She went to Brown's house on the third morning, early, before the household was fully awake. Fischer knew she was going out. He didn't ask where. She had come to understand that Fischer's silences were not indifference but rather a very sophisticated form of trust.
Brown's street was the kind of narrow, stone-paved lane that appeared on no official map but which constituted the actual skeleton of the city—the parts built for living in, not for impressing visitors. The house was two floors, a cypress in the front garden still dark-green despite the winter, stubbornly alive.
He let her in without ceremony. The study he brought her to was small and book-dense, the window covered with a thick curtain, a single oil lamp making the room breathe amber. On the desk: a folded paper envelope.
"The inventory," he said. "A copy of my personal record. Three entries flagged in red—the discrepancies I noted at the time." He placed his hand on the envelope, not blocking her from taking it, just acknowledging it. "If this ever becomes official, the original will need to be verified independently. I won't hand it over without a proper process."
"I'm not asking you to," she said. "A copy is enough to demonstrate the pattern."
She picked it up and opened it. The pages were tidy—the handwriting of a man who had spent decades making records that might someday need to be read by people who weren't him, clear and consistent and precise. She found the red-flagged entries. She found his marginal note.
"The second entry," she said. "Military communications, thirty years prior. The flag says the paper weight is inconsistent with the rest of the batch."
"Storage fold is wrong too," Brown said. "Everything else in that batch was stored vertically. That document had been folded horizontally at some point—kept somewhere else before it was added." He paused. "I've been in this work twenty-three years. Documents don't fold themselves differently."
She looked up at him. He was watching her with the expression of a man who had been carrying something for a long time and had not been sure it would ever be worth carrying—that particular combination of relief and apprehension that comes when a burden is finally handed to someone else and you can't quite trust that they won't drop it.
"This is enough to support an application for independent verification," she said. "Combined with the right witness, it's enough to demonstrate that the document was introduced after the original transfer."
"I know," he said. "That's why I kept it."
She tucked the envelope into her inner pocket. "Your name won't be in any formal proceeding without your knowledge and agreement. That's a promise."
"I'm not worried about promises," Brown said. "I'm worried about Warwick." He looked at her steadily. "Be careful. He's not a man who accepts that he's been outmanoeuvred. When he realises what you're building—"
"I know," she said. "We'll move quickly."
She thanked him and left. The street outside was grey-white and cold, the kind of cold that finds the gaps in your coat and settles there. She stood for a moment with the envelope against her chest and thought about a document folded the wrong way—stored somewhere else, somewhere it didn't belong, introduced into a record meant to be definitive.
Someone had thought that nobody would notice. Brown had noticed. Brown had noticed and kept the evidence for two and a half years, waiting for the right moment to be useful.
She walked back through the cold, quickly, and she was thinking the whole way about what it meant to wait that long for the chance to set something right.