A Locksmith by Trade

On Monday morning Edwin opened the door of his shed for the first time in two years.

It creaked as it always had — long and drawn out, with a plaintive whistle that Mary used to say was the shed complaining about its master. Inside it smelled of machine oil, iron filings and dust. The apron hung on its nail. On the workbench, under a canvas cover, lay the tools, arranged in the order he had left them the day he sold the workshop and came home feeling that he had buried another piece of himself.

He took off the cover. Ran his fingers along the handles — screwdrivers, probes, tension wrenches, fine steel hooks he had turned himself, each for his own hand and its own task. Forty years. Two leather rolls, each with twenty-four pockets. He knew every one of them by heart, the way one knows the faces of family.

He picked up the larger roll and spread it out on the bench to check that everything was there.

And froze.

Everything was there. Twenty-four tools, each in its pocket. But the third probe from the right — the finest, with the distinctive double bend at the tip that Edwin had once devised for locks built exactly like Oscar's — was lying in its pocket with the bend facing outward. Edwin never put it in that way. Never. Not once in forty years. The bend always faced inward, towards the leather, so it wouldn't catch on the edge when the roll was rolled up.

He stood over the bench for a long time, looking at that little piece of steel, and felt something heavy and dark slowly rising in his chest. Then, carefully, with two fingers, he drew out the probe and held it up to the window. On the tip, in the hollow of the bend, there was a barely visible pale smear. Not rust. Not oil. Something grey and faintly greasy, like modelling clay.

Or like wax.

Edwin wrapped the probe in his handkerchief, put it in his breast pocket, and rolled up the roll. His hands were steady. His hands were always steady. But his heart was beating as it had not beaten since the day the doctor came out of Mary's room and said nothing at all.

* * *

The door of the back room was taken off its hinges at ten. Doyle brought two lads from Bennett's sawmill, and, puffing, they carried the heavy oak slab out into the passage and laid it across the trestles Edwin had asked for in advance. Without its door the room looked like a gaping mouth. The desk was still there, the cabinets, the lamp with the green shade. The bronze horse had been taken away. The body had been taken away. On the carpet only the dark stain remained, which no one had dared to scrub.

"Go ahead," said Doyle, and sat down on a chair by the trestles with his notebook on his knee.

Gwendolyn stood in the doorway to the shop. No one had invited her, but no one sent her away either. Doyle glanced silently at her, then at Edwin, and Edwin gave a barely perceptible nod. Let her watch. It was her uncle. It was her door now.

Edwin laid out his own tools on a clean cloth — not the roll from the shed, but the second, smaller one he used to take on call-outs. He put on his spectacles. And set about taking the lock apart.

He did it slowly, explaining each movement, as he used to explain to apprentices. Here is the faceplate. Here is the cylinder — one of the few in the county with nine pins instead of the usual five. Here is the bolt — a massive steel tongue that shoots into the keeper in the frame. And here — he unscrewed the brass housing above the keyhole — here is the heart of the whole contraption.

The counter.

A small wheel with numbers round its rim. Above it, a ratchet with a pawl — a thin steel tongue that allowed the wheel to turn in one direction only. And a toothed gear linking the counter to the bolt: the moment the bolt moved even half an inch, the gear pushed the wheel on by one position, and the pawl clicked, fixing the new figure for ever.

"To open the door," said Edwin, "the bolt has to slide back. The moment it slides back, the gear turns the counter. There's no other way. The bolt and the counter are joined like two fingers of one hand."

"Then how?" Doyle leaned closer.

Edwin didn't answer. He picked up a magnifying glass — an old one in a brass mount that had come down to him from his father — and bent over the bolt.

For a minute he said nothing. Two. The clocks in the shop ticked out of step, and Gwendolyn thought she had never before heard how loud a score of clocks could sound in absolute silence.

"There," said Edwin at last. His voice was strange — quiet and yet sharp, like glass squealing under a knife. "Look, Percy."

Doyle took the glass. On the side face of the bolt, right at the edge, where no key ever touched, ran two very fine scratches. Parallel and fresh — the metal in them gleamed like a new coin, not yet dulled.

"And now here."

Edwin pointed at the pawl of the ratchet. On its tip there was the same tiny fresh dent, as if someone had pressed it from below with something thin and hard.

"I don't understand," Doyle admitted.

Edwin straightened. Took off his spectacles. Polished them on the tail of his jacket — slowly, thoroughly, although they were perfectly clean.

"The counter counts when the pawl clicks," he explained. "If you hold the pawl off, the wheel turns freely. Either way. Someone slid a thin, flexible tool with a double bend at the tip into the gap between the door and the frame. With one bend he held the pawl up so it couldn't click. With the other he caught the bolt from the side and moved it. And while the pawl isn't holding, you can turn the wheel wherever you like — forwards, backwards, one position or ten. Set any number you want. For instance, one thousand four hundred and seventeen."

"So it can be fooled!" Doyle almost jumped off his chair. "So the counter lies!"

"The counter doesn't lie, Percy. The counter's simply blind if you blindfold it. But to blindfold it you have to know where its eyes are. You have to know that the pawl sits exactly here, at exactly this angle, exactly this far from the edge. You can't see that from outside. You can't see it even if you take off the faceplate. Only I know it. I, and my drawings."

"Where are your drawings?"

"At my house. In a chest under the bed. Under a lock," Edwin smiled bitterly, "of my own making."

He paused. Then he reached into his breast pocket, took out the handkerchief and unfolded it on the cloth beside the bolt. A thin probe with a double bend lay on the fabric like a sleeping snake.

"And there's something else," he said. "I made this tool forty years ago for locks like this one. There isn't another like it. This morning I found it in my roll lying the wrong way round. And on the tip — wax."

Gwendolyn felt the room grow colder. Doyle was looking at the probe the way one looks at a loaded pistol.

"Do you understand what you're saying, Mr Hale?" he asked slowly. "You've just shown me the instrument that opened that door. And it's yours."

"I understand." Edwin looked the constable straight in the eye. "But look at the scratches, Percy. Compare them. My probe has a double bend with a radius of a sixteenth of an inch. The scratches on the bolt were made by a tool whose bend is slightly wider and whose tip is flatter. It wasn't made at a bench. It was cast. Or forged from a mould."

"A mould?"

"Wax, Percy. Someone took my probe, pressed it into wax, made a mould. And then from that mould made another — a little cruder, a little wider, because a copy is always a little worse than the original. And put mine back in the roll. Only the wrong way round."

The passage went so quiet that they could hear someone outside on Marlow Street trundling a barrow over the cobbles.

"Who had access to your shed?" asked Doyle.

"Anyone who knows how to open a creaking door. I haven't changed the lock on that shed in twenty years." Edwin smiled crookedly. "The cobbler's children go barefoot, and the locksmith's shed goes unlocked."

Doyle wrote in his notebook for a long time. Then he put down his pencil.

"I'm taking the probe," he said. "And all your tools. For the county inspector. You understand I can't do otherwise."

"I understand."

"And you understand that I still don't know whether you've just shown me proof of your innocence, or very cleverly hidden your guilt."

"I understand, Percy," Edwin said wearily. "In your place I wouldn't know either."

* * *

When Doyle had gone, taking the probe, the drawings and both rolls, Gwendolyn found Edwin in the far corner of the shop, by the display case of clocks. He was standing with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the second hands of twenty clocks run, each at its own pace.

"You knew all along you'd be suspected," she said. "And you still showed him the probe. You could have just kept quiet."

"I could."

"Why didn't you?"

The old locksmith did not answer for a long time.

"Because your uncle, Miss Renwick, spent forty years keeping things in this shop that couldn't speak. And they were all honest, except the ones someone had made dishonest." He turned to her. "Whoever killed Oscar wants us to believe the door was never opened. And then he wants us to believe that I opened it. Two lies. One on top of the other. Like two layers of paint on an old picture."

"And what's underneath?"

"Someone who knows how to make copies," Edwin said quietly. "Someone who knows very well indeed how to make copies."