Celeste Vey kept her office above the old scoring stage, where the walls were thick enough to contain an orchestra and thin enough, Mara suspected, to transmit gossip.
Rowan took the exterior stairs without looking back. The iron treads were wet with salt mist. Mara followed at the distance people used when they did not wish to appear escorted.
At the landing, he stopped.
“Your hand.”
Mara looked down. A shallow cut crossed the heel of her palm, darkened at the edges by adhesive from the call sheet. She closed her fingers over it.
“It remains attached.”
“Low standard.”
He opened a narrow leather pouch at his belt. Not a weapon. Gauze, tape, small shears, a glass vial. The remnants of another profession arranged with care.
“I don’t need—”
“Blood on a contract makes people dramatic.”
He held out his hand, palm up. There were pale rope burns across two knuckles and a crescent scar near his thumb. Mara gave him her injured hand because refusing would take longer.
He cleaned the cut without apology. His touch was impersonal, but not careless. He pressed the gauze into place, tested the movement of her thumb, then wrapped the tape once around her wrist and folded the end back on itself so it could be removed without tearing skin.
A release tab.
“You do that for everyone you follow?” she asked.
“Only the ones leaking on company property.”
His mouth did not move, but the line beside it deepened.
Mara withdrew her hand. The bandage was neat enough to irritate her. She knew she would remember the folded tab later, when remembering him would be less useful.
Rowan knocked once and opened the door.
Celeste’s office had been built where the conductor’s booth once overlooked the musicians. The glass remained, though the stage below had been converted into storage. Music stands crowded the floor in orderly ranks, each one draped in grey cloth. From above, they resembled a congregation waiting for a funeral to begin.
Celeste stood at the window in an ivory suit that caught none of the room’s dust. On her desk sat the missing camera magazine.
Mara knew it by the dent near the latch.
She did not slow.
Celeste glanced at Rowan. “Close the door, please. The building has always had an appetite for unfinished sentences.”
He obeyed and remained beside it.
“Miss Rook.” Celeste indicated a chair. “You have made an energetic entrance.”
“The vault supplied most of the energy.”
“And yesterday’s fire supplied the spectacle. Today we have darkness, missing equipment, and paperwork that appears to have developed a private life. One begins to miss ordinary incompetence.”
Mara sat. The folded call sheet remained inside her palm, held under the curve of her fingers.
Celeste touched one manicured nail to the magazine. “Do you recognise this?”
“Yes.”
“How refreshing. Mr. Rusk’s first assistant spent twenty minutes describing it as an object adjacent to a camera.”
“Where was it found?”
“In your locker.”
The room did not alter. The covered music stands below remained still. Rowan’s weight shifted once against the floorboards behind her.
Mara looked at the latch. No dust lay inside the dent. Whoever had handled it last had wiped the metal and missed the damaged place.
“My locker does not lock,” she said.
“An admirably democratic locker.”
“It also contains two mould reports, a spare cardigan, and biscuits Iris Bell considers too stale to steal. The magazine would be the most valuable thing in it.”
“By a considerable margin.” Celeste’s smile was almost kind. “Do you know what is on the film?”
“No.”
“A smaller answer than I expected.”
“It is the complete one.”
Celeste considered her. Mara could feel Rowan doing the same from behind, though he made less ceremony of it.
The office door opened without a knock. Nico Rusk entered carrying a paper cup and an expression designed to forgive everyone in advance.
“Celeste, if this is an execution, wardrobe needs notice. Black is very demanding before noon.”
His coat hung open over half-buttoned rehearsal clothes. Even tired, he knew where the light was. He found it beside the window and stood there.
Celeste’s amusement cooled by a degree. “You were asked to wait downstairs.”
“I did. Heroically. Then I remembered it’s my film in the box.” Nico looked at Mara. “And you’re the clerk who saved our negative.”
“A negative,” Mara said.
“There. Modesty. We should preserve it before financing gets to her.”
He reached for the magazine.
Rowan crossed the room in two steps and put his hand over the latch first.
“No.”
Nico looked at Rowan’s hand, then at his face. “I adore a man who can make one syllable feel insured.”
“Film may be damaged.”
“So may my schedule.”
“Schedules don’t ignite.”
“Not with that attitude.”
Celeste moved around the desk. “The magazine was loaded during yesterday’s camera test. It should contain six minutes of rehearsal footage. Instead, it contains eleven seconds.”
Mara kept her gaze on the metal case.
“Eleven seconds of what?” Nico asked.
Celeste pressed a switch beneath the desk. A projector stirred behind the rear wall, its mechanism muffled but distinct. The office lights dimmed. On the glass overlooking the scoring stage, a rectangle of grainy light appeared.
The painted hotel corridor from Stage Twelve trembled into view.
The camera had been left low, perhaps on a sandbag, its angle crooked. A lighting stand cut across one side of the frame. Nico entered in shirtsleeves, passed out again, and the image jumped.
Then darkness.
Not complete darkness. Emergency lamps washed the set in a low amber pulse. Someone moved at the far edge of the hotel wall.
Mara saw her own coat first.
She was crossing toward the false wallpaper, one hand raised. The footage had caught her profile as she looked directly at the place where the strip of old film lay hidden beneath the paper.
The image stopped.
Her face remained on the glass above the shrouded orchestra, pale and enlarged, watching something no one else in the room could see.
Celeste let the frame burn there.
“What were you looking at?” she asked.
Mara felt the red-pencil note against her skin.
What she saw.
“Loose wallpaper.”
Nico gave a soft laugh. “I’ve offered better performances under worse direction.”
“It was lifting in the draft,” Mara said. “I was checking for heat damage behind it.”
“Were you?” Celeste’s tone made disbelief sound companionable.
“There had already been one electrical fault.”
“And you have an admirable instinct for the vulnerable parts of my studio.”
“Damage is usually easier to find than the person responsible.”
The projector clicked off. Her enlarged face vanished.
Celeste returned to her desk. “The production has lost a day of photography, its continuity clerk has developed a fever of unusual convenience, and Mr. Rusk has promised our insurers a revised assembly by Friday.”
“I promised them proof of life,” Nico said.
“You will have Miss Rook instead.”
Mara looked at her.
Celeste smiled. “Temporarily. Vault in the morning, continuity on Stage Twelve after lunch. You noticed a misplaced lens report before anyone else noticed a missing camera. Let us put that quality where it can be observed.”
The wording was silk over wire. Refusal would be remembered. Acceptance would place Mara beside the false wall, under Rowan’s eye, while her ordinary payroll identity accumulated duties no ordinary new clerk would receive.
Iris would hate it.
“I report to Iris Bell,” Mara said.
“Everyone reports to someone.” Celeste’s gaze flicked toward Rowan, then back. “Even owners.”
Nico lifted his cup to Mara. “Welcome to the picture. We are only three days behind and two betrayals ahead.”
“Which two?”
His smile warmed. “That is exactly the spirit we need.”
Celeste picked up the camera magazine. “Mr. Saye will return this to post-production. Miss Rook, you will tell Iris about your revised assignment. And if the wallpaper speaks again, do try to remember the dialogue.”
Mara rose.
Outside, the mist had thickened over the lot. It softened the warehouse roofs and erased the sea beyond them. Rowan walked beside her down the stairs, the magazine tucked beneath his arm.
“You knew it wasn’t mine,” she said.
“I knew the search was clean.”
“Meaning?”
“Your locker had dust on the upper hinge. None on the floor below it. Door had been lifted off, set aside, put back.”
She looked at him.
He kept his eyes on the wet steps. “No need to pick a lock that isn’t there.”
“You didn’t mention that upstairs.”
“Wasn’t asked.”
“Celeste pays you for silence by the hour?”
“For results.”
“Those are more expensive.”
“Yes.”
At the bottom of the stairs, he handed her the magazine.
She did not take it. “You were told to return it.”
“You work for post.”
“You don’t trust me with it.”
“No.” He held it steady. “I trust who planted it less.”
The answer lodged where the folded tab of his bandage already had. Practical. Unflattering. Hard to dismiss.
Mara took the magazine.
Stage Twelve was empty when she returned. Lunch had drawn the crew toward the canteen, leaving the false hotel in a silence made of distant hammering and rain ticking against the roof vents.
She placed the magazine on a prop table and crossed to the wall.
The wallpaper lifted easily at the bottom corner. Fresh paste shone beneath it.
Mara peeled it back six inches.
Strips of film had been laid beneath the paper at uneven intervals, not as decoration but as packing, leveling a warped seam in the flat. Whoever had repaired the set had used old footage the way another crew might use card.
She pulled on the release tab Rowan had folded into her bandage. The tape came free without dragging across the cut. She used its sticky edge to lift one strip from the paste.
The frames were black-and-white work print, scratched and clouded with age. A man in a white shirt stood beside a location board. Alden. Younger than at his death, but not by much.
Mara carried the strip to a work lamp and held it near the bulb.
Four frames showed Alden turning toward someone beyond the camera. In the fifth, a woman entered the edge of the image. Heavy field coat. Dark hair pinned up with a pencil. One hand held a slate; the other gripped Alden’s wrist as if stopping him from walking out of frame.
June Rook’s face appeared in the next frame, sharp with anger.
Below her chin, the slate was readable.
VESPER HOUSE — FINAL UNIT.
The date was the night Alden Vey died.
Mara stood beneath the work lamp with her mother’s face burning between her fingers.