The storage unit was in Žižkov, a fifteen-minute walk from his apartment, in a building that had been a factory of some kind before it was converted. A long corridor with numbered metal doors on both sides, fluorescent strip lighting that flickered at the far end, where the fitting had been loose for as long as he'd been coming here. He had been paying the monthly fee for twenty-six months. He had visited four times in that period, twice in the first week after the accident, when he had brought her belongings here because he could not have them in the apartment he was living in at the time, and then twice more in the following months to confirm that the lock was holding and the unit was dry. He had not opened the door on either of those two later visits.
He had the key on a separate ring from his other keys. He had always kept it separate.
He unlocked the unit, pulled the door up, and stood in the entrance for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the interior light, which was a single weak bulb on a pull cord. The unit was three meters deep and two wide. Floor to ceiling with her things.
He had done the packing himself over the two days after the accident, before he flew back to London. He had done it systematically and without allowing himself to stop and look at anything, because stopping and looking was something he had understood, even then, that he could not afford to do. So the boxes were labeled efficiently: kitchen, books, photography, clothing, documents, and stacked efficiently, and the whole thing had the orderly appearance of someone who had moved house cleanly rather than someone who had packed away a life in a state of shock.
He started with the boxes labeled documents.
There were three of them. He went through the first two methodically. Bank statements, insurance records, her university transcripts from Charles University, correspondence in Czech that he could read only partially but that appeared to be professional rather than personal, her architectural consultancy work, client records, and project files. These were the expected things. He set them aside carefully and opened the third box.
More files. A folder of property documents. Another of her personal records includes her identity documents, her parents' death records, and the documentation of her Czech citizenship. He went through each folder, and then he reached the bottom of the box.
There was a book there, beneath the last folder. Small, hardcover, dark blue cloth binding worn at the corners. No title on the spine. No title on the cover. He opened it.
The first page.
Her handwriting, he knew it well enough that seeing it caused a physical response, a tightening in the chest that he had learned over two years to acknowledge and then keep moving through. But what the handwriting said stopped him for a full ten seconds.
The characters were not Czech. Not any language he had been able to read in her journals and correspondence before. They were geometric. Angular. The same leftward lean on the vertical strokes. The same character density he had seen last week in the empty building on the side street.
The same script as the inscriptions.
He turned pages. All of it in the same hand, the same script, sixty or seventy pages of it, the entries dated in numerals that were standard enough to read the oldest going back four years, the most recent three weeks before she died.
He sat down on the floor of the storage unit with his back against the door frame and held the journal with both hands.
He had known she spoke Czech, English, German, and basic French. He had known she was deeply interested in the city's architectural history; it was how they had met, at a professional conference in London, a symposium on medieval European urban structures where she had given a paper on pre-1600 building methods in Bohemia. He had not known she could read or write a language that no public database could identify and that had been carved into hidden walls across the historic center of Prague.
He went back to the boxes.
He found the map in the photography box, folded under her camera equipment, a large paper map of Prague. He unfolded it carefully on the floor of the storage unit. The map had been annotated by hand in the same pen she always used, a fine black fineliner she went through at the rate of one per month, with small, precise marks at twelve locations across the city.
He took out his phone. Pulled up the photograph he had taken of his own map, the one on his kitchen table with the red dots.
He went through each of her twelve marks and compared them to his nineteen dots.
Seven of them matched exactly.
Seven of the twelve locations she had marked were locations where he had independently confirmed the hum was present. He had found those seven locations through eight months of systematic work across the city, through a process of physical testing and careful documentation. She had known them. She had them written on a map that had been folded in a box under her camera equipment for twenty-six months.
He sat very still for a moment, and then he kept going because stopping was not going to help.
The photographs were in the same box. Three folders of prints, her work, she had been a professional photographer before she moved into architectural consultancy, and she had never fully stopped, the camera always with her. He went through the first two folders quickly, architectural work, the familiar texture of her eye for old surfaces and light.
The third folder was different.
All of them were of Charles Bridge. Taken at night, or in the early morning before tourists arrived. Dozens of shots, varying focal lengths, and different sections of the bridge. He went through them slowly. Most were the bridge itself, the statues, the towers, the stone surface in various lights and weathers. And then, near the back of the folder, one photograph that was different from the others.
She was in it.
She was standing on the bridge, shot from a distance, the angle suggesting the camera had been on a tripod and the shutter had been triggered remotely. The timestamp in the lower corner of the print: 03:14. The date: three weeks before she died. She was standing at the fourth pillar on the left bank side. His pillar. The one he went to every time he crossed.
She was not looking at the camera. She was looking down. At the stone beneath her feet. Her posture was not casual; she was standing the way a person stands when they are paying close attention to something, when they are trying to hear something, when they are doing something that requires concentration and stillness.
He looked at the photograph for a long time.
Then he looked at what was in the lower left corner of the frame. The bridge stone, close to her feet. A hairline crack, barely visible, running diagonally across the pale limestone surface.
The crack.
The same crack he had seen in the photograph he had taken of the Cartographer's position two weeks ago. The crack that had not appeared in his documentation from six weeks prior. The crack that had been warm on a cold morning.
She had been photographing it three weeks before she died. Before it was visible to him. Before the Cartographer appeared beside it. Three weeks before the night she died on this same bridge, at roughly this same hour.
He put the photograph down on the floor of the storage unit and breathed.
He went back to the journal. He could not read the body of it not yet, not without Mira's help and the phonetic key they were building, but the dates were readable, and he paged to the last entry. The final dated entry was three weeks before she died.
He could not read what it said. He stared at the characters, running through the phonetic values he had so far, sounding out fragments. Some he could almost get. Mostly he couldn't. But at the very bottom of the last entry, beneath the main text, she had written two lines that were different.
In English.
Her English handwriting, which he would have recognized anywhere, in any context, in any state.
He must not know yet. But he will feel it. He already does.
He closed the journal.
He sat in the storage unit in the flickering fluorescent light for a considerable amount of time. He did not know exactly how long because he stopped tracking it. The hum was there, low and steady, as it always was, and he breathed around it and held the journal in both hands and thought about a woman who had died on a bridge three weeks after writing those words.
He must not know yet.
Him. She was writing about him. She had been documenting something he didn't understand, in a language he hadn't known she could write, on a map she had hidden under her camera equipment. She had known he would feel the hum. She had known it before he understood what the hum was. She had written it down as a certainty, not a hope, not a guess.
He will feel it.
He packed the journal, the map, and the photograph carefully into his bag. He turned off the unit light. He pulled the door down and locked it.
On the walk home through the dark streets of Žižkov, the hum was slightly louder than usual. Or he was simply less willing now to pretend it was something ordinary.
He had stopped pretending it was something ordinary.
End of Chapter 10