Chapter 13 The Wexford Will

The Thistlecote branch of the county bank had one counter, two clerks, and a manager's office with a window that looked out on the market cross, and Mr. Bellwether had sat behind the desk in that office for thirty years, which in a town of four thousand people makes a man a sort of monument. Verity went in on Thursday morning with the heart-shaped key in her pocket and her best coat on, because a bank is a place that reads clothes the way a dog reads the post. "I'd like to ask about the Wexford estate," she said. Bellwether was a thin, careful man with rimless glasses and the habit of answering a question with a longer question. He looked at her over the top of the glasses and did not offer her the chair, which was itself an answer. "The Wexford estate was settled long ago," he said. "There's nothing to ask about." "Then you won't mind telling me who settled it." He was quiet a moment. Behind him, on the wall, hung a framed photograph of the branch as it had looked in 1970, four clerks and a manager who was not Bellwether, and on the desk beside his phone lay a stack of papers with a red corner, the colour of a thing that has been read a great many times. "The mill and the mill house passed to the bank on default in 1980," Bellwether said. "The family had left. There was a fire, there was an insurance dispute, and the estate was wound up, and the buildings have been bank property ever since, which is how Mr. Lampitt comes to be buying them." "And the family?" "Gone." "Which family? Mr. Wexford, or his daughter, or both?" Bellwether took his glasses off and polished them, which was the first thing he had done that looked like a person and not a branch. "Miss Wexford left the town in 1980 and her father died the following winter," he said. "She never came back. We had word, some years ago, that she had died abroad. That is the whole of the file, Miss Callender, and I've answered your question, and now I'd be grateful if you'd tell me why the town's locksmith is so interested in a family that nobody has mentioned in thirty years." "Because somebody has started mentioning them," Verity said. "Somebody has been going round this town collecting Wexford things, and I'd like to know whether the bank has a view on that." She watched him as she said it, and she saw it, the small thing she had come to see: his eyes went, for half a second, to the stack of papers with the red corner, and then back to her, and the half second was enough. "There is one thing left," Bellwether said, and his voice had gone carefully flat. "A safe deposit box. Rented in 1979, in the name of Arthur Wexford, and never opened, and never surrendered, and the rent has been paid out of the estate ever since, forty-odd years of a standing order for a box whose key has been lost for as long as anyone can remember." He put his glasses back on. "I mention it because you will find it in the file whether I mention it or not, and because I would rather you heard it from me than from Mr. Lampitt, who has been asking me about the same box since he bought the mill." "And what's in it?" "I have no idea, Miss Callender. Nobody has opened it since the year it was rented." He stood, which meant the interview was over. "But I will tell you the one thing I remember, because my father was manager here before me and he told me when I took the chair. He said the man who rented that box came in the day after the fire, and he said the man's hands shook so badly he could not sign the card." Verity did not walk home the long way at first. She walked the other way, out along the mill track, with the heart-shaped key in her pocket and a question she could only answer with her hands. The mill house stood in the afternoon light with its windows dark and its one good door, and she climbed the step and tried the key. It went into the keyhole and stopped, the way a key stops when the wards are wrong in every particular, and she tried it in the back door, and in the store door, and in the little door under the stairs that had once led to the cellar, and in none of them would it go past the first pin. She stood back in the yard and looked at the key, and then at the house, and she was not disappointed, because a locksmith is never disappointed by a lock that refuses; she is only told something she did not know before, which is a kind of gift. "You don't open any door in this town," she said to the key. "My father fitted every lock in this house, and this isn't one of his profiles. So he didn't keep you for the house. He kept you for something he made a promise about, and you've been hanging in a drawer under a tag that says tea room, and the only thing in Thistlecote that a person needs a strange key for and can't get at is a box in a bank that nobody has opened since the year of the fire." The wind came off the cut and moved the nettles, and somewhere down the towpath a moorhen called, and Verity put the key back in her pocket and walked home the long way after all, past the lock and the bench that was not yet there, and the whole length of Cheaping Lane, where every door she passed had once been a line in her father's book. Rufus was waiting on the step with his cap in his hands. "You've been out to the mill," he said. "You've got that look. That's the look you get when a lock's beaten you and you've decided to like it." "The key fits nothing in this town," Verity said. "Nothing?" "Nothing I can put it in. And I can put it in everything, because I know every lock my father ever fitted, and this isn't one of them, and a key that fits nothing is a key to something that isn't here." She unlocked the shop and held the door for him. "Which leaves a box in a bank that nobody in this town has opened since before either of us was born, and a woman who has been trying to reach it for a year, and a bank manager who has spent thirty years not asking his own father why the file was shut." "So you're going to the bank." "I'm going to the bank," Verity said. "Tomorrow morning. And this time I'll take a witness, because the last time I asked a bank a question I got a longer question back, and I'm tired of being answered sideways." Rufus looked at her for a moment from under the brim of his cap, and then he grinned, because a boy who has spent a year waiting to see a real lock opened has just been told there is one, at last, with something behind it. ---