Chapter 5: The Auditor's Ghost in the Archive

We arrived at the City Heritage Index at twenty past eight in the morning, forty minutes before its public doors opened, which was precisely what Holmes had intended.

The Index occupied a converted Victorian pumping station on Upper Thames Street, its original brick facade now threaded through with embedded luminance strips that shifted colour by the hour — a heritage preservation grant had required the stonework be maintained, and someone with a sense of irony had decided the trade-off was acceptable. In the grey November light the building looked like a man wearing someone else's expensive coat. The luminance strips pulsed a slow amber. They would shift to white at nine, when the archive opened to researchers and the public feeds activated.

Holmes had timed us to arrive in amber.