Chapter Three: What Denholm Kept

Denholm kept his three slips in an unmarked tin that had once held travel sweets, at the back of a drawer that officially held spare typewriter ribbons for a typewriter the office no longer owned. He set the tin on the desk between them like a man producing evidence he had hoped never to need.

All three were dated ahead of their discovery. All three had proven, on the relevant date, to be accurate to the centimetre. And all three, like Reva’s, had turned up inside ledgers that had been sealed in storage for years before the slip’s paper stock had even existed — which meant, Denholm said, that either someone was breaking into a locked archive to plant paper that didn’t exist yet, or the slips were arriving by some other means he had spent nineteen years failing to imagine.

“I used to think it was a colleague’s private project,” he said. “Somebody clever, keeping a running joke going for decades, dying, and someone else picking it up without telling me. I stopped thinking that when I found the second one, because the ink chemistry didn’t match between the first and the second, and no two people write identically enough to fool a lab, which I had one slip tested, quietly, by a friend who does document forensics for the county archive.”

“What did the lab say?”

“That the ink was consistent with manufacture no more than two years before the slip’s discovery date. Which would be perfectly ordinary, if the slip hadn’t been sitting inside a ledger that had been under lock since before that ink existed.”

Reva turned the tin slowly, reading each slip again as though a fourth reading might produce a different, more comfortable answer than the first three had. It didn’t. “So you think someone is sending these back,” she said. “From after.”

“I think,” Denholm said, in the tone of a man who had rehearsed not saying this sentence for a very long time, “that somewhere in this building there is a fourth ledger. One that hasn’t been written yet. And something is filing pages from it early, by mistake, the way a letter sometimes arrives at the wrong house on the right street.”