Chapter 4 The Room That Was Locked

Selkie Cove Public Library had a brass plate on the door and a green shade over the desk and the particular hush of a building where nobody had any urgent reason to shout. It smelled of waxed floor and old newsprint. Four people were reading. It was half past two on a Tuesday. Mrs. Pratt was sixty-eight and had been at that desk for thirty-one years, and she took one look at the pair of them and knew what they were. "You're the girl with the note," she said. "And you're the boy who came in on the Thursday." "Mrs. Pratt—" "Iona. Nobody has called me Mrs. Pratt since 2004 except the council minutes and the tax man." She put a card back in the drawer and shut it. "Now. You have come to ask me about a fund, and I am going to tell you that I do not know what you are talking about, and you are going to thank me, and then you are going to go and sit in the corner and be quiet, and we will all be friends." Tove put the folded page on the counter. "Ask the library who signed the fund took the money out." The hush in the room got slightly worse. The four readers did not look up, which took effort. "Say that again," Iona Pratt said. "Twice, if you like. It has come up out of the sea six times since November and this morning it came up for me, and a man at town hall has been quietly picking them off the rocks, and my grandmother told me to burn it, and I am not going to, because somebody wrote it expecting a stranger to be exactly the sort of person who counts." Tove kept her voice level, which took all she had. "I need one question answered. Is there a fund?" "No." "Was Lars Ostler your librarian?" The colour went out of the old woman's face in one movement, the way a light goes out. "He was," she said. "Where is he?" "In the sea, since October 1996, along with a good many people who were not him, and if you have come to my desk to say that to a woman who was here when it happened, you can turn around and use the door and I will not think less of you for it, but you will not do it twice." Nobody in the reading room moved. Tove found that her hands had gone cold. "I am sorry," she said. "That was a cheap thing to walk in and do." "Yes." "I do not think he walked into the sea." Iona Pratt came out from behind the desk for the first time. She was shorter than Tove had assumed and she walked with a stick she did not appear to need, and she went past them and through a door marked STAFF and held it open. "If you are going to do this," she said, "then you are going to do it properly, and properly means you look at the thing everybody in this town has looked at for thirty years and never once said out loud. Both of you. Now." The staff room was eight feet by eleven and smelled of tea and old coats. One wall was papered in photographs, forty of them, in mismatched frames: librarians going back to 1911, men and women and two of them children who had helped in the war years, each one captioned in silver ink with a name and a span of years. One frame was turned to the wall. It was at eye height, second from the right, and the frame had been rotated on its nail so that only the back showed. Tove stepped in close. The wall around it was the same nicotine yellow as the rest, dulled and darkened by thirty years of lamp smoke and hair oil. The rectangle the frame had been covering was noticeably cleaner. Brighter. It had not been sitting on that wall for a decade. "That is not old," she said. "No." "When did somebody turn it round?" "I do not know. It was like that when I started, and I have been in this room every day for thirty-one years." Iona Pratt stood in the doorway with her hands loose at her sides. "I told you I was here in 1996. I was twenty-six and I ran the children's room four days a week. And I will tell you now, since you have made me say his name in my own building, that I turned it round myself, in the November of 1996, because I could not have a man who had been here the week before me looking at me while I handed out autumn picture books." She went back to the desk. Tove and Piet stood in the staff room doorway. "She just told us," Piet said quietly. "Why did she do that?" "Because nobody has asked her a real question since 1996." Tove looked at the pale rectangle on the wall. "And because if somebody had turned that frame round in the last few months, she would have seen it, and she did not see it, which means the frame is thirty years old and something else in this building is not." She went back out to the counter. "Who was the last person to use the reading room?" "Staff, for storage. The trustees used it for meetings until 1997." Iona Pratt was stamping returns. "It is locked. It has been locked since before I came here." "Do you keep the key in a drawer under the counter?" The stamping stopped. "I keep no key to no room," Iona Pratt said, "and if that room was ever opened while I was on this desk then I did not open it." They went out into the street. The library stood on the west side of Larkin Street with its green shade and its brass plate, and the afternoon was the colour of dishwater. "Two," Piet said. "What?" He was crouched by the side door, in the strip of shade under the drainpipe, pointing at the jamb where the door met the frame. There was a pencil mark on the wood, very faint, the size of a thumbnail: a circle with a 2 inside it. "Exactly like the marks in the register," he said. "Page one had a one. Page four had a two. Somebody was counting sections." "And the register is the library's own holding, and section one is the archive, and section two is upstairs." Tove crouched with him. "Somebody is giving us a route. That is not a code any more. That is a set of directions." Beneath the circle, cut into the old paint with something sharp and then painted over once, was a date. Not written. Carved, and then filled, badly, so the shape of it still came through. Tove read it twice, and then she sat down on the step, because her legs had stopped taking instructions. 8 OCT 96. "Sixty centimetres," Piet said. "The mark is exactly sixty centimetres off the ground. Somebody with a hand at that height." "Six centimetres under it is a boot," Tove said. "Whoever carved that was standing on a library step, in a hurry, while somebody else held a light." She got out her phone and photographed the date twice, and then she sat there on the step with the photograph and a month of notes in her coat and thought about the arithmetic of a town, which was that eleven hundred people had managed for thirty years to keep two things apart, and the two things were the ones in the basement and the ones upstairs, and a pencil circle in a doorframe was the first time in her life she had seen the two of them touch. ---