Locked Doors

Maureen Cobb had woken at six without an alarm clock for twenty-two years, and in twenty-two years she had never once been late for the shop. That Friday she left home at twenty past seven, in a grey coat over her grey cardigan, carrying an umbrella although the sky was invisible behind the fog, and with a heavy, clammy feeling under her ribs that had not gone away overnight.

She had slept badly. She had dreamed she was writing figures in the inspection register, and the figures kept crawling out from under her pencil like ants, and she could not catch them.

The fog over Marlow Street was so thick that she did not see the shop until she was right in front of it. The window was dark. The lamp Oscar always switched on at seven, "so that passers-by know we're alive", was not lit. Maureen stopped on the cobbles and for a few seconds simply looked at the glass, in which she saw her own reflection — small, grey, holding an umbrella, as if cut out of a newspaper.

Overslept, she told herself. Oscar was seventy-four. People of seventy-four are entitled to oversleep.

She took from her handbag the key to the street door — an ordinary brass key, nothing like the other one that hung on its own chain under her cardigan — and put it in the lock. The key turned. But the door did not give.

Maureen pushed harder. The door stood like a wall, and at once she understood why: the bolt was drawn on the inside. The big iron bolt Oscar drew only when he was sleeping upstairs, in his two rooms above the shop. Which was to say, every night. But every morning at seven he drew it back.

"Mr Renwick!" She knocked on the glass, gently at first, then with her fist. "Mr Renwick, it's Maureen!"

The bell behind the door jingled at her blows, thin and helpless. Otherwise — not a sound.

She stepped back into the middle of the street and tilted her head up to the first-floor windows. The bedroom curtains were open. The curtains open, and no light. Oscar never opened his curtains until he was dressed, because, as he put it, "at my age, the morning is a private matter".

Someone touched her elbow, and Maureen cried out.

"I'm sorry! I'm so sorry, Miss Cobb, I didn't mean to frighten you."

It was Gwendolyn Renwick — hatless, her hair damp from the fog, a coat thrown on over a house dress.

* * *

Gwendolyn had not intended to go out so early. She rented two rooms at Mrs Hobbs's boarding house opposite the church and usually came to the shop at nine, by which time her uncle had drunk two cups of tea and quarrelled with the newspaper. But at twenty past seven she had been woken by the telephone in the hall of the boarding house; Mrs Hobbs had knocked on her door and said the call was for her, but whoever it was had rung off the moment they heard she was asleep.

"A man? A woman?" Gwendolyn asked.

"Who's to say, dear. The voice sounded as if they were talking through a handkerchief. All they said was, 'Tell Miss Renwick she'd better hurry.'"

She dressed in three minutes. All the way through the fog she told herself it was a stupid joke, that people in small towns get bored and amuse themselves however they can. And all the way she saw her uncle's face the evening before, as he watched Tobias Lane leave. He had not looked like that even when he wrote to her in London. And that had been a strange letter.

"Come, Gwen. I need someone with my blood in their veins. There is a matter here I must finish, and I don't want to finish it alone."

There had not been a word in it about an inventory. He had invented the inventory later, for everyone else.

"The bolt," said Maureen, and her voice shook. "He's drawn the bolt and he doesn't answer. The curtains are open and there's no light. Miss Renwick, it isn't right. He never does that."

"And the back door? From the yard?"

"There's an ordinary latch and a lock. Only Mr Renwick has the key."

Gwendolyn turned, searching for someone, anyone, and out of the fog, as if in answer, emerged a tall, slightly stooping figure in an old tweed overcoat.

Edwin Hale was coming for eight. He arrived at a quarter to, because never in his life had he been late for anything, and he knew from a long way off that something was wrong. Two women on an empty street in front of a dark shop window. One with an umbrella, the other without a hat. Both looking at him the way people look at a doctor who has appeared on the doorstep before anyone sent for him.

"The bolt's drawn inside," said Gwendolyn instead of a greeting. "He doesn't answer."

Edwin asked nothing. He went to the door and knocked — three short raps, two long, the way he had knocked for Oscar for forty years — and put his ear to the glass. Then he crouched, lifted the brass flap of the letterbox, and looked inside.

"Maureen," he said evenly, "have you got a hatpin? A long one."

Maureen drew a pearl-headed pin from her hat, and Edwin took it the way a surgeon takes a scalpel. He had not carried tools for two years. But his fingers remembered. Fingers always remember.

He bent the tip of the pin into a hook, pushed his arm through the letterbox up to the elbow, turned his wrist at an angle that made his own shoulder crack, and felt for the cold ring of the bolt. He had fitted that too, twenty-five years ago, and he remembered that it stuck if you pulled it straight and slid obediently if you lifted it a little first. He lifted. He pulled. With a dry scrape the bolt slid aside.

The door opened. The bell above it rang as it always did, cheerful and out of place.

The shop smelled of wax and lavender. And it was very quiet. Not the quiet of an empty room, but the quiet of a room where someone is holding their breath.

"Oscar!" Edwin called.

No one answered.

He switched on the light. The shop was exactly as he had left it the day before: the display case of clocks, the counter, the cabinet of silver, the Chinese vase Oscar would never have sold even if he'd been offered half the town for it. On the hook behind the counter hung the seventh key — brass, heavy, with the letter R engraved on its bow. Edwin paused beside it for a moment. The key hung straight and still, as it had hung every day for twenty years.

"I'll look upstairs," said Gwendolyn, and without waiting for an answer she ran for the narrow staircase in the corner.

Edwin and Maureen heard the floor creak over their heads, heard the bedroom door open, then the sitting room. A minute later Gwendolyn came running down. Her face was white.

"He's not there. The bed's made. Nobody's slept in it."

"And the door to the yard?" asked Edwin.

He walked down the passage past the back room without looking at it — the way a man looks away from what he is afraid of — and opened the small door into the scullery, and from there the door to the yard. The yard door was shut on the latch. But not locked. The key was sticking out of the lock on the inside.

Edwin looked at it for a long time. Then he shut the door and went back into the passage.

Only then did he allow himself to look at the oak door lined with iron.

From beneath it a thin yellow strip of light was showing. The light of the lamp with the green shade.

"He's in there," whispered Maureen. "Dear God, he's been sitting in there all night, and we—"

She flung herself at the door and hammered on it with both fists.

"Mr Renwick! Mr Renwick, open the door! Please!"

Silence.

Edwin gently moved her aside and bent to the brass counter above the keyhole. He knew what he would see. And yet, when he saw it, he felt something cold slide slowly, very slowly, down his spine.

One thousand four hundred and seventeen.

The same number he had set with his own hand at two minutes past six the evening before, when he locked the door with his key. The same number Maureen had written in the register, with the minutes. Since that moment the mechanism had not turned once. Not from outside, not from inside. Not with any of the seven keys.

No one had opened the door all night.

And from under it shone the light of a lamp that someone had switched on after it was locked.

"Maureen," Edwin said quietly. "Have you got your key?"

She looked at him as though she did not understand the question. Then slowly, with trembling fingers, she drew a thin silver chain from under her cardigan. On it swung a key — the same as Edwin's, the same as Oscar's on its hook, the same as four others belonging to four other people in Marlow Cross.

"I never gave it to anyone," she whispered. "Never, Mr Hale. You do believe me?"

"Open it, Maureen."

The key went into the keyhole. Behind them Gwendolyn pressed her hand to her mouth. The fog outside the shop windows suddenly seemed to Edwin very thick and very far away, as though all of Marlow Cross had dissolved in it and nothing was left in the world but the three of them, the passage, the oak door, and the small brass digit that was about to turn over.

The mechanism clicked.

One thousand four hundred and eighteen.