I take a fresh slip and write it out while I talk, keeping my hand small and legible: Card A17 — two addresses, close succession (observed), unexplained glitter in Marsh Lane line (observed), meaning unknown.

"There. Hypothesis pile, properly labeled." I set it beside your Marsh Lane receipt. "Now, your question. The answer has two halves, because Ash Steps keeps two different registers, and people trip over that constantly."

I hold up one finger. "The accession register. That's the intake book — every parcel that passes through the archive or the records office gets an accession number, and the register records who brought it, when, and where it was addressed. A17's mark would let us look up its entry. That's an ordinary inquiry. The current intake desk sits at Ash Steps, and the clerk there is Tamsin Rook. She's careful, a bit stiff, and entirely fair. You ask to inspect an accession entry, she checks it's a legitimate request, and she lets you read it. No parcel required. We could ask about A17's intake entry without carrying the thing anywhere."

A second finger. "The bell-metal master register is another animal entirely. It's the old ward register — brass plates, the city's official memory of its wards and streets. It lives in a secured vault at Ash Steps, and access requires specific permission, not just a reason. Tamsin can explain what the requirements are, but I want to be precise: asking doesn't grant access. Someone with authority to approve it has to actually do so. I don't currently hold that permission, and I'd want a concrete, defensible purpose before requesting it — 'a parcel's card says something odd' may or may not clear that bar. Tamsin will judge, and she's entitled to."

Which is as it should be. A vault that opened for anyone with a curious afternoon wouldn't protect anything.

"One caution, since you asked about procedure and not a plan. The master register is the council's book. Making a formal inquiry about it puts our question on someone's desk, officially. That's not a disaster, but it's not invisible either. The accession entry, by contrast, is routine — clerks look those up daily."

I top up your mug without asking, because the kettle's there and the tea's going cold.

"So: the accession lookup is a small, ordinary step we could take at Ash Steps whenever we liked. The master register is a larger one, needing real permission and a real stated purpose. Neither requires you to touch the parcel. Anything else you want the shape of before we decide whether to do any of it?"