The drive back to the motel on the A12 was a silent, eighty-minute funeral procession for a congregation of one. DI Miles Corbin drove on autopilot, the sodium orange of the motorway lights washing over him in hypnotic waves. He didn't register the other cars, the road signs, or the searing pain in his arm. All he could see was the glint of piano wire and the light of a brilliant mind being extinguished.
On the passenger seat beside him lay the book Dr. Evelyn Reed had died for. It was a thick, heavy tome, its leather cover cracked with age. It felt like a cursed object. Her final legacy. His only inheritance.
He walked into the grim motel room to find DC Harris pacing, buzzing with nervous energy from his own solitary confinement.
"Guv! You're back. Did you get it? Did she find anything?" Harris asked, his words tumbling out. He stopped short when he saw Corbin's face, and then noticed he was alone. "Guv? Where's Dr. Reed?"
Miles didn't have the energy for a gentle explanation. He walked to the wobbly table and placed the heavy book down with a solid thud.
"She's dead, Harris," he said, his voice a flat, hollow thing. "The Puppeteer was waiting for her. He knew she'd go back for her research. It was a trap."
The colour drained from Harris's face. Of all the horrors they had faced, this felt different. The others were case files, victims. Evelyn had been one of them. She had been their guide. Now, their small, rogue team felt broken, their sanctuary of theory and intellect violated.
"He killed her right in front of me," Corbin continued, his voice low and seething with a cold, controlled rage. "He wanted me to see it. He wanted us to know."
For a long time, the two men sat in silence, the weight of their loss and the scale of their enemy pressing down on them. They were no longer just investigators; they were survivors.
Finally, Corbin pushed his grief aside, channelling it into the only thing he had left. The case. He pulled the ancient book towards him and opened it. The pages were brittle, the text written in an archaic English filled with esoteric symbols and strange, spidery diagrams.
"She died for this book, Harris," he said grimly. "We're not going to let that be for nothing. We need to find what she wanted to show us."
They spent the next few hours poring over the text, a suspended detective and his loyal constable trying to decipher the arcane ramblings of a 17th-century mystic. It was Harris, with his knack for seeing patterns in chaos, who found it first. A chapter titled 'On the Construction of the Archon'.
The text was dense and looping, but the core of it was terrifyingly clear. It described a ritual for creating a perfect being, a homunculus, by harvesting five key "virtues" from worthy vessels. It listed them: Perception, Form, Instinct, Identity, and Will. An exact match.
But it was the final passage of the chapter that made them both freeze. It detailed the last phase of the ritual, the "Unification." The five harvested traits, it claimed, were inert components. To bind them together into a single, transcendent consciousness, a final, catalytic element was required.
The ritual needed a 'Conductor'.
The text described this person not as a victim to be harvested, but as an officiant. Someone who, willingly or unwillingly, would channel the energies and preside over the final, metaphysical transfer. This Conductor needed to possess a rare balance of public authority and deep, respected empathy.
Corbin and Harris looked at each other, the same horrifying realisation dawning on them both. Dame Eleanor Swift. The decorated war correspondent, the beloved philanthropist, the national treasure. Her profile didn't perfectly match the victim of the masterpiece. It perfectly matched the officiant of the ceremony.
The final, devastating twist of the knife.
They had been wrong. Terribly, completely wrong.
The cabal wasn't going to the gala to attack Dame Eleanor. They were going because they needed her, alive and intact, to complete their ritual. The real victim, the true 'masterpiece' who would be deconstructed to have the five traits poured into them, was someone else entirely. Someone who would also be at that gala.
Miles felt a fresh wave of nausea, more potent than any he'd felt before. Their entire investigation had been built on a false premise. They weren't protecting the right person.
He looked at the printout of the gala's guest list they had acquired, his eyes scanning the names of the rich and powerful. The vessel was in there somewhere.
"My God, Harris," he whispered, the full weight of his failure crashing down on him. He looked at the picture of the smiling, formidable Dame Eleanor.
"She's not the canvas," he said, his voice flat with horror. "She's the paintbrush."