Chapter 2 The Bakery Cellar

Thistlecote in the morning was a town made almost entirely of errands. Verity crossed the market square at half past eight with the smell of Tabitha Osgood's bread coming at her from three directions at once, because the bakery sat at one corner of the square and the wind had decided to be generous. The square was old and uneven, cobbled in the middle and patched with brick around the edges where the cars were meant to go, and in the centre stood the market cross, a stone pillar older than the town's right to have one. A market cross is a good thing to have, her father used to say, because it gives people something to lean on while they lie to each other. Rufus Tandy was already on the bakery step, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his cap pushed back, looking as though he had been there since dawn and had not yet decided whether to enjoy it. "Morning, boss," he said. "I'm not your boss before nine." "You're always my boss. It says so on the door." "It says Callender's Keys. It doesn't say boss anywhere." "Then someone's missed a trick," said Rufus, and got up, and followed her in. Rufus was seventeen and had come to her a year ago with a note from his mother and an unusual talent: he could tell, from the sound of a key turning in a lock behind a closed door, whether it had turned all the way. He could not explain how he did it. He had never tried. Verity had hired him on the spot and had not regretted it except on Mondays. Inside, Tabitha Osgood was sliding trays of rolls onto the cooling rack, red-faced and cheerful, her sleeves rolled to the elbow. She was a big, quick woman who moved through her own bakery as though the bakery were an extension of her arms. "Verity. You'll want the cellar," she said, before either of them could speak. "I'll want the cellar," Verity agreed. "It's the strangest thing. I went down Tuesday for the preserves and the door was open. Not broken. Open. And nothing gone, except—" Tabitha stopped, wiped her hands on her apron, and looked annoyed with herself. "Except a jar of damson jam and a photograph off the wall." "Which photograph?" "The one of the mill, from before the fire. My grandmother's. It's been down there since I was a girl." Verity took her bag down the narrow stone steps behind the shop, where the air went cool and damp and smelled of flour and cellar and something older beneath both. The cellar door was low and heavy, banded with iron, the sort of door a careful baker keeps between her flour and the world. The lock was a two-lever rim lock, cheap and old, and Verity had fitted it herself four years ago after the last one died. She crouched and looked at it for a long time. "This was picked," she said. Rufus crouched beside her. "How d'you know?" "Show me." The boy leaned in, and his face did the thing it did when he was working something out, the whole of him going still and inward. "Scratches," he said at last. "Inside the keyway. Where they shouldn't be, because a key doesn't scratch the inside of a lock. A key is shaped for it." "Go on." "And there's a mark on the collar. Here." He touched the metal with one careful finger. "Something turned against it that wasn't a key." Verity felt the small, unearned pride of a teacher whose pupil has answered well, and tried not to let it show on her face, and mostly failed. "That's a rake mark," she said. "Someone raked the pins and turned it with a tension tool. Took them about ninety seconds, if they knew what they were doing, and they did." "But there's a key," Tabitha said from the top of the steps. "I've got a key. Why not use the key?" "Because a key leaves a story," Verity said. "A key leaves its shape behind. This person didn't want to leave theirs." She stood and looked around the cellar. Shelves of preserves in neat rows, a barrel of flour, a rack of bottles, the pale rectangle on the whitewash where a photograph had hung for sixty years. Only one thing about the whole scene was wrong, and she had already found it, and it was not the jam. "Tabitha," she said. "The photograph that went missing. Was it the mill before the fire, or the mill after?" "Before. Nineteen fifty-something. When it was still working, with the wheel and the water going." Verity looked at the pale rectangle on the wall a moment longer. Upstairs the shop bell rang, and a voice she knew came through the floorboards, and then Sergeant Desmond Frayne was coming down the cellar steps sideways, the way a tall man comes down a narrow stair, with his cap already in his hand. "Morning," he said. "Tabitha says you've been at her lock." "I've been looking at it. There's a difference, and the difference is that looking is free." Frayne was somewhere north of fifty and had the face of a man who had spent his working life being told things that were not quite true by people who wanted him to believe them anyway. He was patient in a way that had been mistaken, once or twice, for slow, and by people who had not been paying attention, which had suited him. "Tell me," he said. So Verity told him. The rake marks inside the keyway. The clean ninety seconds it had taken. The photograph of the mill before the fire, gone off a wall where it had hung since before either of them was born, and a jar of jam missing beside it, as though the jam were the joke and the photograph were the business. Frayne listened to all of it without interrupting, which was his other habit, and when she had finished he was quiet for a while, turning his cap slowly in his hands. "Nineteen seventy-nine," he said. "The mill fire. You know the story." "I know the version everyone tells." "Which is that the mill burned down one night and the Wexfords moved away and the town forgot about it." "And the version nobody tells?" Frayne looked up at the pale rectangle on the wall, where the photograph had been, and for a moment he did not look patient at all. He looked tired, the way a man looks when he has carried a thing so long that carrying it has become a posture. "The version where old Mr. Wexford's daughter was meant to marry a man she didn't want," he said. "And where the mill was insured for more than it was worth." He put his cap back on and went up the steps. "That's the version nobody tells, and I'd be obliged if you'd keep it in the same place the town keeps it." "Frayne." He stopped at the top. "Why are you telling me a thing you want kept quiet?" "Because somebody's already stopped keeping it," he said, and was gone. Verity stood a moment in the cool of the cellar. Then she went up, said thank you, ate a roll she had not intended to eat, and walked back out into the square, where the market was waking and Myrtle Soper was already arranging her stall of eggs and gossip, and it occurred to Verity for the first time that both of the things taken in Thistlecote this fortnight, the key from behind her own counter and the photograph from Tabitha's cellar, were things that had once belonged to somebody else, and had been left, for years, exactly where they were. ---