The silence inside the Old Bailey was a living thing, dense and watchful. Elara's breath came in shallow gasps, her footsteps swallowed by the cavernous, marbled hall. She moved on instinct, guided by the logic of a man who saw courtrooms as stages.
He wouldn't be in a modern chamber. He'd seek the oldest, most symbolic heart of the building. The first courtroom. Where the echoes of the most famous—and infamous—judgements still lingered.
She found the door to Court Number One. It was slightly ajar, a slash of dim, golden light cutting across the checkered floor of the hallway. From within, a soft, rhythmic sound echoed. Scrape… thud. Scrape… thud.
Pushing the door open, she stepped into history.
Court Number One was a sombre, wood-panelled amphitheatre of justice. The public gallery rose in steep tiers, empty and dark. The jury box sat vacant. But in the well of the court, the scene was lit by a single, ancient-looking oil lamp placed on the clerk's desk.
In the centre of the floor, a man in a cheap suit knelt, trembling violently. It was a stranger, middle-aged, sweating through his shirt. His hands were bound behind him with what looked like old, waxed cord. And on the floor before him, scattered in a deliberate semi-circle, were dozens of dried peas.
Scrape… thud.
He was being forced to shuffle on his knees across the peas, the pain contorting his face into a silent rictus of agony. A modern chorister, performing his penance.
And seated in the Judge's high chair, perched not on the cushion but on the carved wooden back like a dark king on a throne, was Leo Sandys. He watched the man's agony with an expression of detached, academic interest. In his hand, he held not a gavel, but the Aethelred Diadem. It glittered wickedly in the lamplight.
"You're late for the summation, Dr. Vance," Sandys said, his voice calm, conversational, echoing slightly in the empty room. He didn't look at her, his eyes fixed on the shuffling man. "The evidence has been presented. The theft is incontrovertible." He gestured with the diadem toward the kneeling man. "Mr. Derek Shaw. Petty embezzler. Stole thirty thousand pounds from a charity for widowed veterans. A small, sour man with a very small, sour song. The modern equivalent of stealing from the collection plate. The court gave him probation. A comma, not a full stop."
Shaw whimpered, another painful shuffle.
"This," Sandys continued, "is the full stop. The punishment that fits the historical precedent. Not a prison cell where he learns nothing, but an experience that translates his crime into physical truth. He will understand the cost of every pound he took, in the language of pain. Then, he will fall from the gallery—an accident, of course. A despondent thief. A neat conclusion."
"It's murder, Leo," Elara said, her voice steadier than she felt. She took a step down the aisle, keeping her eyes on him. "Not justice. Theatre."
"All justice is theatre," he replied, finally turning his gaze to her. His face was sharp, intelligent, devoid of madness. This was the true horror. "The wig, the robe, the raised bench… it's a set designed to convey authority. I've simply stripped away the pretense and returned to a purer form. One with aesthetic and pedagogical integrity."
"You're not a judge. You're a archivist gone rogue."
"I am a corrector!" he snapped, the calm fracturing for a second, revealing the fervour beneath. "The world is a palimpsest of moral compromises, scribbled over and blurred. The Codex… it shows a way to write clearly. To make meaning through action so definitive it cannot be debated."
"By killing a music teacher? A harmless old scholar?"
"Finch was not harmless!" Sandys stood, his movement fluid. He paced along the judge's bench. "He hoarded knowledge, bought and sold pieces of the past like trinkets. He authenticated the dagger for me because he was curious, because it would add value to his collection. He had no philosophy, only appetite. I gave his death philosophy. I made him a symbol of the corrupted academic." He stopped, looking at her with something like yearning. "You see that, don't you? You, who digs in the dirt for truth, not for profit. You understand the need for a clean line."
Elara saw the fanaticism now, the terrifying intellect twisted into a rigid, deadly framework. He saw people not as humans, but as exemplars. Arguments to be made flesh.
The distant wail of sirens filtered through the stone walls. Thorne was close.
Sandys heard it too. He sighed, a sound of genuine regret. "The interruption. Always the interruption." He looked at the sobbing Shaw, then at the diadem in his hand. "The performance must reach its crescendo, or it is merely noise."
He moved swiftly. He dropped the diadem—it clattered and rolled across the wooden floor—and grabbed Shaw by the collar, hauling him toward the steep steps leading up to the public gallery.
"No!" Elara shouted, running forward.
Sandys was strong, efficient. He dragged the helpless man up the first few steps. Shaw's screams echoed in the court.
Elara didn't have a weapon. She had only words. She skidded to a halt by the clerk's desk, her hand closing around the heavy, brass oil lamp.
"You're not a corrector, Leo!" she yelled, her voice ringing through the chamber. "You're a copyst! A slavish, unimaginative copyst! The Ariadne Codex wasn't a manual—it was a warning! A map of the labyrinth so people could avoid the Minotaur, not become it! You've misunderstood the entire text!"
He froze, halfway up the steps. He turned, his face a mask of cold fury. "I have perfected it."
"You've hollowed it out!" she shot back, holding the lamp aloft. "You took stories of complex human failing and reduced them to… to stage directions! Where's the mercy? Where's the redemption? Where's the thread that leads out? That's what Ariadne gave! A way out! You're just laying more bricks in the walls!"
For a moment, he stared at her, his ideology challenged at its core. The sirens were at the door now, shouts, pounding.
In that split second of hesitation, Shaw, in a final burst of desperate survival instinct, bucked and twisted, knocking Sandys off balance.
Sandys stumbled, his grip loosening. Elara didn't throw the lamp. She swung it low and hard, smashing it against the wooden steps at his feet.
Flame and burning oil erupted, a sudden, shocking barrier of fire on the stairs between Sandys and his victim, between Sandys and the gallery's edge.
Shaw scrambled back down, falling into the well of the court, sobbing.
Sandys recoiled from the flames, his path to the completed "fall" cut off. He stood on the higher steps, isolated, the firelight dancing on his face. He looked at the burning oil, then at Elara, and in his eyes she saw not anger, but a profound, terrifying disappointment.
"You chose the messy narrative," he said, his voice almost sad.
Then he turned and ran, not up toward the gallery, but along the narrow steps behind the bench, vanishing into a judges' entrance just as the main doors of the courtroom crashed open and Thorne burst in, followed by a flood of armed officers.
The flames were already dying, starved of fuel on the stone and hard wood. Thorne's eyes swept the scene: the sobbing Shaw, the scattered peas, the glittering diadem on the floor, and Elara, standing with the shattered lamp base in her hand.
"He went that way!" she gasped, pointing.
Thorne and half the team gave chase. But as the chaos settled, Elara knew. The Old Bailey was a maze of corridors and private exits. Leo Sandys, the Labyrinth Keeper, had built his narrative to have an escape clause.
He had vanished. Not in triumph, but in retreat. His perfect sentence had been left unfinished, a dangling clause.
And an unfinished writer, she knew with a sick certainty, always returns to complete his work.