第9章 The Locked Shed

Wilf Marples had kept the Thistle Cut for forty years, and in that time he had raised and lowered the same two lock gates so many times that he could hear from the bridge whether they were sitting true, which was a skill he had never once needed and mentioned to everyone. "There's a shed," Wilf said, standing on the towpath with his hands in the pockets of a coat the colour of wet leaves. "Bottom of the second pound, past the bend. I've lost the key to it." "Lost it, or it's gone missing?" "I'm seventy-nine, Verity, so the honest answer is I don't know. I've a hook with nine keys on it and the little one that opens the shed isn't among them, and it was among them last month, and I've turned this barge inside out looking." "Then we'll open the shed," Verity said, "and you can start keeping your keys on something you can't lose." He laughed at that, a dry sound like gravel going downhill, and led her along the towpath, and Rufus came behind them carrying the long bag because Verity had decided, on the walk out, that a boy who wanted to be a locksmith ought to see more than shop doors. The Thistle Cut ran out of the Noke a mile above the town and had been dug by men with wheelbarrows two hundred years ago to carry coal to a place that no longer had the money to burn it. Now the water lay flat and green between its banks, freckled with duckweed, and the old lock keeper's cottage sat at the first pound with its windows dark. The cut had not been worked in thirty years. Wilf kept it anyway, because a canal with no boats is still a canal, and because someone had to keep the gates from rotting shut. The shed stood at the foot of the second pound, a low tarred building with a tin roof, and Verity looked at the padlock on its door for a while before she touched it. "This isn't your padlock," she said. "It's the one on the door." "It's the one on the door now. It's new. Six tumblers, decent make, brass and steel, and it's got a scratch on the shackle that's fresh." She took the picks from her bag. "Somebody changed your lock and kept the key, Wilf, which is a polite way of saying somebody's been in your shed." She had it open in under a minute, and the three of them stood in the doorway and looked in. The shed was tidy in the way a place is tidy when it belongs to an old man who has kept the same tools in the same order for half a century. Rakes, sheets of tar, a coil of rope, a tin of grease, a stool. And at the back, behind the tar, a chair had been set, and on the chair was a folded blanket, and beside the chair on an upturned crate were a candle stub, a tin mug, and a box of matches. "Somebody's been sleeping in here," Rufus said softly. "Somebody's been resting in here." Verity stepped in and looked at the blanket and the chair and did not touch them. "Not sleeping. Sleeping leaves a shape, and this blanket's folded like a person leaves a thing when they mean to come back." On the wall above the crate, pinned with two drawing pins, was a photograph of the mill, black-and-white and already going soft at the corners: the wheel, the water, the men on the loading platform, and behind the men, a toddler in a white dress being held up by a woman in an apron, laughing. Tabitha Osgood's grandmother's photograph, off its wall in a cellar three weeks ago and pinned here, in a tarred shed at the bottom of a dead canal, by a person who had wanted it where they could see it. Verity stood in front of it for a long time. Under the crate, pushed back, was a folded sheet of paper, ruled green, torn along one edge, and on it, in her father's slow careful hand, a list of names and years. She read down it. Tunnicliffe, ninety-four. Osgood, twenty-eleven. Vardy, two thousand and three. Frayne, ninety-eight, back door only. On it went, and beside each name, in a second hand, softer, spaced too evenly, a small pencilled mark. "Boss," said Rufus, from the doorway. "There's a name at the bottom." She looked. At the foot of the page, in the second hand, was written the part of the list that mattered. *Wexford. Mill House, all doors, 1979. Keep for Mr. W. Whoever has the ledger has the town. Whoever has the town has the mill. Whoever has the mill has the truth.* Verity folded the page and put it in her pocket, and looked again at the photograph on the wall, the toddler in the white dress, the laughing woman in the apron, the men on the platform who had all been somebody's fathers. "Wilf," she said. "Who's the little one in the picture?" Wilf looked, and his old face did something complicated, the way faces do when a memory arrives without being invited. "That's the Wexford girl," he said. "That's Beatrix, that is, when she was small. I'd know her anywhere. She used to come down to the lock with her father." He was quiet a moment. "Pretty child. I heard she went abroad, years back. I heard she died." "Who told you that?" Wilf thought about it, and the thinking took a while, and Verity let it take its time. An old man on a towpath with his hands in his pockets is not being slow. He is being careful, because he has learned that a memory is a thing you can break by hurrying at it. "Nobody told me," he said at last. "That's the thing. Nobody ever told me, and I've known it thirty years, and now I come to say it out loud I can't find where I had it from." He looked down the cut, at the flat green water and the two gates and the cottage with its dark windows. "That's how it goes round here, Verity. A thing gets said once, at a market, by a man who's since died, and then it's true forever, and nobody alive can remember who said it first." "Then maybe nobody said it first." Wilf looked at her sideways. "You're going to pull at that thread, aren't you." "I've been pulling at it all month." "Then pull it kindly," the old man said, and turned and walked back along the towpath towards his gates, and Verity watched him go, a small figure between the water and the hedge, keeping a canal that no boat had used in thirty years, because someone had to. She put her hand on the photograph, not quite touching it, the way she had put her hand on Enid's green door on the first evening of all this. "So did I," she said. ---