第6章 The Worn Key

"Read it to me again," said Delphine Jellicoe. Delphine had been the town's doctor for twenty years, and had grown up here, and had come back here, and could therefore say things to Verity that nobody else in Thistlecote would dare to. She was sitting at the kitchen table in the flat above the shop with her boots off and a mug of tea going cold between her hands, which was how she spent most Thursday afternoons when there was no surgery to run. "Mill office, spare, 1979," Verity said. "In my dad's hand. Which means the tag came off a key he kept, which means the key came out of the drawer, which he never lent to anyone in his life, which means—" "Which means somebody got into the drawer." "The drawer's still locked. The ledger's gone, the tags are all on their keys, and this tag is standing in the wet grass at a mill that somebody's been digging up like it's a flower bed." Delphine turned the tag over, though there was nothing on the back but the soft brown ghost of the key that had hung against it for forty years. "You said the key on this tag would open the mill office." "Once. My dad fitted the office lock in seventy-nine, the year old Mr. Wexford had the place done up for the last time, and he kept a spare, the way he kept a spare for everything." Verity took the tag back and held it under the lamp. "The cord's frayed, and the fray goes all one way. That key's been swung on this tag a long while. Years." "Then it's his own key, not a copy." "No. It's the one from the drawer." She set it down. "Unless—" She stopped, and Delphine waited, because Delphine had spent twenty years waiting professionally. "Unless there were two keys, and one of them left this house long before the ledger did." The light through the kitchen window was going gold, the way it did in Thistlecote in the late afternoons, when the bricks of the old square seem to warm up and hold the sun for an extra half hour. Verity got up and went to the shelf over the range, where she kept the few things of her father's that were purely his and not the shop's: a pipe he had given up, a photograph of the pair of them at a fair, a tobacco tin of screws that were too good to throw away. She took down the tin and opened it on the table. "Every so often he'd bring home a key that had been 'out'," she said. "His word. A key out in the world, on a ring somewhere, getting worn. He'd bring it back and study it, because a worn key tells you things a new one can't. Which side a person favours. How hard they turn. Whether they fumble." "And you think this is one of those." "I think this key is forty years old and worn on both sides, hard, and my dad never fitted a lock he didn't test, and a test key gets worn on one side only." She looked at the tag. "This key was used. Somewhere. By two hands, over years. And then it came back to my father's drawer, and somebody took it out of the drawer this spring, and used it on the mill office door, and dropped the tag in the nettles getting away." Delphine whistled, low, which she did not often do. "So the person who took your ledger, and your mill key, and Tabitha's photograph, and Bridie's bell—" "Is the same person who has a map of everything my father ever kept, and is working their way down the list." Verity sat back down. "You've read that ledger a hundred times. You must remember some of it." "Some." Verity closed her eyes, because that was how the entries came back to her, in her father's slow hand, column after column. "The mill takes up more of the book than anything else. His biggest job, nineteen seventy-nine. Office, yard gate, store, the two cottages at the end, a whole page of Wexford, Wexford, Wexford." She opened her eyes. "And every one of them says the same thing in the margin. Keep for Mr. W." "Not keep for the drawer. Keep for Mr. W." "Which means old Mr. Wexford was meant to be able to come for those keys at any time." Verity turned the tag over in her fingers. "My father fitted the locks. Somebody else kept the spares. And thirty years later somebody has decided to take them back, one small brass thing at a time, and I want to know whether that somebody is a Wexford or a person who has decided to become one." Delphine looked at her for a long moment, and then she did what she always did when a thing had stopped being interesting and started being serious, which was to put her cup down and fold her hands. "Nineteen seventy-nine," she said. "I was at school. The mill was shut by then, it had been shut since I was small, but old Wexford still lived up at the house and came into town for his paper every morning, and everyone knew him, and nobody knew a thing about him." She frowned. "You know what I remember? That his daughter was never mentioned. Never. Not once, in all those years, by anybody. A whole town keeping its mouth shut about a girl is not forgetfulness, Verity. That's a decision." Verity went through the rest of the ledger in her head, all the doors, all the dates, and the shape of the thing began to come clear, the way a key's wards come clear when you finally hold it up to the light. "You know the worst of it? It's tidy. Whoever this is has a list and a purpose and a habit of putting things back where they found them. A thief takes the silver and leaves the room a mess. This person takes a bell nobody can sell, and a photograph nobody can sell, and a key that belongs to a building nobody wants." "Which sounds less like a thief," said Delphine, "and more like somebody going round a town collecting the things that were once their family's." They sat with that for a while, and outside the square went quiet in the way it always did between the end of the market and the beginning of the evening, and it was Delphine, finally, who said the thing Verity had been circling all along. "If it is a Wexford," she said, "then you've got a bigger problem than a missing ledger. Because there's only one Wexford anybody knows about, and she died in a car on the coast road. And I was the doctor who signed the certificate. Ninety-seven, that was. November." Verity set her cup down very carefully. "In a car," she said. "On the coast road, near the county line. The man who was driving her was killed too. I was young, just qualified, and the county asked me to do the paperwork, and I remember the name because it was the only time I ever saw it written down, and it was on a form." "And the name on the form—" "Was Beatrix Wexford," Delphine said. "Which is the name I have not said to a living soul since, and which I have just said to you, and now I want to know what you're going to do with it." Verity looked out of the kitchen window at the square, at the last of the light lying along the cobbles, at the door of the phone shop where the curtains were shut. "Find out who's collecting her family's things," she said. "Because either the woman on the coast road was Beatrix Wexford, or she was somebody who had a very good reason to be called that, and I have learned this month that in Thistlecote a name is a door and everyone has a key to it." ---