The Forger's Letter: 2

Agnes Ashdown kept records for sixty years. Now someone is killing to make sure those records never surface. Victoria Lane has settled into Thornevale -- into Agnes's house, Agnes's archive, and the slow, methodical work of understanding what her great-aunt built and why. The 1970s drawer has yielded twelve years of careful correspondence with an authentication expert, confirming what Agnes had known since 1962: the painting in the festival's permanent collection is not what it claims to be. Then an anonymous Swiss foundation announces a loan to the festival. A Post-Impressionist interior. Late 1930s. Never before publicly exhibited. The timing is not a coincidence. When the independent authenticator brought in to verify the loan is found dead -- apparent cardiac arrest, documentation missing -- Tor recognises the pattern. It is the same method, the same precision, the same deliberate plausibility as the previous year's murder. The network Agnes had been watching has decided that Thornevale is a problem. To find out how far it reaches, Tor will have to leave the archive behind and follow the evidence wherever it leads.