Chapter 11 The Second Key

Rufus arrived at eight, took one look at Verity, and put the kettle on without being asked, which was, in his own words, the entire art of working for a person. She told him the whole of it: the woman, the green coat, the drawing, the sentence about the ledger being a map of a crime. He listened with his hands round his mug and his cap pushed back, and when she had finished, he said the thing she had been hoping he would say, because it was the thing she had been thinking and could not make herself say aloud. "The tag's wrong," Rufus said. "Say that again." "The heart-shaped key. The one that came in the post. The tag says Vardy, two thousand and three, tea room. But the tag in the mill was in your dad's hand, and your dad didn't write the wrong door on a tag, because your dad didn't write the wrong anything." He leaned forward. "So the heart-shaped key never opened the tea room. Somebody put a true tag with a false name, and sent it back to you, because a tag from the ledger is a thing only two people could have written, and neither of them is around to say so." Verity set her mug down and went to the bench and took the heart-shaped key from its box and held it under the lamp. It was old brass, and it had been worn on both sides, and it had a bow shaped like a heart, and she had looked at it half a dozen times and read the tag and trusted the tag, because her father's tags had never lied to her in her life. "Rufus," she said. "Fetch me the tag for Frayne, ninety-eight, back door only. It's in the drawer." He brought it. Two tags, side by side on the bench: the heart-shaped key with its lie, and the sergeant's plain key with its truth. Verity looked at the two of them for a while and then picked up the heart-shaped key and turned it slowly in the lamplight, and there, cut into the shank just below the bow where the light caught it, was a tiny stamped mark she had never noticed, because she had never had a reason to look for it: a small neat W. "Wexford," she said. "Wexford House," said Rufus. "All doors, nineteen seventy-nine, keep for Mr. W." She sat down slowly, and the whole shape of the thing came clear to her at once, the way a set of wards comes clear when you finally hold the key the right way up in your hand. "My father fitted every lock in the mill house. He kept the spares for old Mr. Wexford, because the old man wanted to be able to come for a key at any time, and my father tagged them with the house's name. But in the ledger, in the margin, he wrote the name he knew the keys by. He wrote tea room." "Why?" "Because my father was careful," Verity said, "and a careful man doesn't write Wexford House in a book that lives on an open bench, in a town where the name was poison. So he wrote it wrong on purpose. He wrote the door it looked like, and kept the truth in the margin, and hoped that nobody would ever need to know the difference." She looked up. "Somebody needed to know the difference. And whoever sent me this key knew enough to send me the one thing in the book that would make me ask why my father had learned to lie." Rufus took the ledger from the shelf and set it on the bench between them, and the two of them went through the mill pages together, one slow door at a time. Forty years of ink, and every entry in the same neat columns, and every margin marked with the things her father had not written in the columns because a margin is where a careful man keeps his private thoughts. "That one says ask Wilf about the gate," Rufus said. "That's a reminder to himself. The gate was stiff in the wet." "And this one says the store has a warped frame, do not force." "He never forced anything in his life." Verity turned another page. "That's all I know about my father, and I've been finding out lately that it's only half of it. He knew about the fire. He kept the spare for the man the town had decided was guilty. And he never told a living soul, not even my mother, not even me, and I sat on this stool beside him for years and thought I knew every thought in his head." Rufus was quiet, which for Rufus was a form of attention. "He kept his promise," Verity said. "That's the thing. Whatever he thought about that fire, and he must have thought something, he decided that the promise he made to Arthur Wexford mattered more than being right out loud. So he wrote Wexford House in a secret margin and called it a tea room, and he went on opening the town's doors and coming home for his tea." She closed the book and looked at the tag again. "And that leaves one door unaccounted for. Every Wexford key in this book opens a building I can name. This one doesn't open the tea room, and it doesn't open the mill house, because I know the mill house, and its doors were made to take a different profile. So what does it open?" "Boss," Rufus said. "The woman in the green coat keeps saying her family's things were put somewhere she can't reach." "Somewhere a person needs a key to reach." "Somewhere nobody's opened since nineteen seventy-nine." They looked at each other. "The bank," Verity said. "There's a deed box in that bank rented the year of the fire, and a woman in a green coat has been trying to get at it for a year, and the only key to it has been sitting in my father's drawer under a tag that lied about a tea room, so that anybody who went through the book would think it opened a place where nothing was hidden at all." "Then the bank," Rufus said, "has some explaining to do." "And I know exactly which door to knock on," said Verity, "because Mr. Bellwether has been the manager of that bank for thirty years and I re-keyed his safe last spring, and I have a spare, and I have never in my life been so tempted." She did not use the spare. She put it back on the ring where it belonged, because a locksmith who uses a customer's key for her own reasons is a locksmith with no trade left, and because the whole of the week had taught her something she did not much want to admit: that a door opened with the wrong key is not really open at all. Instead she sat down and wrote a letter, in her own hand, on the shop's headed paper, to Mr. Bellwether at the branch, asking for an appointment on Saturday morning regarding a deposit box rented in 1979 in the name of Arthur Wexford, and she sealed it and walked it to the post office herself, and Enid Tunnicliffe took it and looked at the address and looked at Verity and said nothing, which from Enid was a paragraph. "Saturday," Verity told Tibbs, when she got back. "If he says no, we'll think of something else. If he says yes, we'll go and open a door that's been shut for forty years." She took off her coat and hung it up. "Either way, the tea's still on." ---