Map of Shadows

Chapter 1

1

Sienna Farren’s footsteps echoed in the long corridor, acres of books in racks either side stretching into the shadows ahead of her. Dim lights came on as she walked, triggered by her movement.

It was like a bomb shelter down here. The world could be ending above ground in Oxford, but below the streets, she would be cushioned by the padding of ancient tomes. Sienna smiled, lost in thought. She could build a shelter in the underground stacks of the Bodleian Library. A den of ripped pages and a fire to keep her warm from words once considered special but now merely fuel. And she could read all day and half the night. Who could be lonely when there was so much to learn?

She passed into an older part of the library. The functional metal shelving gave way to wooden stacks with carved lintels and wheels on the end to move them closer together. Sienna frowned. She didn't recognize this section. She stopped and tugged on a cord to turn on brighter lights and bent to read the sign on the end of the nearest row. Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries. She frowned and looked down at the retrieval slip in her hand. This was nowhere near where she was meant to be.

Sienna sighed. It was only her second week working in the library, and once again, she was lost. She should have turned left at Metaphysics, but she must have walked straight past the stack. By the time she retraced her steps and made it back over there, the Head Librarian would be tutting and looking at his watch, frown deepening in his furrowed brow. Books first, readers second, and lowly library clerks most definitely last. She turned and looked back the way she'd walked. The stacks stretched away, seemingly endless, darkening to shadow.

She sat down on the floor for a moment, leaning back against the shelf, sending up a cloud of dust into the air. The remains of crumbling pages, words written by those long dead, preserved down here as if somehow, someone would recall them up to the rarefied air of the University once more.

She really needed to get a life.

It had been a year since leaving St Peter's College where Sienna had read Geography. Her friends had moved to jobs in London, but she hadn't been ready to leave Oxford quite yet. It had become her home over the years of study, a welcome escape from the suffocating cocoon of her mother's house. She'd flitted around various short-term jobs and finally landed this position, hoping it might be the right fit. But as she sat surrounded by old books, Sienna knew that this was over too.

Perhaps it was time to give in and move to London like everyone else. Perhaps she should even try again with Ben. They had been inseparable in her first two years at college, but he was a year older and got a job in the City after Finals. They'd held it together for the first year, but when she didn't move as he had expected, they began to drift apart. Right now, Sienna felt untethered, like a boat bobbing freely on the waves. She should be experiencing the exhilaration of freedom, but instead, she found herself longing for the shore. London hadn't felt like the right direction, but maybe it was time to give it another chance.

She looked at her watch and stood up quickly. Clutching the retrieval slip, she retraced her steps, navigating by the signs at the end of the corridors until she found the book and hurried back to the Head Librarian's desk. He looked up as she emerged into the main vault of the Radcliffe Camera. His shaggy white eyebrows arched over his wire-rim glasses and Sienna felt his disdain rest upon her. He tapped his watch.

"Sorry," she whispered, as she placed the book on his desk. "I'm going out for my break now."

Sienna turned before he could stop her and hurried up the little stairs out onto the steps of the Rad Cam. The air was fresh outside. Mid-June and still a little chilly, but there was a patch of sun on the other side of the square. As she walked down the steps, Sienna turned on her phone, and within seconds, it started beeping with text messages and missed calls. Her mum had been calling on and off for the last hour. That was unusual. She was over-protective, but this was a lot even for her.

Sienna stood in the sun at the corner of the square by Brasenose Lane and called back.

"Hi, Mum. What's up?"

"Oh, sweetheart. Something dreadful has happened. Your grandfather—“ Her voice broke with a little sob.

Sienna frowned. Her mum's dad was already dead, mourned as a beloved granddad who had always shown her interesting things in the hedgerows and fields near their country house. Her Dad’s dad was a distant memory, a man she hadn't seen or heard from since the year she started high school. He had been around after her father had disappeared, lost on a geographic survey to Antarctica, but then he'd faded into the background of their lives.

"What do you mean? What's happened?"

Her mum blew her nose, then continued. "Your grandfather's body was found this morning in Bath, just down the road from his map shop. They're saying it's some kind of ritual murder. A friend of his, Bridget, called me and told me the news."

Shock slammed through Sienna at the words. Her grandfather murdered? It seemed impossible.

"Bridget said he left something for you. She wants to talk to you."

Sienna's breath caught in her throat. Ten years and the pain of losing her Dad still hurt, but curiosity rose at her mother's words. "Do you have her number?"

"She said you should go to Bath, to Grandad's old map shop and she would meet you there." A pause, then her mum's voice changed. "I don't think you should go, sweetie. You're working now. You're busy. You don't want to go to that musty old map shop. It was always a complete mess when I went there with your dad back in the day. I'm sure this Bridget can send whatever it is."

Sienna half listened as she remembered losing herself in the antique map shop as a child. The wonders of the world rendered in so many different ways. The smell of thick paper and ink, the weight and size of the maps on the wall, intricate tiny streets and imagined animals in the corners, cartouches of long-dead kings, calligraphy of names that no longer existed. She remembered running her hands over the maps, sensing a vibration of energy, like they wanted her to step inside somehow. Then the concern on her dad's face, a sadness, like he wanted her to see only printed paper, not the world beyond the map. After he disappeared, Mum had never taken her back there.

"I want to go," Sienna said, cutting off her mother's stream of words.

"But what about your job?”

Sienna looked up at the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and the spires of All Souls College behind it. A gaggle of students burst from Brasenose College, chatting as they walked off to lectures. That was not her life anymore.

"It's not really working out, to be honest. So I'll go to Bath this afternoon. It's only a few hours on the bus."

"But I can't get down there, sweetheart. You shouldn't go alone."

"I'm just going to the shop, Mum. I'm not going to visit the morgue or anything."

Her mum sighed. "Alright, but call me later. Your Grandfather was a meddler in life. I would expect him to be just as bad now he's gone."

As the bus drove through the outskirts of Bath a few hours later, Sienna gazed out the window at the fine Georgian terraces made from the distinctive honey-colored limestone that made the city famous for its architecture. Bath was smaller than Oxford, but there was a similar sense of historic weight about it. A World Heritage Site dominated by the ancient Roman Baths and medieval Abbey, Bath had become a fashionable Georgian spa town, made famous by the books of Jane Austen.

Sienna remembered her dad talking about the background of the Farren family, how they had lived in Somerset for generations. He had only left the area because her mum had wanted to live in London, the hub of politics boosting her foreign aid work. But now Sienna returned to the south-west, without Dad, and with Granddad gone. The only Farren left of their line.

The bus stopped downtown, and Sienna walked up through the shops, navigating past the grand Abbey and up the hill towards The Circus. She passed a group of American tourists on the edge of Queen Square, their guide explaining loudly:

"This square marks the bottom of a key with The Circus at the top of the hill as the round end. Seen from above, it forms a Masonic shape built into the architecture of the city along with symbols of Druidic times."

His voice faded into the hubbub of the traffic as Sienna continued walking uphill towards the circle of trees visible on the rise at the end of the terrace.

As she reached the top, she paused to catch her breath, admiring the Georgian townhouses that curved around in a perfect circle. Three tiers of windows, each flanked by classical columns, rose up towards the blue sky. Acorn finials of stone topped the buildings, and between each tier, a carved frieze wove its way around portraying nautical elements, serpents and masonic symbols. In the center of the circle, five huge plane trees stood tall on lush green grass, their leaves rustling in the breeze. It would have been peaceful, a glimpse into a regal past, but today, bright yellow Crime Scene tape wrapped around the trees. Police officers stood on the perimeter, faces impassive, even as tourists took photos of the curious spectacle.

Sienna's heart thumped as she crossed the road and stood on the edge of the tape, as close as she dared go. Scene of Crime Officers still worked on the grass, but she could see between them to the trunk of the largest tree. Even from this distance, she could see it was stained with blood.

What had happened here last night? Her grandfather ran an antique map shop, so why would anyone want to hurt him? Perhaps his friend Bridget would be able to help.

Sienna walked away down Brock Street and turned off before the Royal Crescent into Elizabeth Buildings. It was a short pedestrianized street, an eclectic mix of little shops and cafés punctuated by colorful flowers and wooden benches. She passed a curiosity shop with a maritime trunk in the window alongside a carved wooden cross from one of the derelict churches in the nearby countryside. There was a shop selling crystals and fossils next to a painting and craft boutique with glass jewelry in the window; an art gallery; a secondhand bookstore and there, in the middle, her grandfather's map shop.

While the other places bustled with tourists, the map shop remained locked, its window in shadow. Sienna walked up and looked in at the display. An old county map of Somerset stood in central position, its hills marked with contoured shading. Next to it, her grandfather's book on the history of cartography, propped open by a tiny engraved globe in a lacquered wooden box. The shop was dark inside, but she could just make out his desk at the back, surrounded by crates of maps in plastic wrapping and the huge globe that had fascinated her as a child.

"You must be Sienna."

The voice made her jump. Sienna turned to see a woman with close-cropped dark hair standing behind. Her eyes were a piercing blue, and although the lines around them suggested the woman was over forty, she possessed an almost elfin look of mischief that made her appear younger. She wore a long dress of patchwork linen in shades of green, like the fields of the West Country in summer, interspersed with the bright yellow of rapeseed.

"I'm Bridget Ronan, a friend of your grandfather's. I recognize you from his photos. Michael had that same bright titian hair, although it looks better on you." Bridget's voice had a soft Irish lilt, and Sienna found herself immediately warming to the woman.

"Thanks for meeting me."

Bridget's welcoming smile faded. "I'm so sorry for your loss, and for mine. Michael was a good friend and already sorely missed." She pulled a key from her bag. "Now, come inside." Bridget unlocked the door and pushed it open.

Sienna walked in and as she inhaled the scent of the maps, she felt like she had come home. They called to her from the display racks, and she wanted to run her fingers over the lines, tracing the borders of the world. She walked to her grandfather's desk and turned the seventeenth-century globe a little, looking for the Barbary Coast, the area of North Africa that seemed so foreign to her when she was little. She found it and touched the picture of the apes sprawled over modern Algeria, a smile playing about her lips as she remembered the stories her grandfather told of times past.

She looked up at Bridget. "What happened to him?"

Bridget took a deep breath. "There's a lot we still don't know." She pulled an envelope from her bag. "But Michael gave me this to keep in case anything ever happened to him. He was nearly eighty, so he expected his time to come, although not as suddenly as this." Her eyes filled with tears as she handed Sienna the envelope. "I need to go deal with a couple of things in town, so I'll leave this with you, give you some time alone. I'll come back in an hour or so. That okay?"

Sienna nodded, and Bridget turned away, leaving the scent of flowers in her wake. Sienna looked down at the envelope, her name written on the front in her grandfather's spidery hand.