31. Investigations
In which the gerbils pay close attention...
Graphic, Griffin and Gimbal returned as usual to the workshop the following morning at 9am where the crate that had led Fenella Burnish to send them home early the previous day, was notably absent. Graphic was taken to the far bench again, where the magnifying glass and the side light were already set up, and a fresh block of paper had been put out with the sharpened pencils.
As before, she drew the marks, checked each drawing against the lead, numbered it in the corner, and set it on the pile. By the middle of the morning the opened cames from the left side of the panel were completed, and Fenella came over to Graphic’s bench, lifted the last two strips away herself, and laid out four new ones in their place.
“Perimeter lead,” she said. “The outside edge of the panel. It’s wider, and it carries more symbols. Same job.”
The perimeter strips were wider, and the marks in them sat further apart. Graphic worked along the first one. Initials. A date. Initials again. She drew each one, checked it, numbered it, set it down.
Graphic noticed a mark on the outside of the second strip of lead. She was about to ask Fenella if it should be copied, but then she hesitated. It was not initials, and not a date. It was a curve that rose and rounded over and gave up at the bottom right, running off in a short trailing tail, with three evenly spaced diagonal lines crossing it from bottom left to top right.
Graphic drew it. She checked the drawing against the lead the way she had checked every other drawing, and it was right the first time. She numbered it in the corner. Then she stopped. She looked up. Fenella was at the bench with her back turned. Halcyon was at the laptop. Nobody was looking at Graphic at all.
Graphic folded the drawing carefully twice and put it in her pocket. She then took a fresh sheet from the block, drew the mark again, checked it against the lead, numbered it in the corner with the same number, and set it on the pile with the rest. Then she moved along to the next mark on the inside of the came, and drew that.
Gimbal had a plan, which was unusual, because Gimbal’s method until now had been to follow the chain of stamps wherever the chain went.
She took the lid off the box and went straight to compartment 23. The stamp in it had 88 painted on the top. She took it out, looked at the top again in case the top had been wrong the first time, and looked at the die, which was a small crown. It was not what she was looking for, and compartment 23 was now empty, and she was holding stamp 88.
So she cleaned 88, dried it, and took it to compartment 88, and took out what was in there, which was 154, and cleaned it, and the chain had her again.
The chain ran where it wanted. It went from 88 to 154 to 61 to 9, and 9 held 200, and 200 held 3, and none of them was 23, and every one of them was clean before it went in and cleaner after. By lunch she had placed 40 stamps and compartment 23 was still empty, a square hole in the middle of the box that she could see every time she lifted the lid, which was often, because she had started checking it, in case 23 had arrived in it by some route that did not involve her.
It had not.
The afternoon chain started at compartment 3, because that was where the morning chain had ended, and went out through 112 and 76 and 130, and at half past three the stamp that came out of compartment 130 had 23 painted on the top.
Gimbal held it for a moment and turned it over. The die was a curve, rising and rounding over, running off at the bottom right in a short tail, with three diagonal lines struck across the top of the curve from bottom left to top right. She looked at it for as long as it took to be sure of it and no longer. Then she cleaned it, dried it and carried it across the box to compartment 23, which had been waiting empty since nine o’clock, and put it in. The chain had been broken, so she looked at the next compartment along, which already had stamp 24 in it, and the next which contained 25 and then saw Stamp 139 in compartment 26, and began the chain again.
Griffin spent the first hour of the morning not looking at the dispatch tab.
The dispatch tab was there. FB0417 was there, blue and underlined, one click from the grey sheet and the box that shook. She had the four characters, the capital F, the 5, the b, the t, and she had six she did not have, and she had Hedgehog’s voice saying nobody knew how many wrong attempts it would take to lock the thing forever.
Griffin logged two parcels and a kiln booking instead, and saw the kiln tab sat between the paint tab and a tab she had never had reason to open, which was labelled Stamps.
She opened it.
It was a list, ordered by number, 1 to 200, one row each. The columns read Number, Die, Date, and Title. Most of the rows were sparse. Number 4 said Fleur-de-lis and nothing else. Number 61 said Crown, small, and nothing else. Number 171 said Personal Seal. A few rows had dates and initials in the Die column and, in the Title column, were names that matched the initials. More often than not, the Date column was empty, and the Title column was nearly always blank.
Griffin scrolled to row 23 and read, Number, 23. Die, curve and lines. Date, 1293. Title, Reconstruction.
She read it twice. Then she scrolled back up to the kiln bookings, logged the firing, and entered the two parcels that had come in without barcodes, field by field, the way Halcyon had shown her.
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