The dinner lasted two and a half hours.
I made it through all of it.
Afterward, in the kitchen, while Yolanda and I worked through the clearing in companionable exhaustion, she said quietly without looking at me: "You did well."
"Thank you."
"The first time you're in a room with him" She paused, choosing words carefully. "He's a lot. Even if you like him, he's a lot."
I looked at her. "Do you? Like him?"
Yolanda considered this with the honesty of someone too tired to be diplomatic. "I think he's the kind of man who's very good to the people he's decided matter." She stacked a plate. "I just wouldn't want to be the kind of person he's decided doesn't."
She said it without drama. A simple observation from nineteen no, she'd said four years four years of working in this house.
I thought about my father watching pigeons from a window in a care facility.
"No," I agreed quietly. "Neither would I."
I didn't go straight to my room.
I went to the east corridor instead, walking slowly, hands in the pockets of my uniform, the house quiet around me at nearly ten p.m.
I stood outside the third door past the staircase and looked at it for a long time.
All of it was behind that door. I had to believe that. The paper trail, the forged documents, the connection to Marcus Veil whose name had no business being as buried as it was.
Whatever Gerald had used to dismantle my father's life was documented somewhere because men like Gerald always documented things they had to, for their own protection, to hold leverage over everyone involved.
It was all there.
I just had to get to it.
Thirty-three minutes, I thought. Every morning.
My eyes moved to the mirror at the end of the corridor. The gilt-framed one, hanging at its careless, useful angle.
I'd had four days to watch Overton punch in the code.
I had three of the four digits.
Soon I'd have the last one.
Soon.
I turned and walked back toward the staff quarters.
Behind me, somewhere in the private wing, I heard Gerald Coldwell say goodnight to his last departing guest, his voice carrying the warm, satisfied tone of a man who had enjoyed his evening enormously.
I kept walking.
Enjoy it, I thought.
While you still can.
The last digit was a seven.
I got it on Monday morning at 7:31 a.m., standing at the end of the east corridor with a stack of fresh towels I didn't need, watching the gilt-framed mirror with the peripheral focus I'd spent weeks developing. Overton arrived at his usual time, punched the code with his usual straight-backed posture, and the mirror did the rest.
4. 1. 9. 7.
Four digits.
One door.
Everything I'd come here for.
I walked back to the linen cupboard, put the towels away with perfectly steady hands, and told myself I would wait until Thursday.
I lasted until Wednesday
Wednesday arrived grey and cold, the kind of November morning that made the mansion feel like a held breath. I was up at five-thirty an hour before my shift, which I'd been doing all week to build it into the pattern of my behaviour so that no one would find it unusual later.
At 7:16, Dominic took his coffee to the open study.
At 7:44, I watched from the supply corridor as Overton's car pulled into the service drive four minutes late, which meant his arrival at the study would be pushed to 7:52 at the earliest.
Thirty-six minutes instead of thirty-three.
Three extra minutes I hadn't planned for but would not waste.
At 7:19, I walked to the east corridor.
Stopped outside the third door.
Pressed 4-1-9-7.
The lock clicked open like it had been waiting for me.
Gerald Coldwell's private study smelled like leather and old paper and something faintly chemical that I placed after a moment as the specific brand of wood polish the staff used on the antique desk. A large mahogany piece, the kind bought to impress rather than to work at, though from the organised surface it was clear Gerald actually used it.
I didn't turn on the light. The curtains were half open grey morning light, enough.
I moved directly to the desk.
Top drawer unlocked. Stationery, a chequebook, correspondence I didn't care about. I noted the positions of everything before touching anything, replacing with exact precision as I went.
Second drawer locked.
I'd anticipated this.
The lock was a simple pin tumbler, the kind that came standard in mahogany desks of this era. I'd practiced on an identical model for two weeks in my flat before taking this job, using a tension wrench and a pick I now kept taped behind the loose skirting board in my room. I hadn't brought them today too risky on a first entry.
Today was reconnaissance only.
Third drawer filing system. Colour-coded tabs, meticulous. Gerald was organised in the way of a man who trusted no one else to manage his information. I moved through the tabs carefully, reading labels, building the mental map I'd come for.
Legal. Investments. Property. Personnel. Correspondence Board. Correspondence Private.
I slowed at Correspondence Private.
Behind it a section with no label at all. Just a red tab.
I glanced at my watch.
7:24.
I had time.
I eased the red-tabbed section forward and looked at the first document.
It was a letter. Single page, no letterhead, dated fourteen months ago. The handwriting was small and controlled not Gerald's loose executive scrawl. Someone else.
I read the first two lines.
Then I read them again.
Then I checked my watch 7:25 and stood very still for ten seconds while the contents rearranged something fundamental in the architecture of my plan.
The letter was addressed to Gerald.
It was about my father.
And it was signed not with a name I recognised, not with Marcus Veil's name as I might have expected but with two letters.
D.C.