Chapter 48: The Name in the Margin

I read the notebook through twice and then I put it down and went to the window and looked out at the men at the gate and the harbor beyond them and the first grey light coming up over the water.

Ronan put the kettle on. Declan was sitting in the chair by the fire with his hands hanging between his knees and had not spoken since I read the last page aloud.

“The false bond,” he said at last. “She believed it was false. That is why she did it.”

“That is why she did it.” I turned round. “She believed the Alpha had made a false bond between the two of you and that the thing she felt was not real. And she rejected you to break a lie, and the lie broke the both of you anyway.”

Declan looked at the fire.

“I have spent a year hating her for it,” he said. “I have spent a year sitting in that office at noon going through the boathouse and telling myself that she chose the seat over me. And she did it because she thought the bond was a counterfeit and she was saving me from a thing that was not real.” He put his hand over his face. “And the thing she felt was real. Ronan has just told us the thing she felt was real. The Alpha could not counterfeit a true bond and so she put a false one on the two of us and broke it, and the true one was the one she could not touch.”

Ronan set the cups on the table.

“There is a thing in this notebook that neither of you has looked at properly,” he said. “You have both been reading the pages about the bond and the claim and the boathouse and you have gone past the first page the way a wolf goes past a signpost he thinks he knows.” He opened the notebook and turned it to the beginning. “Look at the margin of the first page of the healer’s notes. The page where I wrote down the wounds and the dressings and the hour I was called to the hall.”

I looked. The page was covered in Ronan’s small careful hand, and down the left hand margin, in a different ink and a different hand, thin and elegant and sloping to the right, there was a line of writing that ran the whole length of the page.

“That is not your hand,” I said.

“It is not. It is the Alpha’s hand. She wrote it in this notebook when I left it on the table in the hall to get my bag.” Ronan put his finger on it. “Read it.”

I read it.

“Cormac, the boathouse, Thursday, the rope, the boy, the father, the water. Cormac, the boathouse, Thursday. Cormac. The boy is the proof. The boy is the proof and the boy must not speak.”

I read it three times.

“She wrote this in your notebook,” I said. “In your hand’s book. She wrote it in the margin of the healer’s notes on the night of the claim and she left it there and she did not take it out.”

“She wrote it while I was out of the room and she thought I would not look at the margin. And I did not look at the margin for a month because I am an old man and I read the middle of the page and not the edges.” Ronan sat down. “She has written the whole thing down in her own hand and she has signed nothing and she has dated nothing and she did not know she was doing it. The boathouse and the rope and the boy and the father and the water. And then the thing that matters. The boy is the proof and the boy must not speak.”

Declan was on his feet. “She was planning it before it happened. The margin note is dated the Thursday. The Thursday is the night of the claim. She wrote the word boathouse in that margin before she put your sister in the boathouse.”

“She wrote it while the woman was on the floor of the hall,” Ronan said. “She wrote it in the margin of the healer’s notes while I was in the next room getting my bag and while her Beta was kneeling beside the woman on the floor. And she wrote the boy’s name four times.”

I stood at the table with the notebook open and the whole of it in front of me.

“Then the boy is not the murderer,” I said. “The boy is the proof. She wrote it down. She wrote down that the boy was the proof and that the boy must not speak, and she wrote it in a book that she gave to the healer by leaving it on the table, and the healer put it in his coat and carried it home and did not read the margin.” I looked at Declan. “Your son is not the murderer. Your son is the witness and the Alpha has known it since the Thursday and she has been keeping him in her hand ever since.”

Declan sat down slowly. His hands were shaking.

“She told him the woman in the harbor was his mother,” he said. “She told him that to keep him frightened. She has been keeping him frightened since he was fourteen because a frightened boy is a boy who does not speak.”

“And on Saturday morning,” I said, “when the co-op is on the pier and the enforcer is beside her and the boat is going out, she is going to stand up and she is going to say that the boy is a murderer and that his father covered it up, and the co-op will believe her because the co-op has been told for a month that the Beta is a broken man and the boy is a strange boy.” I picked up the notebook. “And she will be standing on that pier with a margin note in a healer’s notebook that says the boy is the proof, and she does not know it exists.”

Ronan put his cup down.

“There is a thing I have not told you either,” he said. “The margin note is not the only thing in this book. Turn to the back page. The last page. The one your sister wrote on.”

I turned to the back. My sister’s line was there in her shaky hand.

And under it, in the same thin elegant sloping hand, in the same ink as the margin, there was another line.

“The boy is not to be harmed. He is worth more alive. M.”

The kitchen was very quiet. Declan stood at the window with his back to us and his shoulders were going.

“She wrote that on the same night,” Ronan said. “She wrote it under your sister’s last words and she thought no one would ever read it because she thought your sister’s words were a thing that would be burned with the body.” He looked at me. “She has written her own name in the margin of a healer’s notebook in a house with a witness in it and she has written the boy’s name four times and she has written that he is not to be harmed. And that is the thing we put on the table in front of the co-op on Saturday.”

I closed the notebook and put it in my coat.

“There is one thing I have to do before Saturday,” I said, “and I cannot do it alone and I cannot do it in this cottage with two men at the gate. I have to go to the coastguard cottage on the north side of the headland and I have to find the woman who has been kept there since 1961 and who is my mother’s sister and who is the only wolf alive who was in the hall on the night of the fire.” I looked at Declan. “And I have to do it tonight, before the Alpha does whatever she is going to do with her.”

Declan turned round. His face was grey and set.

“The men at the gate are Tom and Leo,” he said. “Tom will not stop me. Leo is seventy and he will not stop anyone.” He picked up his coat. “I will get the boat and bring it round to the cove below the cottage and we will go along the shore under the headland and come up the north side in the dark. And there is a thing I have to do first and it will take an hour.”

“What thing?”

“I have to go to my son and tell him that his mother is in the ground on the hill and that the woman in the harbor was a schoolteacher and that the Alpha has been lying to him since he was fourteen.” He put his coat on. “And then I have to tell him that he is the proof and that on Saturday morning he is going to stand up in front of the whole co-op and say what he heard in the hall on the Thursday night, and that his father will be standing beside him.”