Chapter 2: The Paper That Fell in the Corridor

The seven o'clock chime had long since faded and the refectory noise had settled into its steady mid-morning murmur when Headmaster Solent's standing memo arrived via pneumatic cylinder, requiring Elias to cross-reference three of the morning's correction slips against the prior-term archive in the Restricted Annex passage. This was routine. The Restricted Annex itself required a signed Form Seven and a Ministry counterseal; the passage outside it required nothing except the small brass key that hung on the third hook inside the Record Room door. He took the key, noted its removal in the maintenance log under the date, and left the nine unfinished correction slips squared against the desk surface.

The corridor outside the administrative wing ran forty feet between two banks of portraits — former deputy heads, their painted eyes tracking with the mild, retrospective authority of people who had made all their consequential decisions decades ago. The light here was amber-grey, the gas brackets turned low in the morning hours, and the stone underfoot had been worn to a shallow channel by the accumulated passage of students who had learned, in time, not to walk in the exact centre of things.

He had reached the passage junction, twenty feet from the Restricted Annex door, when he heard the sound.