Chapter 3: 血缘疑云

The rain chased us out of the archives. I slipped my father’s fountain pen into my inner pocket, keeping silent about the inscription on the clip. Inside, it bore the same recurring abbreviation found in my grandfather’s letters. Greta watched as I locked the door. “You recognized something, yet you deliberately left the answer behind that door. This will rob us both of any way back.”

“I merely confirmed it was an old family notation. Explaining it hastily would contaminate the evidence. It might also drag you into danger.”

As we reached the intersection, my phone lit up. An unfamiliar photo displayed my father’s handwriting next to a chipped stone tablet.

The photo came from Friedrich Baumann. He demanded I go to the auction house alone, noting that while the tablet had never been publicly sold, its consignment files had been tampered with.

Greta blocked the car door. “Your breathing changed the moment that photo appeared. Stop telling yourself this is just a common family marker.”

“Baumann reached out on his own, which means someone is forcing him to pick a side. I need to determine which way he’s leaning before anything else.”

“That pen is a piece of evidence. By taking it privately for comparison, you’re giving Karl the chance to overturn our conclusions.”

She was right. Karl Albrecht was most skilled at using procedure to protect evidence, and equally skilled at silencing evidence that didn’t follow procedure. Still, I drove alone into the rain.

I didn’t go to the auction house. I went back to the old estate first. The wooden chest in my grandfather’s study held twenty-seven letters, the most recent written two months before my father disappeared. I put on gloves and examined each one. My father never put a horizontal bar through the number seven, yet the seven in the photo did. His final strokes in letters curved left, but the handwriting in the photo flared right. Only the abbreviation inside the pen genuinely belonged to him.

“The note wasn’t written by my father. Someone imitated his style but didn’t realize the family notation derived from a different language.”

My phone rang immediately after. Friedrich’s voice was tight. “Officer, if you’re not there in thirty minutes, the consignment records for that tablet will be legally destroyed.”

The auction house was closed for the day, but every light was on. Friedrich stood by the appraisal table. “To be clear, what I handed you was only the appraisal copy. The original was already retrieved by the consignor according to the terms.”

I didn’t touch the paper bag. “You didn’t call the detective to save a few sheets of paper. You’re afraid the auction house is becoming part of a transit chain.”

“An industry’s reputation takes years to build, but only one act of silence to destroy it. So I’d rather admit I was fooled than pretend otherwise.”

The bag contained UV imaging, intake dimensions, and an old appraisal. The valuation was 620 marks, dated before the euro came into circulation. The consignor’s name had been cut out.

He slid the images under the lamp. “The surface looks like thirteenth-century Latin, but the underlying script has been repeatedly filled in with wax and mineral powder.”

“The base layer isn’t the main text. It’s a family oral code with shifted consonants. Vowels are only used to mark pauses.”

“Two university researchers called it mason’s practice work. How could you identify it with just one look?”

I pulled out the fountain pen. “Because I memorized it as a child. Grandfather said it was a cryptic code Rhine shipmen used to evade taxes.”

It wasn’t a complete explanation. What my grandfather taught me was a funeral dirge with no written record, passed to only one child per generation. Miss a single note, and the second half would turn into a meaningless string of river channel names.

After substituting twelve sets of consonants, it spelled out: “The nameless return to stone; the key-holder returns to blood.” The final four groups were ground smooth; only the starting strokes were visible in slanted light. I covered the surface inscription. “These four groups aren’t place names. They’re old-style ownership marks, and the pronunciation matches the Wagner family’s oral tradition.”

Friedrich was silent for a moment. “So this ‘unowned’ religious stone was at least kept by your family. Its right to be auctioned is flawed from the root.”

“Worse, the missing corner matches a stone paperweight in my grandfather’s chest. That relic might have originally been part of the tablet itself.”

He pulled out another photo. The tablet was secured in a rail freight container, with an old label from Cologne to Frankfurt attached to the corner.

“Ernst Baumann sent this photo anonymously. He asked me not to disclose it unless absolutely necessary.”

“You share a surname but pretend not to know each other. Is that to cut off the trace of who’s feeding information to the investigation?”

He took off his gloves. “He’s my brother. Our relationship isn’t a secret, but we’ve kept our correspondence private for years to use it as a cover for passing messages.”

“Ernst has been leaking investigation leads for a long time. Is he leaking the flow of the artifacts, or the movements of the investigators?”

He didn’t answer. The silence was clearer than a denial.

The sound of a car stopping came from outside. Friedrich turned off the appraisal lamp. “Only you were in here tonight, but the maintenance log will show I was doing a routine check alone.”

“Falsifying records just creates a second loophole. Keep the original footage and make a read-only copy immediately.”

“You still believe procedure can protect the truth. But if the ones who make the procedures are involved, compliance can just as easily be a veil.”

“Procedure doesn’t guarantee innocence, but it forces manipulators to leave traces. And traces eventually become evidence.”

The person outside didn’t come in. A few minutes later, the car drove away. They only wanted us to know they could get close to us anytime.

I walked out the back door. Greta appeared from across the street. “You left me outside the archives and took the pen with you. Is that what you call not contaminating evidence?”

“I needed to rule out the possibility that my father forged the message. Family correspondence shouldn’t drag you in before the conclusion is formed.”

She handed me a printout. “You’re not protecting me. You’re controlling the order in which I find out the truth. That’s no different from the people erasing the archive files.”

Someone had inquired about her employer’s secret storage location under the name of forensic review. The authorization number belonged to Karl’s department. The timestamp was eleven minutes after we had opened the portable device.

Carl may have merely been fulfilling his duty to preserve evidence. A query alone does not prove his involvement in the transport.

“I never said it could convict him. But you’re lenient with your father, cautious with colleagues, and yet you chose to hide this from me.”

I placed the fountain pen into her evidence bag. “The abbreviation on the pen clip corresponds to the letters from my grandfather, and the marker on the base layer of the stone points to the Wagner family’s former ownership.”

“Are you handing this over now because you trust me, or because you can no longer bear this surname alone?”

“Both. From this point forward, all family correspondence will be entered into the official evidence log.”

Back at the old estate, Gretta examined the paper fibers, creases, and ink while I transcribed the oral syllables. She pointed to the seventh sheet of correspondence. “The year has been overwritten. The original ink reads 1998; it was later altered to 2008.”

I checked the watermark. “If the original date holds, my father had not yet been involved in the auction case at that time, yet he already knew the stone would be transferred via rail.”

“There are indentations on the back left by the previous page. Raking light should recover most of the content.”

The revealed sentence read: “The wordless monument belongs not to the collector, but only to those left unrecorded.” It was not a declaration of property, but rather a promise of restitution, centuries late.

Another letter mixed Latin roots with old Rhineland phonetic shifts, replacing every kinship term with the word “witness.”

Gretta asked, “Why did you deliberately avoid terms like father and son, or brother, while constantly emphasizing witnessing and custody?”

“Perhaps ‘bloodline’ was never a biological relationship, but a duty of confidentiality handed down generation to generation.”

She placed the two letters side by side. “Then the surname isn’t a title of inheritance. It’s a label on the chain of custody. Whoever takes on the secret becomes the Wagner.”

I remembered how sternly my grandfather corrected pronunciations. He wasn’t concerned with acoustic accuracy, but with whether the sentence would arrive at the next generation intact.

Ernst sent an encrypted compressed file containing scanned copies of the railway archives, with a note: “I can only provide historical copies. If you request current dispatch records, Carl will receive an immediate audit notification.”

I replied, “Retain the original carrier numbers and scan verification logs. Otherwise, the files will only point to investigative directions.”

Minutes later, he called. “Your father inquired about the same batch of shipping notes in 2004. After that, the paper copies were moved to the restricted vault.”

“Who issued the restriction order? Were the application reasons and receipt forms retained?”

“The signature page is missing. The receipt bears the old seal of your criminal investigation division. The custody responsibility is internal.”

Gretta closed the wooden box. “He knew the query would trigger a notification. Why send this to you now?”

“Someone is beginning to clean out the old archives, and he had to take the risk before the data disappeared. Or, he may have deliberately led me to the railway.”

“Every clue has two interpretations. That is the safest hiding place for a manipulator.”

“Tomorrow morning, we’ll apply for a search and seizure warrant. Tonight, we’ll move the originals to an independent safe.”

“If Carl controls forensic custody, submitting them through normal channels is just an advance notification to him.”

Bypassing procedure would destroy the evidentiary value, but following procedure might cause the evidence to vanish.

At that moment, Carl called out of the blue. “William, there was an unlogged access to the archive room. Submit the fountain pen and all copied data tomorrow morning.”

“I will submit them as per regulation, but they must be inventoried by two personnel with no conflict of interest, and the access logs must be sealed simultaneously.”

“You are implying a conflict of interest within the forensic department. Such an accusation must be based on verifiable facts.”

I looked at the query records. “The facts are taking shape. Anyone who had prior access to the evidence may become a subject of inquiry.”

When the call ended, Gretta said, “He didn’t ask what we found. That means he already knows, or he doesn’t need to know from us at all.”

We continued inventorying the wooden box. The bottom board was three millimeters thicker than expected, and the edges had been re-waxed. Gretta pried open the concealed layer along the old seams. Inside was only a faded envelope and a few railway receipts.

“The seal wax matches the ownership markers on the inscription. Opening it will permanently destroy the original sealed state.”

“Photograph, measure, and number it first, then extract it from the crack without widening the damage.”

She finished her documentation. “If this proves the family’s involvement in the transport, you are both the investigator and a potential party to the crime.”

“Then I will apply for recusal. But before that, I want to ensure it doesn’t fall silent again.”

Inside the envelope was a railway shipping note from 2004. The departure point was Cologne, and the destination was also Cologne. The cargo column listed only “architectural stone samples,” collect on delivery for 480 euros. The sender’s field was covered in black ink, and on the back was a pencil annotation from my grandfather: *Hand it to the one who can read the last sentence.*

Gretta whispered, “This isn’t a transport record. It’s a delayed delivery. The cargo may still be waiting in some transit warehouse to be claimed.”

I looked further down the document. The recipient field did not list my father, my grandfather, or any institutional name.

It listed my full name: William Wagner.

The date was a full seven years before I joined the criminal investigation division.