第1章 The Tumbler

Verity Callender had spent twenty-three years opening other people's doors, and along the way she had learned to read a lock the way a doctor reads a pulse. A stiff tumbler meant weather. A loose escutcheon meant a screwdriver and a hurry. A key that ground instead of clicked meant the whole mechanism was tired and wanted replacing, and it would go on wanting until somebody listened. This evening, standing on the step of the post office with Enid Tunnicliffe breathing hard beside her and the last of the light going grey over the market square, she listened. "It jams something dreadful," Enid said. "I've been shoving at it since half past four." "You've been shoving at it with your shoulder," Verity said. "I have. What else is a shoulder for?" Verity set her bag down on the worn stone and knelt. The bag was old leather, the handle mended twice with waxed thread, and inside it lived the ordinary miracle workers of her trade: picks in a canvas roll, a plug spinner, a tension wrench thin as a hairpin, a tin of graphite, and, for emergencies, a small hammer she had never once enjoyed using. The post office door was painted a deep green that had been repainted so many times the panels had gone soft at the edges. Verity put her hand flat against the wood first, which was a habit and not a technique. Locks talk through doors if you let them. "Five-lever mortice," she said. "Is that bad?" "It's good. It's expensive." She fed the tension wrench into the bottom of the keyway and held it with her little finger, the way you hold a thread when you are trying to get it through a needle. "The question is what it's doing on your front door." "I don't know what any of that means." "Nor should you. That's the point of me." The tumblers gave, one after another, with small patient clicks, and the door swung in on the smell of paper and stamps and the faintly sweet dust of a place that dealt all day in other people's news. Enid made a noise of relief and reached past her for the light. Then Verity stayed where she was, kneeling on the step, looking at the edge of the door. "Enid," she said. "When did you last have this lock changed?" "Never. It's the same one your dad put in, oh, it must be thirty years ago. He did it the week after Brian and I took the place on. Why?" Verity took the pencil torch from her bag and shone it at the lock's face. The cylinder was new. Not new-old, not cleaned-up-and-put-back, but new: bright in the bevels, unworn at the keyway, the grub screw still holding its factory shine. Around it, the wood was marked with the pale ring of a fitting plate that had been there far longer. "The lock is new," Verity said. "Someone changed it." Enid stared at her. "That's a joke." "I don't joke about brass." "But nobody's been near the place. I'd have noticed. I notice everything, I'm the postmistress, noticing is the whole job." Enid folded her arms, then unfolded them, then folded them again, which was what she did when a fact refused to sit down quietly. Verity stood and brushed the grit from her knees. "When did it start jamming?" "Tuesday." "And before Tuesday?" "Before Tuesday it was a lock. It opened when I put the key in. That is the entire relationship I wish to have with a lock." Verity turned the key Enid handed her. It went in smoothly, as a key will when the lock it belongs to is younger than the key. She held it up. The key was old, worn smooth at the bow where Enid's thumb had polished it for thirty years, but the bit was crisp and the wards fitted the new cylinder exactly. Which meant the new lock had been cut to match the old key. Which meant someone had copied Enid Tunnicliffe's key, taken the old lock off, fitted a new one matched to the copy, and walked away, and then, some weeks later, the copy had stopped fitting. Or been worn down. Or been lost. Verity did not say any of this. She had a rule about saying things before she was sure, and the rule had kept her out of more trouble than it had ever cost her. "There's a van," she said instead. "Going round. A man told Prue Osgood he was from Callender's." "From your dad's?" "From mine." Verity looked at the green door and the market square beyond it, where the lamps were coming on one by one along Cheaping Lane. "Prue had her shop lock changed a fortnight ago. She thought it was me." "But it wasn't you." "It was not." Enid went quiet in the way that people go quiet when they are deciding whether to be frightened. Above them the old clock on the clockhouse struck six, badly, as it always did, one note lagging behind the others like a tired man on a walk. "Well," Enid said at last. "I suppose I'd better put the kettle on. You'll want it, whatever's happening." "I'll want it more than that," Verity said, and followed her in. Inside, the post office smelled of ink and warm dust and the particular hush of a room where everyone's news is kept in neat little piles. Enid filled the kettle and set about being brisk, which was her way of being brave. Verity sat on the counter stool and thought about her father. Cedric Callender had run Callender's Keys from a shop on Cheaping Lane for forty-one years, and when he died he had left her the shop, the ledger, and a drawer full of keys that no longer belonged to anyone. He had promised, every time a customer moved away or died or simply forgot, that he would keep their key against the day they came back for it, and mostly they had, and the ones who had not were still in the drawer, each on a paper tag with a name and a date, waiting in a dark like patient guests at a party that had ended long ago. "Enid," Verity said. "Did you ever give a key to anyone? A neighbour. A lodger. The coal man." "I gave one to my sister when she watered the plants in the summer of ninety-eight. She lives in Yorkshire now and she has opinions about the plants to this day." "And that key?" "Buried with my sister's opinions, as far as I know." Verity finished her tea. Then she picked up her bag, said goodnight, and walked the length of Cheaping Lane with the shop lamps coming on around her and the town closing its shutters for the evening. Her own door, the door of Callender's Keys, was wedged between a tea room and a saddler that had sold out to a phone repair shop two years ago. The painted sign above it had been repainted by Verity herself, the letters a little crowded at the end, the way they had been crowded when her dad painted them, because she had never had the heart to widen the shop. She stopped in front of it and did not go in. The brass escutcheon around her own keyhole, the small polished shield she cleaned every Saturday of her life, was scratched. Two fine new lines ran from the keyway out across the brass, the marks a pick makes when someone is working in a hurry and does not care what the brass remembers. Someone had been at her door. Verity stood a moment in the lamplight, feeling the cold come up off the pavement through her shoes. She had spent her life learning to open what other people locked. It had never once occurred to her, in twenty-three years, that someone might want the secret of what she locked in return. She unlocked her own door, went in, and turned on every light in the shop. Tibbs, the grey cat who had appointed herself the shop's foreman some years ago, lifted her head from the counter, considered Verity, and went back to sleep. "Nothing you can't handle," Verity told her. "Probably." But she did not sleep well that night, and in the morning she went down to the workshop behind the shop and opened the drawer of keys that no longer belonged to anyone, and found that the ledger that went with it, the long green book where her father had written down every key he ever kept and every door it had come from, was gone. ---