed obvious and weren’t, that the prominent and obvious thing was usually not the thing. The prominent thing was what the system wanted you to look at. The actual problem was behind it, or beneath it, or in the place you hadn’t thought to check because the prominent thing was so busy being prominent.

But he didn’t say this. Not yet. Not to Hartley-Voss, who had clearly already convicted Voss in the court of clipboard justice, and not to Albion, whose expression remained professionally neutral but whose focus on the name had been, for the briefest moment, just a shade too sharp.

“I’d like to see the kitchens,” Elliot said.

The kitchens were a different country.

If the concert hall was the First Carriages’ public face — all polish and performance and the elaborate pretence that civilised entertainment could exist on a train doing sixty miles an hour across a wilderness — then the kitchens were the engine room. The place where the pretence was manufactured, by hand, at speed, by people who would not be invited to sit in the upholstered seats.

The carriage was wide and hot and loud in a way that reminded Elliot, with a small pang, of Carriage 74. Not the same kind of noise — there were no children here, no card games, no dog — but the same quality. The noise of people working hard in a confined space, moving around each other with the practiced choreography of bodies that had learned each other’s patterns. Stoves lined one wall, metal tops crowded with pots and pans in various stages of production. A long preparation counter ran down the centre, scarred and scrubbed and occupied by three people cutting, chopping, and arranging with the focused intensity of surgeons who were also in a hurry.

The heat was impressive. Elliot had been in hot places — the Tesco in Bedminster in August with the air conditioning broken, his old flat when the boiler had its episode — but this was a professional, industrial heat, the kind generated by multiple cooking surfaces and a ceiling that was too low and walls that were too close and a ventilation system that was either inadequate or deliberately punitive. The cooks worked in it with the grim acceptance of people who had made their peace with discomfort the way soldiers make their peace with mud.

The smells, though — the smells were extraordinary. Layers of them, complex and competing: roasting meat, baking bread, something sweet and caramel-dark, fresh herbs, the clean sharp bite of citrus. After a week of Carriage 74’s ambient aroma — oil, bodies, the ghost of porridge — the kitchen smells hit Elliot with a force that was almost emotional. These were the smells of effort. Of food made with intention and skill and enough ingredients to have options. The difference between this kitchen and Mr Plum’s stove plate was the difference between an orchestra and a man humming — both were music, but one of them had resources.

Lotz — the head of catering, key holder number four — met them at the entrance with the wariness of a man whose kitchen was his kingdom and who did not welcome tourists. He was short, broad, and dense in the way that bread dough is dense: compressed, powerful, with the suggestion of considerable expansion if conditions allowed. His apron was clean, which impressed Elliot, because everything else in the kitchen was covered in the evidence of work in progress.

“Albion,” he said. His voice was deep, accented in a way Elliot couldn’t place — which meant nothing, because accents in Train World seemed to follow their own logic, untethered to the geographies that produced them in his old world. “I have twenty minutes. The second course mock-up is at a critical stage and I am not losing it for this.”

“We won’t need twenty,” Albion said.

Lotz grunted. The grunt was a complete communication — it contained acknowledgement, scepticism, a timetable, and the implicit threat that if the twenty minutes were exceeded, there would be consequences involving his kitchen and their continued presence in it.

Elliot asked his questions. Key access — Lotz kept his on a hook by his station, visible at all times. Had he been near the storage room? Not personally — his work was here, in the kitchen; the storage room was outside his territory. Had anyone from his team been near it? His assistant handled deliveries to the staging area, which was adjacent. How often? Daily, during preparation. Who was the assistant?

“Several,” Lotz said. “I rotate. Depends on the day, depends on the task.” He was already moving back toward his station, pulled by the gravitational force of an unfinished second course. “Ask Fen. He manages the staging schedule. He’ll know who went where.”

Elliot marked this — another thread to follow, another junction in the process map he was building. The image in his head was starting to look like one of his old project flow charts: boxes and arrows and decision points, each one labelled with a name and a question and the infuriating word pending next to most of them.

“One more thing,” he said. “The concert preparations — what else is being produced? Besides the food and the staging. Decorations? Set pieces?”

Lotz looked at him properly for the first time. It was the look of a man reassessing a piece of furniture and finding it more complicated than expected.

“That’s not my department,” he said. “That’s the patisserie.”

The patisserie was through a connecting door at the far end of the kitchen, and it existed in a different universe.

Not literally — it was still on the same train, still in the same carriage, still subject to the same heat and motion and the fundamental physical laws of cooking in a metal box on rails. But where the kitchen was noise and urgency and the controlled chaos of twenty things happening at once, the patisserie was quiet. Concentrated. A small, rectangular space separated from the kitchen by a partition wall that did not quite reach the ceiling, with its own preparation surface, its own oven — smaller, more precise — and an atmosphere of focus so intense it had its own weight.

One person worked here.

She was young — mid-twenties, maybe, with dark hair pinned back from a face that was built for concentration. Her hands were covered in white — flour, sugar, the fine dust of whatever materials she worked with — and they moved over the preparation surface with a speed and precision that reminded Elliot, with a small shock, of Plum. The same quality. The same absorption. The quality of someone doing something they were very good at, in a space they had made for exactly this purpose, with focus so complete it bordered on devotion.

And she was building something remarkable.

The preparation surface held what Elliot could only describe as architecture. Decorations for the concert — but decoration was too small a word, the way painting is too small a word for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, if the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel had been made of spun sugar and marzipan and supported by wire armatures hidden inside structures of cake so precise they looked like engineering.

There were towers. Small ones, no taller than a foot, with spiral staircases of pulled sugar winding around them. There were flowers, individual petals layered and curved and coloured with a subtlety that made them look, from more than a foot away, real. There were miniature instruments — a tiny violin, a tiny cello, a tiny piano — each one perfect in its detail, each one made from materials that would be eaten before the evening was out, which struck Elliot as both magnificent and slightly mad.

And in the centre of the preparation surface, on a board of its own, was the centrepiece.

A gramophone.

Elliot’s breath caught. His hand went to — nothing. There was nothing to grab. He stood in the doorway of the patisserie and looked at a gramophone that was not the gramophone but was, he had to admit, a gramophone of such astonishing fidelity that his heart had leapt before his brain had caught up.

It was life-size. Built on a wire armature, covered in layers of cake and fondant and something darker — chocolate, maybe, or marzipan mixed with cocoa — that had been shaped and smoothed into a surface so precise it caught the light the way polished wood catches the light. The horn — the flared bell of the gramophone — was made from what appeared to be pulled sugar, amber and translucent, curving upward in a spiral that was both delicate and structurally bold. The crank handle was a separate piece, fitted to the side with a precision that suggested it might actually turn. The base was dark, grained, and looked for all the world like rosewood until you got close enough to see the join lines where the fondant met and the faint sheen of sugar glaze that no real wood would have.

It was, in a word, extraordinary. And in several more words, it was the most impressive thing Elliot had seen in either of his lives, and he had once seen a man at a corporate event carve an ice sculpture of the company logo with a chainsaw, which had been dramatic but not, in retrospect, art.

The young woman looked up. Her eyes were brown, quick, and currently doing the thing that eyes do when someone has entered your workspace without warning: assessing threat level, deciding on a response, calculating the cost of social engagement against the value of returning to work.

“Sorry,” Elliot said. “I didn’t mean to — that’s extraordinary.”

Something in her face softened. Not a smile — she didn’t seem like a person who smiled easily — but a loosening, the small release of tension that comes from hearing your work called what it is by someone who means it.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was quiet, precise, and carried the faint reserve of someone who was not accustomed to compliments and was unsure what to do with them. “It’s for the concert. The centrepiece. Madame Courcier wanted a gramophone theme, to honour the — the piece that was meant to open the second half.”

She didn’t say the gramophone that went missing. She said the piece that was meant to. The distinction was careful, and Elliot noticed it, and filed it, and moved on, because noticing things was his job now and filing them was what he did.

“How long have you been working on it?” he asked.

“Three weeks. The armature took the longest — getting the proportions right. The horn was—” She gestured at the sugar bell with a flour-dusted hand. “Difficult. Sugar wants to be one thing. You have to persuade it to be something else.”

“How accurate is it? To the original?”

“Very.” She said this with the quiet confidence of someone stating a fact, not a boast. “I studied it during rehearsals. Made sketches. Measurements. Madame Courcier wanted the replica to be — well. She wanted guests to do a double take.” A pause. “It’s the kind of commission you don’t get often.”

Albion had moved into the room — or rather, he had been in the room for some time and Elliot was only now noticing, which was a trick of Albion’s that was becoming familiar. The quiet man stood near the partition wall, hands behind his back, his gaze moving over the preparations with the methodical sweep of someone cataloguing the contents of a room and assigning each item a threat level between zero and significant.

“Your name?” Albion said.

“Marisa.” She said it to Albion but looked at Elliot, which was interesting — a small, unconscious choice about who she found less threatening, and Albion’s absolute lack of reaction to the choice suggested he was accustomed to it.

“You work here alone?”

“Mostly. Lotz provides ingredients. I have access to the kitchen stores when I need them. But the work is mine.”

“And your access to the storage room?”

“I don’t have a key. I’ve been in once — to see the gramophone, for reference. Madame Courcier let me in. That was three weeks ago.” She answered Albion’s questions with the careful precision of someone who had already anticipated them and prepared responses, which was either the sign of a clear conscience or a careful mind. Possibly both.

Elliot walked around the replica. Slowly. The detail was astonishing up close — the grain of the faux-wood base, the slight patina applied to the metal parts, the careful imperfections that made it look real rather than perfect. The horn was the triumph — translucent amber sugar catching the kitchen light, curving upward, wide enough to catch sound if there had been sound to catch, beautiful and hollow and just slightly too warm to touch.

“Do you hollow out the base?” he asked. It was a casual question. The kind of question someone asks when they’re admiring craftsmanship and making conversation. But the project manager in him — the man who had spent a decade asking innocuous questions that turned out to be load-bearing — asked it with the full weight of professional curiosity behind the casual wrapper.

“The internal structure is wire armature and dowel,” Marisa said. “Covered in layers — cake, then fondant, then detail work. There’s space inside, yes. The armature doesn’t fill the volume. But it needs the air gaps for stability — if it’s too dense, it cracks during transit. The train’s movement is…” She waved a hand. “Constant.”

Elliot nodded. He filed this too. A hollow structure, large enough to contain significant empty space, being built within walking distance of the storage room, by someone with no key access but detailed knowledge of the gramophone’s dimensions. He filed it without emphasis, without conclusion, without the small internal alarm that he was trying very hard not to let reach his face.

It was a data point. That was all. One data point among many. The obvious suspect was Voss. Multiple witnesses, reputation, access. Voss was the rock in the stream, the thing everyone pointed to, the shape that drew the eye.

But Elliot had spent ten years troubleshooting systems, and the first rule of troubleshooting was: the error is never where the error message says it is.

They compiled notes in the corridor outside the kitchen. Albion produced the folded paper again — Elliot was beginning to think of it as Albion’s version of a clipboard, if clipboards came in the form of a single sheet and were kept by a man who could probably recite their contents from memory and carried them anyway out of procedural discipline.

“Impressions,” Albion said. It was not a question — it was a prompt, delivered in the tone of a man administering an exam he had already graded.

“Voss is the obvious suspect,” Elliot said. “Everyone mentions him near the storage room. He has access. He has a reputation. He’s who the investigation is supposed to find.”

Albion’s eyes moved to him. The look was steady, professional, and contained something that Elliot had not seen there before: attention. Not the scanning, cataloguing attention he’d shown all morning — this was focused. The attention of a man who was listening.

“Supposed to,” Albion repeated.

“It’s too clean. Six keys, all accounted for. No sign of forcing. A locked room that everyone with a motive had access to. And one name that keeps coming up, mentioned by witnesses who seem very keen to mention it.” Elliot leaned against the corridor wall. The wood panelling was smooth against his back — a far cry from the riveted metal of Carriage 74, and his body registered the difference with a comfort he felt vaguely guilty about. “In my — in my experience, when a problem points at one thing, and only one thing, and points at it very loudly, the problem is usually somewhere else.”

He’d almost said in my old life. The words had been right there, formed and ready, and he’d caught them at the edge of his mouth and redirected them into something less dangerous. Albion’s expression didn’t change, which either meant he hadn’t noticed the stumble or had noticed it and chose not to acknowledge it, and Elliot was no longer sure which possibility he preferred.

“We pursue Voss,” Albion said. “But we keep looking.”

It wasn’t agreement. It wasn’t the warm collaborative moment where two partners align and the investigation clicks into place. It was something more practical and more honest than that: two people who had arrived at the same conclusion by different routes and were willing to walk the same road for a while, without pretending that the road was friendship or that the walking was anything other than work.

“We pursue Voss,” Elliot agreed.

Albion folded the paper. Returned it to his coat. The corridor stretched in both directions — left toward the concert hall, where the violin was still playing, faint and beautiful and completely indifferent to the investigation happening in its margins, and right toward the junction with the residential sections, and beyond that the long gradient back down through the carriage classes toward the metal grating and the hanging laundry and the warm smell of oil.

“Tomorrow,” Albion said. “Early.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“I’ll say it again tomorrow.”

It was — Elliot was almost sure — a joke. Or the ghost of one. The smallest possible humorous gesture, delivered without change of expression, without warmth, without any of the usual signals that a person is being funny. Just the words, flat and dry, and behind them the faintest shimmer of something that might, in a different person, have been a smile.

Elliot almost missed it. He wouldn’t miss the next one.

The walk back to the open carriages took longer than the walk out, because Elliot was paying attention now in a way he hadn’t been that morning. He watched the gradient in reverse — the wood giving way to painted metal giving way to bare steel, the carpet thinning and disappearing, the lights retreating into their cages, the air thickening with the smells of industry and habitation and the train’s mechanical baseline.

He stopped at the tea car. Birdie was still there — Birdie was always there, the way gravity was always there, consistent and unavoidable and fundamentally necessary for the continued functioning of the system.

“Well?” she said.

“I’m looking for a gramophone.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Elliot.” She set a cup in front of him with the precise, economical motion that characterised everything she did. “This is a train. A very big train, but still a train. People talk. Tea loosens tongues. I’ve known about the gramophone for a week.” She paused. “I also know about Voss. Everyone knows about Voss. He’s the kind of man people know about — not because he’s important, but because he’s convenient. When something goes missing, you need someone to suspect, and Voss has made a career of being suspectable.”

“Suspectable?”

“It’s a word now. I’ve decided.” She poured tea for herself — a rare thing, Elliot would learn, a sign that a conversation had earned her full attention. “He’s not your man.”

“You sound very sure.”

“I’m sure of very few things, which is why I’m sure of the things I’m sure of. Voss is a petty operator. He lifts small things — tools, supplies, the occasional bottle from the kitchen stores. He’s got quick hands and a chip on his shoulder about the First Carriage residents, and he likes people to know he’s a bit dangerous, because being a bit dangerous is the most interesting thing about him.” She sipped her tea. “He didn’t take the gramophone. It’s not his style. Too big, too visible, too much consequence. Voss is a man who steals apples. He doesn’t steal paintings.”

“Then who did?”

“I don’t know. But I know it wasn’t the obvious answer, because the obvious answer is never the answer. If it were, it wouldn’t need to be obvious.” She set her cup down. “That’s free. The next insight costs a favour.”

“What kind of favour?”

“The kind I’ll think of when I need it.” She smiled — not the serving smile, not the professional smile, but the real one, quick and sharp and gone before you could catch it. “Go home, Elliot. Eat your porridge. Let Plum fuss over you. Tomorrow you can be a detective again.”

He went. The corridors dimmed and narrowed and the smell of oil returned and the floor became metal grating and his boots rang on it with the familiar percussion of arrival — not arrival at a destination, but arrival at the place where he was known, which was a different thing and, he was beginning to understand, a more important one.

Mr Fixer was on his crate. Of course he was. He had the not-apple and the knife and the grin, and behind the grin the sharp eyes were already working, already calculating, already three moves ahead in a game Elliot was only beginning to understand the rules of.

“Learn anything?” Fixer asked.

“Several things. Not sure which ones matter yet.”

“That’s the job.” He offered a slice on the knife blade. “The trick is knowing which things matter before they do. Plum’s made something. It might be dinner. Go and act grateful. We’ll talk later.”

Later. Everything on this train was later — the next stop, the next meal, the next problem. The train moved forward and the future was always approaching and the past was always falling away behind them, blurring into distance the way the landscape blurred through the viewing slots, too fast to hold and too vast to comprehend.

Elliot ate what Plum had made, which was a stew of some kind, thick and plain and seasoned with the malt and something green he didn’t ask about, because not asking was its own kind of trust. He lay on his bunk and stared at the ceiling and let his mind do what it did — arrange, categorise, connect.

Six keys. One locked room. One missing gramophone. One obvious suspect who everyone pointed to and who Birdie said wasn’t the answer. One concert organiser clutching his clipboard like a life preserver. One head of catering with a twenty-minute tolerance for interruption. One young woman in a quiet room, building a hollow replica gramophone out of cake and wire and sugar, with detailed knowledge of the original’s dimensions and the steady hands to do something about it.

The image sat in his mind, not as a conclusion — it was too early for conclusions, and he’d learned at work that early conclusions were the most expensive kind, because they committed resources before the data was in — but as a shape. A possibility. The outline of something that might become an answer if he looked at it long enough and from the right angle.

The pipe hummed. The carriage breathed. Mr Fixer’s voice drifted from somewhere, talking to someone about something, because Mr Fixer was always talking to someone about something, and the day the talking stopped would be the day the train itself went quiet.

From behind the flowered curtain, the soft click and tap of Plum working on the clarinet. Almost finished, Fixer had said. Almost whole. A broken thing being made unbroken by patience and skill and the quiet faith that things could be repaired.

Elliot closed his eyes. Ten days. He had ten days to find a gramophone, keep a deal, earn a ticket, and not get thrown off a train into a wilderness that stretched to the wrong edge of a wrong-coloured sky.

He’d managed projects with tighter deadlines. The deliverables had just never been this personal.

The train moved on. Elliot slept. And in the morning, Albion would be there, early and expressionless and ready, and the chase would continue through the bright corridors and the dark ones, through the carpet and the grating, through a world that made no sense and was slowly, terribly, becoming his.