第3章 The Spare Drawer

The drawer was old oak and had been built to hold cutlery, and for forty-one years it had held keys instead. Verity pulled it out to its full length and set it on the workbench under the window, where the morning light came in across the tools her father had kept so precisely that she had never moved a single one of them. The drawer had a smell of its own, brass and graphite and the faintly sweet something that old paper gets when it has rested in the dark a long time, and she stood a moment with her hands on the wood before she made herself look properly. There were forty-one keys in the drawer. She knew that because her father had known it, and had written it on a card pinned inside the drawer's lid, the way he wrote everything: date at the top, total at the bottom, a small neat line through the middle where the arithmetic had been checked. Forty-one keys, each on a paper tag, each tag with a name and a date and sometimes, if the customer had been the sort of person who liked to explain, the thing the key had opened. Verity counted them. There were forty-one. The ledger was what was missing, and the ledger was what mattered. She went through the drawer key by key, reading each tag as she lifted it free and set it in a row along the bench, because her father had taught her that a list you can see is a list you can think with. Tunnicliffe, 1994. Osgood, 2011. Frayne, 1998, back door only. Vardy, 2003, shop and flat. On and on, half of Thistlecote's doors, kept here against the day the town changed its mind about them. The ledger had been the map of the drawer. Without it, the keys were only metal on string, forty-one small anonymous promises. Verity sat down on the tall stool and made herself be calm, which was her father's trick and her father's word, and which had never once meant that she was calm, only that she was not yet doing anything foolish. The ledger had lived here, in the workshop, in the shallow top drawer of the cabinet, because her father believed that a record of everything you were trusted with should be kept close enough to touch. It had a green cloth cover worn pale at the corners and columns ruled in his slow careful hand: who, when, which door, and at the end, sometimes, a note. She had read it herself a hundred times, looking for the one tag she needed on a job, and it had been here a month ago, she was certain, because a month ago she had used it, to find the spare for the old Frayne back door when the sergeant's own key had snapped in the cold. She had put it back. She always put it back. Her father had kept one rule above all the others, and it was the rule he had taught her before he taught her anything about brass. Never lose the record. A locksmith is trusted with doors, he used to say, and a door is only as good as the person who remembers whose it is. He had written down every key he ever kept, every lock he ever fitted, every house he was ever let into, and he had done it not because anyone made him but because being trusted had seemed to him a thing worth keeping accounts of. Verity had kept the rule. For twenty-three years, through every kind of door and every kind of customer, she had kept it, and the green ledger was the proof of it, the whole of her father's careful life in one worn book, and now the book was gone. She made herself think about who could have taken it. The workshop had no window to the lane, only the small dusty one over the bench that looked at the yard wall three feet away, and the back door with the old lock on it. Anyone who wanted the ledger had to be in the shop or in the yard, and the shop was open five days a week and the yard backed onto the alley behind Cheaping Lane, where the bins lived and where, as everyone in Thistlecote knew, nobody ever went and everybody sometimes did. The bell in the shop went again. "Boss?" "Workshop." Rufus appeared in the doorway, holding two teas, one of which he had already drunk a third of. He read her face the way he read locks, quickly and without needing to be told. "Something's wrong," he said. "Besides the tea room window." "Something's gone," Verity said. "The green ledger. My dad's book of keys." Rufus put both cups down very carefully, which was his way of showing he understood the size of a thing, and said nothing for a moment, which was his other way. "That book's worth nothing to anybody but you," he said at last. "Isn't it." "Nothing at all," Verity agreed. "Unless you wanted to know which keys open which doors." The two of them looked at each other across the bench, and the morning light came in off the yard wall and laid itself along the forty-one keys in their neat patient row, and neither of them said the obvious thing, which was that a person who wanted to know which keys open which doors was a person who had plans for the doors. Verity went through the workshop as carefully as she went through a lock: cupboard, cabinet, shelf, the drawer by the sink where the string lived, the tin where the tags were kept, the pockets of her father's old coat, still hanging on its hook because she had never found a reason to take it down. Nothing. Then she did it again, more slowly, in case the first time had been a looking and not a finding, and it was on the second pass that she saw it. The workshop door, the back door that opened onto the service yard where the bins and the coal had once lived, had a bolt in the middle and a lock at the side, and the lock was the one her father had fitted in the year she was born and had never had any reason to change. There were two fresh marks in the paint beside the keyway. Not scratches, like the ones on her shop door. This was a smudge, a dark print about the size of a thumb, where a hand had steadied itself against the frame while it worked, and left something behind. Verity took a sheet of clear tape and a corner of blotting paper from the bench drawer and lifted the print as gently as she had ever lifted anything in her life. Behind her, the shop bell went, and Rufus's voice came through from the front, cheerful and far too loud. "Boss! Someone's here about the tea room, says the window's been done!" Verity looked at the smear of dark on the tape in her hand, then at the forty-one keys laid in their patient row, then at the empty place in the cabinet where her father's green ledger had lived. "Coming," she said. But she did not move for a moment, and when she did, she took the key drawer and locked it in the safe under the bench, and put the safe's key on the ring with all the others, where, if she was honest with herself, it had never once needed to be before. ---