第7章 The Post Office Parcel

The parcel arrived on a Friday, and it came for Verity, which was the strangest part, because nothing had ever come for Verity in a parcel from anybody. Enid Tunnicliffe brought it herself, across the square, in her coat, and she would not hand it over at the counter like a normal person. She waited until Verity had shut the shop, and then she took the parcel out of her bag and set it on the counter between them as though it might go off. "It came this morning in the second post," Enid said. "No sender. Brown paper and string, and my own name and yours on the front, which I don't like one bit." "Enid." "It was posted in Thistlecote, Verity. That's what I don't like. Somebody walked a parcel into my own post office and posted it to you from town." Verity looked at the parcel. Brown paper, neatly folded, tied with string in a knot that had been tied slowly and well. Her name on it, and the shop's name, in printing that was not quite a printing, letters spaced too evenly, as though each one had been considered and placed. "Did you see who posted it?" "It came in the box overnight. Posted Wednesday, worked its way through, here today." Enid sat down uninvited, which was how Verity knew she was frightened. "Verity, what's going on? First my lock, now this." "I don't know yet. But I'm going to find out, and I'd rather find out with the string cut than untied, don't you think?" She cut the string. Inside the brown paper was a small wooden box, the kind that once held chessmen or cards, and inside the box, on a bed of folded tissue, was a key. It was a small key, old, yellowish brass, with a bow shaped like a heart, and it was worn on both sides, hard, the way the mill key had been worn. On a tag beside it, in her father's handwriting, was a name and a date. *Vardy, 2003. Tea room.* "Bridie's key," Verity said. "Bridie's got her key. I saw her open up this morning." "Then this is the spare." She turned it over. Under the key, folded small, was a strip of paper torn from something, and on it, in the same careful spaced printing as the address, were five words. *You taught me the drawer. Come alone.* Enid read it over her shoulder and went very quiet, and then she said, in a small voice, "Verity. Whoever wrote that knew your father." Verity did not answer. She was looking at the torn edge of the paper, and the colour of it, greenish, faintly ruled, and she knew beyond any doubting whose book it had been torn from, and she knew that whoever had torn it had wanted her to know. She telephoned the station from the shop phone and asked for Sergeant Frayne, and Frayne came round within the half hour, which told her more about how the week had gone than any report would have. He read the note twice, and looked at the key, and did not touch either of them, which was a professional habit and also, she noticed, a superstition. "You're not going," he said. "I haven't decided." "Verity." "Desmond." They knew each other well enough to drop the rank and well enough to use it as a weapon when they wanted. Frayne folded his arms and stood in the middle of her shop in the lamplight and looked at her with the patient face he saved for people he actually liked. "Somebody's been in four houses in this town in three weeks," he said. "Nothing taken that's worth taking. A bell, a photograph, a jar of jam. Now they've posted you a key and asked you to come out alone, and you want me to tell you that's a tea party." "I want you to tell me what the four houses have in common." "They're all on Cheaping Lane or off it." "And?" He was quiet. "Every one of them has a lock my father fitted," Verity said. "Every one of them is in the green ledger. And whoever's been in them knew the ledger before they went in, because a person doesn't take a jam jar and a dead bell unless the bell is the point and the jam is the joke." She tapped the torn strip of paper. "This came off that book. Whoever took it is telling me they have it, and telling me they know I'd recognise it, and asking me to come and get it, and there's only one reason a person asks you to come alone." "Because they don't want me there." "Because they don't want you there." Frayne was quiet a long moment. Then he did the thing she had been waiting for, which was not to forbid her but to be practical, because he had learned a long time ago that forbidding Verity Callender was like forbidding the weather. "Then you do it our way," he said. "You tell me where and you tell me when, before you go, and you take nothing with you but your bag and that mouth of yours. And if it goes wrong, you shout, and I'll be close enough to hear you. That's the deal. Take it or leave it." Verity took it. "Postmark says Wednesday," she said at last. "Whoever this is was in town Wednesday, and left today's business behind, and wants me to come to them." She picked up the little heart-shaped key and held it, and it was old and cold in her palm. "And Enid, the one thing I can't work out—" She looked up. "Why would somebody who took a ledger and a photograph and a bell give a key back?" "Maybe they want you to think they're kind." "Maybe," Verity said. "Or maybe they want me to think they're not." Enid gathered up her coat, and at the door she stopped and looked back at the key in its little box on the counter. "Verity," she said. "Your dad kept spare keys for half this town, and I've lived here all my life and I never once heard you mention that. Not once. I've known you twenty years and I didn't know that was under your counter." "Nor did I," Verity said. "Not properly. I knew it the way you know a thing that's always been there, like the clock being wrong, or the yew in the churchyard." "Yes," Enid said. "That's it exactly. It's always been there, and now somebody's gone through it like a cupboard." She opened the door onto the dark square. "Goodnight. Lock your door behind me, and mean it." Verity locked the door behind her, and meant it, and stood a while in the shop with the little heart-shaped key in front of her, and thought about the fact that she had lived beside a thing for twenty-three years and had never once asked it a question, and that a stranger in a green coat had read it backwards and forwards in a single winter and knew it better than she did. It was, she decided, a fair humiliation, and she would not hate the woman for it. ---