Chapter 10 The Night Watch

Verity did not tell Frayne about the shed until morning, and by morning the shed had been emptied of the chair and the blanket and the candle stub and the mug, and the photograph had gone from the wall, and the only thing left was the pin holes in the tarred board, two small dark points, like the eyes of a bird that had flown. "I need you to understand what you've done," Frayne said. "I've done nothing but look in a shed." "You've warned them," he said. "You and your bag and your boy walking down a towpath in broad daylight. Whoever's been using that shed knows now that you know, and they've taken their things and gone, and that is a warning I did not need you to give them." "Then I'll find them before they go further." "Verity—" "I'll find them, Desmond. And when I do, I'd rather it were me, because I know this town's keys and you know this town's laws and between us that might be enough to keep somebody out of your cells." She pulled her coat on. "One more thing. That lock on the shed was new, and it was fitted by somebody who knew how. There's two locksmiths in this county and the other one's in Kettering and he's eighty-two. So either a locksmith changed that padlock, or somebody has learned fast." Frayne looked at her a long moment, and then he did the thing he had been doing more and more of this month, which was to let her go. She did not sleep that night, and at half past one she got up, put on two jumpers and her coat, left a note on the counter in case Rufus came in early, and walked out into the town. Thistlecote at night was a different animal. The market square went soft and silver under the lamps, and the clockhouse stood over it with its crooked minute hand, and the Noke slid through the dark at the bottom of the lane without any noise at all. Verity walked the length of Cheaping Lane with her hands in her pockets, past the bakery and the post office and the Crane and Kettle, and then out along the mill track, where the grass was wet and the wind came up off the water, and the mill stood at the end of the track with one window faintly lit on the upper floor. There was somebody in the mill house. Verity stood in the dark of the hedge and looked at that small square of light for a full minute, and then she walked up the track as quietly as a woman in boots can walk, which is more quietly than you might think if you have spent twenty-three years learning to move about other people's houses. The mill house door was open. She went in. The lower floor was dark and smelled of cold and old flour, and she stood still inside the door and let her eyes learn the room, and then she went up the stairs one at a time, testing each board with the edge of her foot before she trusted it, the way she had been taught in the careful years of her trade. The upper room was small and once had been a bedroom. Now it had a mattress on the floor, a paraffin lamp turned low, a tin of biscuits, a folded blanket, and a woman in a green coat, standing with her back to the door, looking out of the window at the dark water and the town beyond it. "I wondered how long it would take," the woman said, without turning round. Her voice was low and educated and had the careful flatness of a person who had practised staying calm. "You're the locksmith." "I am." "You'd have found it sooner if you hadn't trusted your father's book so much." The woman turned. She was fifty or so, grey-haired, tired in the way of somebody who has been tired for years, and she looked at Verity without any anger at all. "He kept the spare for every door in this town. It never occurred to you that the spares were the treasure." "Who are you?" "Somebody who used to live here." The woman's eyes went to the window, then to the stairs behind Verity, and something in her face changed. "And somebody who doesn't intend to be the reason a locksmith gets hurt. So do me a kindness. Go down, go home, and forget the light in this window." "Not until you tell me why you've been taking things that belong to other people." "Those things belonged to my family," the woman said, very quietly, and for a moment the flat careful calm in her voice cracked along its length, like ice going under a boot. "The bell was my mother's. The photograph was my grandmother's. The jam was a joke, because my mother made damson jam every autumn and nobody in this town would remember that, and I wanted to be the sort of person who could still make a joke about it. And the ledger—" "The ledger is mine." "The ledger is a map of a crime," the woman said, "and I have been trying to read it for a year, and I am nearly finished." She picked up the tin of biscuits and the blanket, and she went past Verity on the narrow stairs as if Verity had already agreed to let her pass, and Verity, who had not agreed to anything, found that she had stepped back anyway, because there was something in the woman's face she recognised, and it was not guilt. At the bottom of the stairs the woman stopped. "The last thing on the list is yours," she said. "Callender's Keys. Your father kept a spare to his own shop, and it's the only key in that book that opens a door with no secret in it. When I've finished, I'll bring it back." She opened the door onto the black yard. "And tell the sergeant I never took anything that wasn't mine." Then she was gone into the dark, and Verity stood alone in the mill house with the paraffin lamp burning low, and she looked around the little room at the mattress and the biscuits and the folded blanket, and on the windowsill, where the lamp had hidden it, she found a child's drawing in pencil on the back of a bank envelope: a house, a wheel, a river, and three stick people holding hands under a crooked chimney. She stood there longer than she meant to, holding another family's drawing in a house that had been taken from their name, and out of the dark window she could see the town she had lived in all her life, its lamps going out one by one as the evening turned itself in, and every one of them a door that she had opened for somebody, at some time, for some reason she had never once thought to ask about. She put the drawing down where she had found it and went down the stairs and out into the cold. On the way back she did not turn her torch on until she reached the lane, and when she got home she sat up in the shop with the light on and the ledger open, reading her father's hand page after page, looking for the door she had never thought to open, which was the one that everyone in the town had agreed to keep shut. ---