第4章 The Tea Room Window

The Crane and Kettle sat at the lower end of Cheaping Lane, where the street widened before the square, and it had been pouring tea for the town since long before Verity was born. Its windows were small and many-paned and always slightly steamed, so that from outside the people within looked like figures in a photograph taken on a warm day. Inside there were eight tables, a shelf of borrowed paperbacks that nobody ever borrowed twice, and a cat-shaped clock over the counter whose tail swung with the seconds. Bridie Vardy was standing in the middle of the floor when Verity came in, holding a tea towel as though she might need it for defence. "It's the window," she said. "The little one by the till. It was open when I came down." "Open as in you left it open?" "Open as in I never touch it, because the last time I touched it the whole frame came away in my hand and Mr. Frayne had to put it back with the wall still attached." Verity crossed the room. The tea room was warm and smelled of toast and the ghost of a thousand cups, and there was a small, busy quiet in it that only Bridget could produce, the quiet of a place where the sugar was always in the same bowl. The window by the till was low and narrow, an old sash with six panes of wavy glass, and it stood an inch ajar, which in a room this warm felt like a held breath. She put her eye close to the gap and looked at the latch, then took her torch out and looked again. "That's a shim," she said. "A what?" "A thin blade. A bit of plastic, a bit of tin, whatever's in reach. You slide it in between the two halves of the sash and you walk the latch back. Gentle as you like." She straightened. "Whoever did it didn't break anything, because nothing needed breaking." "And they took my bell." "Your what?" "My bell. The little brass one, on the shelf there, the one my mother used to ring when the tea was up." Bridie pointed at an empty place on the shelf above the till, a clean circle in the dust around it. "Nothing else. Not the till, not the tin, not the spoons that old Miss Framlingham keeps stealing by accident. The bell." Verity looked at the clean circle in the dust. Three days ago a jar of jam and a framed photograph. Last night a brass bell that did not work, had never worked, and was worth perhaps four pounds on a good day and a broken heart on a bad one. "There's something on the sill," Rufus said, who had followed her in and was now crouched by the window doing his still-and-inward face. "Show me." He held up a finger and touched nothing. "Powder. Grey. Right along the ledge where the sash slides." "Graphite," Verity said. "Lock lubricant." "But it's a window." "It's a lock," she said. "A sash latch is a lock. Whoever came in wanted it to move quietly, and thought of that, and took the trouble." She looked at the little window and the clean circle in the dust and felt the small cold prickle she had been waiting for since Enid's door. "This isn't a thief, Bridie. A thief takes the till." "Then what is it?" "I don't know yet. That's the honest answer." She sat down at the nearest table, because sitting was how you told a person you were going to stay a while, and Bridie, who understood the language of tables as well as anyone in Thistlecote, poured two cups without being asked and sat down opposite. "I'll tell you what I think," Bridie said, when the tea had done its work. "It's one of the Wexfords come back." Verity looked up. "Don't look at me like that. That bell was the mill office bell. Old Mrs. Wexford gave it to my mother when the mill closed, the year I was six, which makes it about thirty years ago and I remember it because I dropped it and got the hiding of my life." Bridie turned her cup in its saucer. "So that's two things gone, and both of them from that family. The photograph was of the mill, wasn't it, the one Tabitha lost. And now the bell." "The key," Verity said, half to herself. "What key?" "Nothing. A key from my own counter." She finished her tea. "Bridie, does anyone still keep in touch with the Wexfords? Anyone at all?" "Only the bank," Bridie said. "Only ever the bank." The door went and Myrtle Soper came in sideways, the way she did everything, with a basket of eggs on one arm and an opinion already forming on her face. Myrtle sold eggs on the square three days a week and knew more about Thistlecote than the parish register, and the only thing she ever got wrong was the order of her facts. "I heard the tea room's been done," Myrtle said, sitting down without being asked, because Myrtle considered every table in the town to be partly her own. "Was it the window?" "It was the window," Bridie said. "And nothing taken but the bell." "The bell," Bridie agreed. Myrtle set her basket down and looked at the two of them with the satisfaction of a woman whose information has been confirmed. "There's a pattern in it," she said. "I've said so to Pargeter. First the jam at Tabitha's, which everyone says is nothing, and then your bell, which everyone says is worse, and if you ask me it's all the one person and the one person is a Wexford." "There's no Wexford left to do it," Verity said mildly. "That's what I said to Mr. Lampitt," Myrtle said, triumphantly, "and he went very quiet, and a man who goes very quiet when you say a name has a reason." Verity let that sit. Myrtle's reasons were about as reliable as a farmer's forecast, which is to say right often enough to be dangerous and wrong often enough to ruin a picnic. Still, Lampitt going quiet at a name was a thing worth knowing. She said her goodbyes and walked back up the lane with her hands in her coat pockets, thinking about a family who had left a town thirty years ago and were now being remembered one small brass thing at a time, and wondering whether being remembered was a kindness or a warning, and who in Thistlecote had decided which. At the shop she took her bag into the back and laid the morning's evidence out on the bench the way she laid out a lock before she worked on it: the graphite on a slip of paper, the two pick marks from Enid's door photographed on her phone, the new cylinder she had taken out of the post office and kept, though Enid had told her to throw it in the bin. She looked at the three things for a long while. A person who changes a lock without telling the owner is a person who wants a key that no one else in the town can account for. And a person who picks a latch and finds the mechanism dirty enough to need graphite is a person who has done this before, and more than once, and in more than one town. "Which means you're not local," Verity said to the bench, "or you are local and you've been at it a long time and nobody's ever caught you at it, and of the two of those I know which one I'd bet on." She put the cylinder in the safe with the drawer of keys and locked the safe and put the key on the ring with all the others, which was beginning to feel less like a habit and more like a siege. ---