Chapter 67
The Box of Sheet Music
Ivy found the missing page inside a box of sheet music.
The box belonged to Elise’s mother. Mara had carried it from the storage unit because she believed it contained only old lessons.
The page was folded between two piano scores.
Its first line completed the sentence:
If Nolan finds you, tell him the first payment was mine.
The second line had been written beneath it.
I paid Bell because he said Nolan’s family would come. I did not know Bell had already spoken to them.
Nolan read the page once.
“My family knew,” he said.
“They may have known Bell,” Saira replied. “Not necessarily you.”
“The payment came from my grandfather’s trust.”
“The transfer did.”
“And Bell told her it came from my family.”
Elise folded the page.
“We still do not know whether Bell was lying.”
Mara shook her head. “He lied about other things.”
“Then he may have lied about this.”
“He may have.”
Ivy wrote the date in her timeline.
The page had been hidden for seventeen years. The sheet music had belonged to a community choir that Elise’s mother directed after the birth.
“Why would she hide it there?” Ivy asked.
“Because no one in the family could read music,” Mara said.
Elise looked at her.
“You could.”
“I was not in the house.”
“You knew where to look.”
Mara did not deny it.
Rhea scanned the page and sent it to Saira.
The lawyer replied that the document strengthened their request for an injunction but did not identify the original source of the payment.
“There is always another missing fact,” Ivy said.
“That is what makes an investigation,” Rhea answered.
“Or a trap.”
The phone rang.
No caller ID appeared.
Nolan answered.
A man said, “You found the page.”
“Who is this?”
“Someone who knows what Bell did.”
“Then give us the name.”
“Names are expensive.”
The call ended.
A text followed.
The second recording is not in London.
The message included an address.
It belonged to the first gallery where Nolan had shown the Hayward.
The gallery had been converted into offices, but its old archive room remained below street level. The address in the text led to a locked service door and a property manager who had never heard of Nolan's exhibition.
Mara sent the manager a preservation notice. Rhea searched the gallery's former catalogues and found a reference to a private listening event held after the exhibition closed. The event had not been advertised, and the guest list was missing from the public archive.
Nolan remembered the night.
“Bell was there,” he said. “He told me the painting was dangerous because it made people ask who had paid for the room.”
Elise asked whether he had met another person.
“A woman near the back. I thought she worked for the gallery.”
Saira found a photograph from the opening. The woman stood beside the sound system, partly hidden by a curtain. Her face was turned away, but her coat carried the logo of a legal services company.
The company had represented the dissolved donor entity.
The gallery manager finally found a storage register. A cassette had been removed from the listening room two weeks after the exhibition. The person who signed it out used a code rather than a name.
The code matched the address in the anonymous text.
Mara requested the current owner of the storage unit. The owner had changed three times. The last transfer occurred after Voss's company acquired the building.
“Everything keeps arriving at Voss,” Ivy said.
“Then we trace the route,” Mara answered.
The storage unit was empty when the court officer opened it. A single piano score remained on a shelf. The page numbers had been cut out, but a handwritten date survived on the inside cover.
It was the date of Nolan's private listening event.
The second recording was not in London.
It had been moved through London and erased somewhere else. The court officer photographed the piano score and returned it to the shelf. Mara requested the gallery's historical insurance files, which listed the private listening event as a “donor consultation.” The phrase connected the event to Bell's fee records.
The former director said the gallery had received an anonymous cultural grant that covered the exhibition's legal and security costs. He had assumed the donor wanted privacy.
He produced a guest ledger with three names removed. The removal had been authorized by a trustee who later became a consultant to Voss.
Ivy asked whether the second recording could have contained the first payment discussion. The answer was impossible to know without recovering the tape.
Mara sent the gallery records to the court. Voss's lawyer objected that they were irrelevant. The judge allowed limited preservation and ordered the gallery not to destroy remaining donor materials.
The piano score returned to its box. The page inside the sheet music had started the investigation. The missing recording now showed how long someone had been trying to end it. The gallery's former director signed a declaration stating that Bell had asked for the private listening event to be kept off the public calendar. He had said the event concerned a donor's “personal reconciliation,” not an exhibition dispute.
Nolan remembered leaving the gallery with the feeling that someone had decided what he was allowed to know.
The declaration did not identify the donor. It did establish that Bell had controlled the description of the event before the payment records were found.
Mara asked the court to require the gallery to identify the trustee who removed the names from the ledger. The trustee had died, but the trust records listed a successor.
The successor was a company controlled by Voss.
Ivy entered the connection into the timeline and marked it as circumstantial.
“Circumstantial is not useless,” Saira said.
“No,” Ivy answered. “It is just not finished.”
The second recording remained unrecovered. The piano score remained in the gallery box. The court officer placed a seal over the box and recorded its location. Nolan asked whether the seal meant the recording would eventually be found.
“It means no one can claim they did not know where to look,” Mara said.
The gallery agreed to preserve the remaining donor files for ninety days. Rhea added the deadline to the calendar.
The anonymous caller sent no further message.
The silence was not proof that the investigation had ended. It was only the next fact they had not yet received.
Mara sent the preserved gallery records to the court and asked the judge to identify the successor company that controlled the trustee's files.
The answer arrived under seal.
The successor company was registered by a former partner of Bell's firm and funded through an account connected to Voss. Mara could not publish the connection, but she could use it to request a complete chain of custody.
The judge ordered the company to preserve its trustee files.
The box of sheet music remained closed.
Its contents were preserved, not performed. The missing recording still waited elsewhere. Under the court order. Still unrecovered. The court retained the question. For now.