Chapter 3: Mara's Case File, Annotated

The documents were laid out in the order she had developed for them, which was not chronological and was not alphabetical but was the order in which they answered each other, the way witness statements were arranged not by when they were given but by what they confirmed or contradicted. She had learned this from a DCI in her second year whose name she no longer permitted herself to say and whose methodology she had wholly absorbed, the way one absorbs anything that works.

Seventeen pages. The original print quality was poor — photocopies of photocopies, the text degraded at the margins in ways that were themselves informative, suggesting the documents had been reproduced in haste, or in secret, or in both simultaneously. She had spent two weeks in her first flat, the one before Ashmore Court, transcribing the degraded margins by hand with a magnifying glass borrowed from a pawnbroker on the Mile End Road who had not asked what she needed it for.

She had not told him it was for reading the theology of the people who had done this to her. She had paid cash and left.