Chapter 8 The Auction

Edgar Pargeter ran his auctions from a barn behind the old corn exchange on the first Saturday of every month, and he ran them the way a man runs a thing he loves, which is to say loudly, and a little too long, and with great attention to the small sad boxes in the middle of the room. The mill sale was the biggest Thistlecote had seen in years, because Lampitt had decided the mill's contents were worth selling rather than skip, and so the barn was full: farmers, antique dealers, Myrtle Soper, two men who had come up from the city in a car neither of them could park, and, near the back, sitting on a folding chair with her bag on her knees, Verity Callender, who had never in her life attended an auction and had told herself she was only there to watch. "Lot thirty-nine," Pargeter called. "Contents of the mill office. Effects, papers, and a quantity of old keys and fittings. Who'll start me at thirty?" Verity's heart did something unprofessional. The box on the trestle was a tea chest, half full. In it she could see a clock with no hands, a bundle of ledgers tied with tape, a brass lamp fitting, and, spilled along one side like a handful of coins, perhaps two dozen keys of every size and colour, on strings, on rings, loose. Myrtle Soper materialised at her elbow, as Myrtle did, with her basket on her arm and the look of a woman who had already decided what everything in the room was worth. "You'll not bid on that junk," Myrtle said. "I've looked at it. There's a clock in there that doesn't go, and the ledgers are all water-damaged, and half the keys are for locks that fell down years ago." "Which half?" "Don't be clever, Verity, it doesn't suit you at this hour." Pargeter, up on his little dais, was in his element, and he knew the room the way a good auctioneer does, which is to say he knew exactly which of the twelve people present had come for the furniture and which had come for the story. "Lot thirty-eight, the wheel shaft, sold to the gentleman at the back, thank you sir, and we move on. Lot thirty-nine, contents of the mill office, and I'll say now, because I've had a look and I'm an honest man on a Saturday, there's more paper in this lot than treasure, so bid with your heart and not your wallet." A ripple of laughter, and then the bidding began low and lazy, the way it begins for things nobody wants. Five. Ten. Fifteen. A dealer in a flat cap took it to twenty and stopped, and Myrtle Soper, who had said she would not bid, put her hand up at twenty-five and then pretended she had not. "A quantity of old keys," Verity said to nobody, in the voice of a woman being handed her father's working life in a tea chest. "Pargeter, you'll make a liar of me." "Forty," said a voice at her shoulder, and she turned, and there was a woman she did not know, grey-haired, in a good green coat, holding a numbered card, watching the box the way a cat watches a birdbath. "Fifty," said Verity, who had not meant to bid at all. "Sixty." "Seventy-five." The barn had gone quiet in the way a room goes quiet when it realises two people have decided to have a small war and everyone else has been made a spectator. Pargeter, who lived for this, let it run. "Two hundred," said the woman in green. Verity stopped. Two hundred pounds for a box of junk was not a bid, it was a statement, and it was a statement she could not afford to match for a reason she could not yet name. She let the box go and watched it carried off the trestle by Pargeter's boy, and watched the woman in green fold her card and make her way out through the crowd without buying anything else, without looking at anything else, walking straight for the door as though the whole auction had been one lot long. At the door, in the press of people, the woman reached up to pull her collar against the cold, and Verity saw her hand. It was the thumb she noticed. There was a dark mark along the pad of it, a soft grey-black smudge of the kind a person gets from handling a thing that leaves its colour behind, and Verity had spent three days looking at exactly that smudge on a strip of clear tape in her father's workshop, lifted from the paint beside the back door. The woman went out into the square. Verity went after her, and by the time she reached the street the woman in green had gone, and the only thing left moving was the low grey sky and a scrap of paper turning over and over on the cobbles, and when Verity picked it up, it was a receipt from Pargeter's, made out to a name she did not know, for the purchase of lot thirty-nine. She read the name three times. It had a shape she recognised and a sound she did not, the kind of name a person gives when they want to be remembered wrongly, and she folded the receipt into her bag beside the heart-shaped key and walked the length of the lane to the station, where Sergeant Frayne was doing paperwork and pretending not to be pleased to see her. "Lot thirty-nine," she said. "Bought by a woman I've never seen before, who bid two hundred pounds for a tea chest of rubbish, paid in cash, and gave a name that isn't real." Frayne took the receipt and looked at it the way he looked at everything, once. "You're sure." "I'm sure it's the kind of name a person gives an auctioneer. Half a name and half a lie." He set it down and looked at her across the desk. "So. Three weeks, four houses, a mill dug up, and now a stranger in a good coat paying more for a box of old keys than my car is worth." He rubbed his eyes. "I've been a sergeant in this town eleven years, Verity, and the biggest crime I've dealt with was a boy taking a tractor for a drive and putting it back in the wrong field." "And now?" "And now I've got a back door that sticks and a locksmith in my office telling me a story I can't disprove." He stood. "Go home. Lock your door. And tomorrow, before you do another thing, tell me what every one of those houses has in common, because you've been keeping it to yourself and I've been letting you, and one of us is going to run out of patience before the week is out." "It won't be you," Verity said, and went home, and locked her door, and sat up in the shop until midnight with the heart-shaped key in front of her, thinking about a woman in a green coat who had paid too much for the wrong thing and left a receipt behind, and wondering whether it had been left behind on purpose. ---