The Seventh Key

Four days later people gathered once more in the shop on Marlow Street.

Not all six. There could never again be six. But those who were left came when Gwendolyn asked them — on Thursday, at six in the evening, exactly two weeks after the evening when Edwin Hale had last seen Oscar Renwick alive beneath the hook where his seventh key hung.

The Reverend Pembry sat by the window, hunched, in black, and the brass plaque engraved with Tobias Lane's name lay on his knees, wrapped in newspaper. He did not know what to do with it. He could not throw it away. Still less could he put it back. Helen Frost stood by the door in a plain grey coat, without her spectacles, looking ten years younger and ten years wearier. She had resigned the day before. Head office in Bristol had accepted without a word. Inspector Grimshaw, who had already put off his departure twice, stood beside old Jan with his hands clasped behind his back. Constable Doyle, in dress uniform, its buttons polished until they dazzled, stood at his shoulder trying not to smile. Tommy Beckett sat on the floor beside the Chinese vase with an apple in his hand — green and sour — and was manfully eating it.

Gwendolyn sat on the tall stool behind the counter. Her stool now.

And Edwin stood by the oak door of the back room, as Oscar had once stood, his palm on the cold handle.

"You asked me to explain," he said. "All of it, from the beginning. I can't talk the way Oscar did. But I'll try."

* * *

"It didn't begin two weeks ago," said Edwin. "It began in 1938, when young Tobias Lane cast a spare handle for a forged Georgian teapot in the workshop they shared, and young Oscar Renwick found it and didn't go to the police. Because he was frightened. He hid the handle and the mould in a box — as security, as insurance, as a reminder to himself. And then, twelve years later, when Tobias came back, Oscar took his money. Not much. Ten per cent. But every one of those coins weighed like a stone. He carried those stones for twelve years."

Pembry bowed his head.

"This summer the stones grew too heavy. Harris from London showed Oscar a miniature made of celluloid instead of ivory. And Oscar decided: enough. On the twenty-second he told Tobias: one week. Either you repay everyone we cheated, or I go to the newspapers. Tobias laughed. He was sure Oscar wouldn't dare. But on the twenty-third Oscar changed his will, wrote his letter, gave a copy to the vicar. And began checking the keys. He asked each of the six whether they had ever given their key to anyone. Because he suspected Tobias was getting ready. He just didn't know how."

"And Tobias had been getting ready for a long time," Gwendolyn said quietly.

"Since July. In July he came to me, supposedly to buy tools for his collection, and in the twelve minutes I spent looking for a lemon in the kitchen he pressed my probe into wax — the only probe in the world made for a lock with a counter. In August he showed Mrs Frost a forged note from Oscar and got five minutes alone with the key in the safe-deposit box. Another impression in wax. From those two impressions he cast two instruments in his workshop. A key that opened the back room. And a probe that could fool the counter." Edwin touched the brass figures above the keyhole. "The seventh key. Because this door always had seven keys: six with six people and one on the hook. And Tobias made himself another. He became the seventh keyholder — the one Oscar never chose."

Tommy stopped chewing his apple.

"And now that night," Edwin went on. "A Thursday, two weeks ago. At two minutes past six I locked this door with my key. The counter read one thousand four hundred and seventeen. I left; Maureen and Miss Renwick left. Oscar stayed on alone. He drew the bolt on the front door, as he did every evening. And at about ten he took his key off the hook, unlocked the back room — the counter turned over to one thousand four hundred and eighteen — and sat down at the desk with his archive. He was writing. We saw the open folder and the pen with its cap off."

"And Tobias?" asked Doyle, though he knew the answer.

"At half past ten Tobias left the Crown, where he'd taken care to lose at dominoes so that everyone would remember when he left. Down the lane — to Oscar's yard. The scullery door was on the latch, the key in the lock on the inside: Oscar never locked it at night, because the yard was blind and the bolt on the front door seemed safer to him. Tobias went in. Oscar heard him and came out, I suppose, into the passage. They talked — I don't know for how long or about what. Perhaps Tobias pretended he'd come to strike a bargain. Perhaps he begged for another week. Oscar went back to the desk, to his papers. He wasn't afraid of Tobias — he'd not been afraid of him for forty years. Tobias took the bronze horse down from the shelf."

Helen Frost closed her eyes.

"Then," Edwin's voice grew steadier, as if he were taking a mechanism apart, "Tobias took the folder Oscar had been working on — the one on the desk, with his latest notes. He didn't find the box or the notebook — a few days before, Oscar had hidden the notebook in the drawer under the counter beneath the receipts, where Maureen found it later. Tobias left the room with the lamp still on. He locked the door with his seventh key — one thousand four hundred and nineteen. He slid the probe into the gap, held off the pawl and turned the counter back two places, to one thousand four hundred and seventeen. The very figure written in Maureen's register at two minutes past six, from my own lips. He hung Oscar's key on the hook. He went out through the yard, leaving the door on the latch. At a quarter to eleven the vicar saw him in the lane."

"But why?" Doyle burst out. "Why bother with the counter? He could just have walked away!"

"Because the counter made him invisible, Percy. And made me visible." Edwin smiled bitterly. "A locked room no one has opened is an impossible crime. And an impossible crime can have only one solution: the man who knows the lock better than anyone. The man whose probe fits the scratches. Tobias didn't just kill Oscar. He killed him with my hands. And so that everyone would see it as quickly as possible, at twenty past seven the next morning he telephoned the boarding house and told Miss Renwick to hurry. A handkerchief over the mouthpiece — an old trick."

"And Miss Cobb?" Tommy asked, barely audible.

Edwin gave the boy a long, warm look.

"Maureen found the notebook. And worked out where to look. She trusted me — and wrote a note. And you, Tommy, ran round to William Street with a newspaper, as you did every day. It wasn't your fault. You couldn't have known that a grown man who gave you twopence every day would steam open someone else's letter." He paused. "Tobias got to the shop before me. Maureen thought it was me. She said, 'Mr Hale, you're early.' I didn't hear it — but I know she said it, because that's what she always said when I came early." His voice faltered for the first time that evening. "He pulled her chain tight while I was standing outside the door in the yard. That sound I heard wasn't a cat jumping off a chair. It was him laying her down on the floor. Then he put into her hand the copied probe he had used on the door the night Oscar died, so that suspicion would fall on me once and for all, took the key to her room from her handbag, went there, found the notebook, came back and put the key back. And took the key to the yard door — so that he could come back."

For a long time no one spoke. The clocks ticked. Old Jan, wound and alive, swung his pendulum gravely.

"He's confessed," Grimshaw said at last. "Yesterday evening. When he saw the laboratory report on the gold from the probe's handle and from his own workbench. And when I laid in front of him Oscar's notebook, taken from his own bag. The assizes at Bristol sit in January. Two murders, fraud, blackmail, forgery. His shop is sealed, his property seized. Whatever can be sold will go to compensate the buyers on the list. Along with whatever Miss Renwick can give."

Gwendolyn nodded.

"I'll sell whatever I have to," she said. "The Chinese vase, the silver, half the clocks. Every one of the twenty-seven will get their money back. That's what my uncle wanted." She paused and looked at old Jan. "But I won't sell that clock. And I won't sell the shop. I'm staying in Marlow Cross."

Pembry raised his head. Helen Frost turned from the door.

"If," Gwendolyn looked at Edwin, and her grey eyes, so like Oscar's, suddenly looked very young, "if someone who knows every lock in this shop better than its owner will agree to come in at least three times a week. Because I know nothing about mechanisms. And a shop with this many clocks needs someone who understands that a mechanism is also a form of honesty."

Edwin was silent for a long time. He looked at the brass figures above the keyhole, at the hook behind the counter, at the empty place on the shelf where for forty years the bronze horse had stood.

"Three times a week," he said at last. "And an inspection every year. With the register, and the minutes."

Tommy Beckett finished his apple and tossed the core into the wastepaper basket. It went in.

* * *

Late that evening, when everyone had gone, Edwin and Gwendolyn sat in the back room under the lamp with the green shade, going through the contents of the steel box. The inspector had returned the letter and the list to them — copies had stayed with the case file. The mould and the handle had gone to Bristol.

Gwendolyn took from the bottom of the box the oilcloth in which the handle had once been wrapped, meaning to fold it. Something crackled under her fingers. She unfolded the cloth — and between its two layers saw a thin sheet of paper folded in half. No one had noticed it, probably, because it had been sewn into the edge of the cloth with a few stitches.

She carefully unpicked the stitches with her fingernail.

The same sharp, backward-slanting hand. But the ink was fresher — no more than a month old.

"Edwin, Gwen. If you have found this, you have found everything else, and Tobias, I hope, can do no more harm. But I must tell you what I did not put in the letter, because I was not entirely sure. Tobias only sold. The metal — yes, the metal he made himself; those are his hands. But the miniatures, the lacquer, the enamel, the celluloid passed off as ivory — that he cannot do and never could. Someone else does that. In London. Tobias only ever called him 'the Clockmaker'. In eight years twenty-seven of his pieces passed through my hands. How many have passed through others', I don't know. Harris says he has seen the same hands in Paris and Amsterdam. He is still working. He does not know me. But if Tobias falls, the Clockmaker will find out who pushed him. Be careful. And for God's sake, trust no one who brings too beautiful a thing into this shop. O.R.

P.S. His twenty-eighth piece has never been sold. It is still here, in the shop, among my clocks. I have never been able to bring myself to find out which one."

Gwendolyn raised her eyes from the page. Edwin was no longer looking at her.

He was looking through the half-open door of the back room — into the dark shop, where in the dim light of the street lamp a score of clocks were ticking, each at its own pace. And among them — one about which he suddenly realised he could not remember where it had come from.

Over Marlow Street, over the rooftops of Marlow Cross, over the spire of St Michael's, stood a clear October night. Somewhere far away, in London, in a workshop no one knew anything about, someone was perhaps at that very moment bending over a new and flawless piece.

Edwin Hale stood up, took from his pocket his father's old magnifying glass in its brass mount, and went into the shop.

For forty years he had made locks. Now, it seemed, he would have to learn how to open clocks.