The Second Body

Tommy Beckett knocked at Edwin's door at a quarter to nine — breathless, red-faced, with the canvas bag in which three unsold newspapers still remained.

"From Miss Cobb," he blurted, thrusting out the envelope. "She said into your own hands."

"When did she say it?"

"Well… a while back," the boy sniffed, and looked away. "I had my papers to do, Mr Hale. I've got a job."

Edwin tore the envelope open there on the doorstep, under the porch light. He read it. Read it again. I know where to look… tonight at nine o'clock… by the yard… I beg you. The writing was even and careful, like a price ticket, and only in the words I beg you did the pen seem to falter for a moment.

He looked at his watch. Eight forty-six.

He did not take his coat. He crossed dark Marlow Cross faster than he had walked in ten years, and the knee that ached before rain ached so badly he had to clench his teeth. The lane behind Marlow Street was narrow and cobbled, with no lamps, and blind walls of yards and sheds on either side. Edwin found the right gate by touch — he knew it, because he had once replaced its latch — and pushed.

The gate opened. A small yard, cluttered with empty packing crates and old frames. The door into the shop's scullery. Dark.

He knocked. Softly, then louder.

"Maureen? It's me, Edwin."

Silence. He tried the handle. The door was locked.

He knocked again — three short, two long, as for Oscar — and put his ear to the wood. Clocks. He could hear the clocks in the shop, a score of clocks ticking out of step like a fine, cold rain. And nothing else.

And then — something. A short, muffled sound, somewhere deep inside, as if someone had carefully set something heavy down on the floor. Or as if a cat had jumped off a chair.

Edwin froze, holding his breath. The sound did not come again.

He stood in the yard until half past nine. Knocked twice more. Went round by the lane to Marlow Street and looked at the window — dark, dead, with only the street lamp reflected in the glass. He tried the front door. Locked. The bolt not drawn — he could feel it in the way the door gave very slightly on its hinges. Someone had come in here with a key to the front door. And had not left this way.

He wondered whether to go to Doyle. And didn't. Because the note said, Tell no one. I beg you. Because Maureen might have changed her mind, taken fright, gone home. Because he was an old fool who for forty years had respected other people's secrets more than his own forebodings.

He went to Maureen's lodgings, to the little room above the cobbler's. The windows were dark. He knocked for a long time, until Mrs Turner put her head out of the next window in her curlers and informed him that "Miss Cobb went out at half past eight, and there's no call to go hammering like that, people are trying to sleep".

He did not sleep that night. He sat in the armchair in front of the cold grate, looking at Mary's photograph, and read the note over and over until he knew every letter by heart.

* * *

Gwendolyn came to the shop at eight in the morning, as she had every day that week. She had already come to love that moment — the turn of the brass key, the jingle of the bell, the smell of wax and lavender, the first minute of quiet when the shop still belonged only to her and the clocks.

That Thursday the bell jingled as usual. But the quiet was different.

She felt it on her skin — the way one feels a draught from an open window in the next room. She stood on the threshold, gripping her handbag. Then she walked past the counter, past old Jan with his winking moon, into the passage.

The paper strips with the seal of the county police hung from the doorway, torn, like the wings of a dead butterfly.

In the back room the lamp with the green shade was burning.

Maureen Cobb lay on the floor by the empty shelf, where a week earlier Oscar had lain — only on her back, with her eyes open, astonishment frozen in them, and her face dark, swollen, a stranger's. The silver chain on which she had worn her key for twenty years was sunk deep into her throat. The key lay under her chin like a little cross.

Two floorboards by the wall had been prised up and wrenched aside. Beneath them — grey emptiness, dust, an old mousehole.

And in Maureen's right hand, clenched so tight the knuckles were white, was a thin steel probe with a double bend at the tip.

Gwendolyn did not scream. She did not remember afterwards what she did in the minutes that followed. She remembered only that somehow she was out in the street, on the cobbles, shaking so hard her teeth chattered, and that the first person she saw in the morning fog was Edwin Hale, walking towards the shop grey as ash, in yesterday's shirt and without a coat.

He saw her face. And stopped as if he had walked into a wall.

"Maureen?" he asked.

Gwendolyn nodded.

The old locksmith closed his eyes. One second, two. When he opened them again there was nothing in them — no fear, no surprise. Only a weariness so deep that he might have lived another forty years in those two seconds.

"I was here," he said quietly. "Last night, at nine. She asked me to come. I stood outside the door, Miss Renwick. Outside the door. And I didn't go in."

* * *

This time Constable Doyle did not stand; he sat on a stool in the shop with his head in his hands and was silent for a long time. Dr Brenner had just left, having said that death had occurred between half past eight and half past nine the previous evening. Strangled. From behind. Quickly. Like Oscar, she probably never had time to turn round. Or else she turned and saw someone she wasn't afraid of.

The probe from her hand lay on the counter on a clean handkerchief. Doyle could not take his eyes off it.

"I kept your probe in the safe at the station, Mr Hale," he said at last, dully, without raising his head. "Under lock and key. At seven this morning I checked it. It's there." He jerked his chin at the counter. "And this one isn't. This one's here. In her hand."

"Look at the tip, Percy," said Edwin. "The bend is wider. The tip is flatter. The metal's greyer. That's not a forged probe. It's a casting. A copy. The same one that scratched the bolt the night Oscar was killed."

"I can see that." Doyle raised his head at last, and Gwendolyn saw that his eyes were red. "I can see that, Mr Hale. And I can also see the note you've just handed me yourself. Come at nine. By the yard. Tell no one. And I can see that you were here, at that door, exactly when she was dying. And I can see she's holding a copy of your tool, which nobody in this town but you could have made. And I know that on Friday morning Inspector Grimshaw from Bristol will be here, because they've mended the bridge. And Inspector Grimshaw didn't know you when he was nine and lost the key to his father's shed."

He stood. The stool creaked.

"Who brought you the note?"

"Tommy Beckett. At a quarter to nine."

"She gave him the note at seven. Mrs Turner saw them under the lamp." Doyle frowned. "An hour and three quarters to run three streets?"

"He said he had his papers to deliver."

Doyle wrote it down. Looked at what he had written for a long time. Then closed the notebook.

"I ought to arrest you, Mr Hale. Do you understand? Any other constable in any other town would have had the handcuffs on you by now."

"I understand, Percy."

"And I'm not going to." He said it as if he did not believe it himself. "Not today. You've got until Friday, when Grimshaw arrives. One day. If by then you haven't given me someone else — someone who can make copies of tools and whom Maureen Cobb trusted — I'll hand the case over to the county with everything I've got. And everything I've got, Mr Hale, points at you."

He picked up the probe, wrapped it in the handkerchief and went to the door. The bell rang after him — thin, out of place, cheerful.

Gwendolyn and Edwin were left alone among the ticking of the clocks.

"'Where the horse stands. Only lower,'" said Gwendolyn suddenly. She was looking at something in her hand. "I found this on the floor, under the desk, when… when I ran out. It must have fallen out of her pocket. I didn't give it to Doyle. I don't know why."

She held out to Edwin a price ticket. A rectangle. Lines of floorboards. A small square against the wall. A cross. And Oscar's sharp, backward-slanting hand.

Edwin looked at the card for a long time. Then at the passage, where beyond the torn paper strips the lamp with the green shade was burning, lighting the two wrenched-up boards and the grey emptiness beneath them.

"She was looking in the wrong place," he said slowly. "And whoever killed her was looking in the wrong place too. Otherwise he'd have taken this card." He raised his eyes to Gwendolyn, and for the first time that morning there was something in them besides weariness. "Which means, Miss Renwick, that whatever they died for is still lying somewhere in your shop."