Chapter 4: Notes in a Hand She Does Not Recognise

The room she had taken was on the third floor of a house that smelled of other people's cooking, and she had covered every surface within four hours of arriving.

This was how Sable worked. Not because she was disordered — the arrangement was precise, hierarchical, the files grouped by date and then by source and then by a third category she had begun calling, in her own shorthand, proximity, which meant how close a given document brought her to whatever was actually at the centre of things. Proximity was the category that kept growing. The other categories stayed fixed. Proximity expanded every time she thought she had reached the middle of it, which told her something about the shape of the thing she was excavating, though she had not yet decided what.

The case had come to her in February, which was four months ago, which felt like either a long time or no time depending on which layer of it she was currently standing in.