Six Keys

Oscar Renwick locked the back room at six o'clock in the evening, as he had done every evening for a quarter of a century, and for the first time in all those years it seemed to him that the lock was not obeying him. The key turned smoothly, the bolt slid into its keeper with the same velvet click he loved more than any music, and the little brass counter above the keyhole turned over a digit. Everything was as it always was. And yet the old man stood by the door, his palm on the cold handle, listening to the silence beyond it as though someone in there were breathing.

No one in there was breathing. There were only filing cabinets, a narrow desk, a lamp with a green shade, and what Oscar had for years called "my archive" and, for the last three weeks, had privately called something else: "my guilt".

He let go of the handle and walked back towards the window display, where Edwin Hale was waiting for him.

But that was in the evening. For Edwin, the day had begun not in the shop on Marlow Street, but with a letter.

The letter was lying on the mat inside the door when Edwin came downstairs at half past seven, kettle in hand, with the familiar feeling that the day would once again be empty. Two years earlier he had sold his workshop to a young man from Hartford, hung his apron on a nail in the shed, and promised himself and his late wife Mary — aloud, over her photograph on the mantelpiece — that from now on he would live like a normal person: grow tomatoes, read the newspaper from the first page to the last, and at long last stop poking his nose into other people's business.

Because a locksmith, Mary used to say, isn't a trade. It's a condition. "You know what everybody keeps behind which door, Eddie, and it never gives you a moment's peace."

She had been right. For forty years Edwin had fitted locks for half of Marlow Cross. He knew that the widow Parker kept not money in her safe but letters from a man who had not been at her wedding. He knew that the chemist changed the lock on his office twice a year because he was afraid of his own brother. He knew that in the vestry of St Michael's there was a door that had not been opened since the war. He had never told anyone anything. But he knew — and that knowledge weighed more than all the tools he had ever held.

The envelope was thick and cream-coloured, and Edwin would have known the handwriting on it in the dark: sharp letters with a slight backward slant, belonging to a man who had spent his whole life writing price tickets for objects older than himself.

"Dear Edwin," Oscar Renwick had written. "It is time for our annual inspection. I know you said you no longer work, but the lock is yours, and I will trust it to no one else. Come today at five, if you can. And one more thing: I need to talk to you about more than locks. I don't know who else to turn to. O.R."

Edwin read the last lines three times. Oscar never wrote "I don't know". Oscar knew everything — the date of every clock, the provenance of every snuffbox, the name of every craftsman who had ever touched silver with a graver. He was one of those people who never ask for help, because long ago they have persuaded themselves they have no need of it.

The kettle stayed cold.

* * *

Renwick's antique shop stood at the very end of Marlow Street, where the cobbles curved gently uphill towards the church, and for a quarter of a century it had looked as though it had been put there before the town itself. A narrow window with faded gilt lettering — O. RENWICK. ANTIQUES & RARITIES — a bell above the door, and the smell of wax, old paper and the lavender that Maureen Cobb tucked in little bags into every drawer, so that "the things don't get lonely".

Maureen was the first to greet him. She stood behind the counter in her eternal grey cardigan, a pencil behind her ear, and when the bell rang she raised her head so sharply that she might have been expecting someone else.

"Mr Hale," she said, and her face relaxed. "Thank God. He hasn't been himself all day."

"Good evening, Maureen. What's happened?"

She shrugged, but her fingers, Edwin noticed, tightened round the pencil until the knuckles went white.

"If only I knew. Since Monday he's hardly come out of the back room. Last night I found him in there at ten o'clock — sitting over some papers, and he didn't even hear me knock. And this morning he asked me," she lowered her voice, "whether I was quite sure I'd never given my key to anyone. Twenty-two years I've worked in this shop, Mr Hale. Twenty-two years."

She did not finish, because from the depths of the shop came a young woman of about twenty-five, tall and dark-haired, with features in which Edwin at once recognised the Renwicks — the same confident line of the jaw, the same attentive grey eyes. Only the look in them was different: not appraising, like her uncle's, but wary and a little tired, like someone who has come to a place where she is not especially welcome.

"You must be Mr Hale," she said, holding out her hand. "Gwendolyn Renwick. Uncle Oscar has told me a great deal about you. He says you're the only man in Marlow Cross who understands that a lock isn't iron, it's a promise."

"He always did like a good phrase," Edwin smiled, shaking her hand. "I hear you've come down from London?"

"Two months ago." Something crossed her face and was gone. "Uncle needed help with the inventory. At least, that's what he wrote."

At least, that's what he wrote. Edwin noted the phrase the way he had once noted a barely visible scratch beside a keyhole: silently, but for good.

Oscar came out to them a few minutes later. He seemed smaller than Edwin remembered — as though over the last months someone had carefully let out some of the air. The pink cheeks had gone pale; the pince-nez hung on its cord instead of perching, as it always had, on the tip of his nose. But his handshake was firm, and his voice was the same slightly theatrical voice that the third generation of Marlow Cross was now gently mocking.

"Edwin. You came. I knew you would. Come along, let's not waste the light."

The back room was separated from the shop by a short passage, and Edwin had hung its door himself — twenty years ago: oak, lined inside with iron, with a mortice lock he had worked on all that winter. There was no other like it in the county. Seven keys, not one of which would fit any other lock in the world. One was Oscar's own, on a hook behind the counter. Six belonged to six people Oscar trusted more than himself. And above the keyhole sat a small brass counter — the owner's whim, which Edwin had at first thought foolish and had later come to love, the way one loves a headstrong but honest horse. Every turn of the mechanism, from either side of the door, with any key, turned over a digit. The lock might keep its silence, but the counter remembered everything.

"One thousand four hundred and sixteen," Edwin read aloud, bending down. "You don't come in here often, for a man who lives here."

"I don't live here," Oscar replied, and it sounded oddly serious. "I keep things here that mustn't live anywhere else."

Edwin worked in silence, as was proper. He took the mechanism apart, tested the springs, oiled the pins, ran a fine probe along every groove. Everything was faultless — exactly as he had left it a year before. No scratches, no trace of foreign metal, no filings. When he had finished, he reassembled the lock and locked the door with his own key — the sixth, which Oscar had once solemnly presented to him "in case I ever lock myself in" — and the counter turned over.

"One thousand four hundred and seventeen," said Edwin. "Write it down, Maureen."

Maureen, standing in the passage, obediently entered the figure in the thick leather-bound register where every inspection for twenty years had been recorded. Six o'clock and two minutes. She always wrote down the minutes.

It was then that the bell above the street door rang again, and, without waiting to be asked, Tobias Lane walked into the shop.

The owner of the antiques shop on William Street was a man of about fifty, stout and carefully shaved, in a suit that cost rather more than a country dealer's suit ought to cost. He was always smiling, and the smile never reached his eyes.

"Oscar, old friend! I was passing and saw the light. Not interrupting, am I?" His glance slid over Edwin, over the tools, over the door of the back room, and rested on the counter a second longer than it needed to. "Ah, the annual ritual. The holy of holies under guard."

"What do you want, Tobias?" asked Oscar. His voice had gone flat as a blade.

"Nothing but your company. And perhaps an answer to my letter."

"I've given you my answer."

"You said 'no', old friend. That isn't an answer. That's a mood."

Something heavy, old and unpleasant hung between them, and Edwin, who had known both men for forty years, suddenly understood that he did not know the most important thing about them.

Tobias left five minutes later, bowing to Gwendolyn and wishing Maureen a good evening. Watching him to the door, Oscar touched Edwin's sleeve.

"Not here," he said quietly, so that not even his niece, who was polishing the glass of the display case, would hear. "Come tomorrow. Eight in the morning, before we open. I'll show you everything. I…" He faltered, and for the first time in forty years Edwin saw fear in his eyes. "For a long time I believed that six keys meant six friends. Now I think they mean six questions. And I already know the answer to one of them, Edwin. That's the worst of it."

"Oscar, if you're in some kind of danger—"

"The only danger I'm in is from my own foolishness. Until tomorrow. I shan't be going anywhere."

Edwin stepped out into Marlow Street as violet dusk was already thickening over the rooftops. The lamp burned in the window; Maureen was turning off the lights at the far end of the shop; Gwendolyn was pulling on her gloves by the door. Oscar stood behind the counter, small and upright, beneath the hook where his seventh key hung.

That was how Edwin remembered him — alive.

He walked home thinking that tomorrow at eight he would finally learn what lay behind the oak door he had hung with his own hands. He thought about six keys, about Tobias's smile, about Maureen's whitened knuckles, and about Gwendolyn's words: at least, that's what he wrote.

The only thing he did not think about was that some doors open once and for all.

And some never open again.