第17章 The Tea and the Trap

They went to the bank together on Saturday morning, Verity and Netta, and they went with the deed box under Verity's arm and the heart-shaped key in Netta's pocket and the ledger, the green ledger that Netta had taken from the workshop and kept for a year and had now, at last, given back to Verity to carry, because a record belongs to the person trusted with it. Rufus had not been pleased about being left behind. "You'll be opening a box in a bank," he had said, in the shop the night before, with his cap on the counter and his arms folded. "That's a key and a lock, boss. That's the whole job, and you're going without me." "That's exactly why I'm going without you," Verity had said. "If it goes wrong, one of us has to be the one who isn't in the room. And if it goes right, one of us has to be the one who stays here and holds the fort, and makes the tea, and feeds the cat, because that cat has opinions about being fed on time and I've never once known her to be wrong about it." "You'll telephone," Rufus had said. "The moment it's open." "The moment it's open," she had promised, and she had meant it, and she had also telephoned Frayne at nine that morning, which was the other thing she had meant, and Frayne had said he would be there and had said nothing else, which from Frayne was a whole speech. They walked up Cheaping Lane in the thin Saturday light, past the bakery and the post office and the tea room, and Netta walked with her hands loose at her sides and her chin up, and Verity, watching her from the corner of an eye, saw a woman who had spent a year keeping to the edges of a town decide to walk down the middle of it. "Once we go in there," Netta said, at the door, "it stops being mine. You understand that. The moment the box is open, it isn't a family thing any more, it's a town thing, and a town thing goes where towns go with it." "It was always going to be a town thing," Verity said. "That's what your grandfather wrote in the margin. He knew, when he asked my father for that key, that a secret that lives in one man's drawer dies with the man. So he left it with a locksmith, and a locksmith's whole life is other people's doors, and other people's doors are a town." She put her hand on the bank door. "You're not losing it. You're giving it somewhere it can last." Then she opened the door, and they went in. Bellwether was not pleased to see them. He was less pleased to see the box. "The box is the property of the estate," he said. "The box is the property of the person who rented it, and the person who rented it left it in his will to his granddaughter," said Netta, "and if you want to argue about the will, we can argue about it in front of a solicitor, and I have a year's worth of nothing to do and a great deal of patience." Bellwether looked at the box and the key and the two women, and Verity watched the small war on his face, and she understood it, because she had seen the same war on the faces of a hundred customers: the war between doing the thing that was right and doing the thing that had been done before, in the same office, by the same family, for thirty years. "There's a procedure," he said at last. "There's a desk," Verity said. "Let's use it." They used the desk. Netta signed the card, and Verity set the box on the green blotter, and Bellwether produced the bank's own duplicate record, and between the three of them they established what Verity had known since the moment she saw the W stamped into the shank: that the heart-shaped key was the key to box four, and that it had been tagged, forty years ago, with the name of a tea room, so that anyone who found it would think it worthless. Netta put the key in the lock. Before she could turn it, the bank door opened, and Bertram Lampitt came in with a folder under his arm and a man Verity did not know behind him, and for a moment the bank, which had been quiet as banks are, went quiet as a held breath. "That box is on my site," Lampitt said. "Your site doesn't start until Monday," said Netta. "It starts the day I paid for it, and the box was found on it, and I've had a surveyor go over the mill and there's a floor been lifted and earth been turned, and I'm within my rights to want to know what's been dug up out of my own property." "You're within your rights to ask," said Verity. "You're not within your rights to stop a woman opening her own grandfather's box in her own family's bank. But you're welcome to watch, Mr. Lampitt. In fact, I'd rather you did." Frayne came in then, because Verity had told him the time and the place, and PC Dodds came behind him and stood by the door in the way a young constable stands by a door when he has been told to stand by a door and is not sure why. Frayne looked at Lampitt and Lampitt's man and the box on the blotter, and did not say a word, and his silence did the work that a hundred words would not have done. "Open it," Frayne said. Netta turned the key. The lid came up, and inside the deed box was a shallow tray of old brown paper, and on the paper were three things. A single sheet of green-ruled ledger paper, ruled and written in the slow careful hand of a man who had spent his life being trusted with other people's doors. A letter, sealed, addressed in the same hand to Mrs. Beatrix Wexford, care of her sister, London. And a receipt, cracked with age, made out by a firm of builders in a town twenty miles away, for a quantity of paraffin and a length of fuse, and signed with a name. Verity read the name, and then she read it again, and then she looked up, not at Bellwether, and not at Netta, but at Bertram Lampitt, who had gone the colour of the paper in the box. "Your father," she said. Lampitt did not answer. Bellwether, behind his desk, had taken off his glasses and set them down and put his thin hand over his eyes, and the man he had brought stood very still, and the bank, with its one counter and its two clerks and its window on the market cross, held still around them all. "Everyone sit down," said Frayne. "I think we'd better have this out in the open, and I think we'd better have it here, because I am tired of a town keeping its mouth shut about a fire that happened before most of us were born." ---