Oscar’s Notebook

For twenty-two years Maureen Cobb had written price tickets.

It was the first thing Oscar had taught her when, a twenty-four-year-old war widow with no children, no money and not the faintest notion of antiques, she first stepped over the threshold of the shop on Marlow Street. He gave her a pack of stiff cards, a bottle of ink and a pen and said: "Every object in this shop has a number, Maureen. The number is its name. The price is its pride. And the story is its soul. Learn the names first."

She learned them. In twenty-two years thousands of objects had passed through her hands, and Maureen remembered the numbers of most of them the way other women remember their nephews' birthdays. Forty-seven — the snuffbox with the shepherdess, sold in 'fifty-three to a clergyman from Exeter. Twelve hundred and nine — the brass telescope no one would buy for eight years, until an American bought it for a price that kept Oscar pink in the face for three days.

So when, at dawn on Wednesday, she finally made herself undo the metal clasp of the brown notebook again and turn past the first page, with its single sentence, she understood it faster than anyone else in the world could have.

Columns of figures. Dates. Brief notes. To an outsider, nonsense, a cipher, an old man's jumbled jottings. To Maureen, a list of names.

Eight hundred and twelve. The silver sugar bowl. Nine hundred and forty. The miniature on ivory. One thousand and sixty-three. The enamelled snuffbox. She remembered them all. Remembered writing their tickets in her best hand. Remembered Oscar holding each of them up to the light and saying, "Flawless. Simply flawless." And she remembered — now, looking at the figures, it rose from some depth she had never looked into — that all these things had come into the shop the same way. Not from auctions, not from country houses, not from widows selling off the family silver.

From William Street.

Beside each number in the notebook there was a mark — a small letter C and a sum. And at the foot of each page Oscar had totalled the sums, and the figures grew and grew until on the last filled page they became a number that made Maureen feel sick. She could not have earned that much in three lifetimes.

After that came entries of a different kind. Short, broken, as though written in haste, in the dark, with a shaking hand.

"14th. Examined miniature 940 under the glass. The varnish is new. The ivory — no, not ivory. Dear God."

"16th. Wrote to Harris in London, asked him to return the sugar bowl for examination. He replies that he's sold it on. Won't say to whom."

"19th. Three more. I signed them all. With my own hand. For forty years I trusted my eye. Or wanted to."

"22nd. He came. He admitted it. Wasn't even ashamed — he laughed. Said I'd been an accomplice from the first day, because I took my share and never asked. Said if I talk I'll go down first, and my whole shop with me, and my signature, and my name. I've given him a week. Let him pay back everyone we cheated. Every last penny. If not — I go to Kettering, and from there to The Times. Let me drown. But I'll drown honest."

Maureen turned the page. Then another. The remaining leaves were blank. She went back to the first page, to the sentence she had learned by heart in three days: "If anything happens to me, Maureen knows where to look. Only she must trust no one. Not even those who hold keys."

There was no name. Anywhere. Not once. Only "he".

She closed the notebook and sat motionless for a long time, watching dawn come up over the roofs of Marlow Cross. Then she got up, put the kettle on, and while it boiled stood at the stove with her fists clenched tight, so that her fingers wouldn't tremble.

Maureen knows where to look.

But she didn't know. For twenty-two years she had known everything about that shop — and now she did not know the one thing that mattered.

The kettle whistled. And then, under that piercing, strained whistle, she suddenly heard another voice — quiet, theatrical, faintly ironic — a voice she had not heard for five days and would never hear again.

"If I'm ever gone, Maureen," Oscar had once said to her, long ago, fifteen years ago perhaps, while she was dusting the tall Dutch clock in the corner of the shop, "ask old Jan what time it is. He's the only one in this shop who never lies."

She had laughed at the time. She had thought it was a joke.

* * *

Gwendolyn left the shop at two — on Wednesday the solicitor had asked her in to sign the probate papers. Maureen waited round the corner under the grocer's awning until she had turned out of sight. Then she crossed the street, unlocked the front door with her old brass key, which no one had thought to take from her, and slipped inside.

The bell rang. She started, as if she had been caught stealing.

Old Jan stood where he always stood — in the corner by the window, tall and dark, with a painted dial on which the moon winked at the sun. An eighteenth-century Dutch longcase clock, which Oscar had refused to sell just as stubbornly as the Chinese vase. Maureen opened the glass door of the case. The pendulum swung; the weights hung solemnly on their chains. She felt along the floor of the case, the sides, the corners. Nothing. Wood, dust, old cobwebs.

Then her fingers found a small knot in the back panel, just below the pendulum. A knot she had wiped with a duster for twenty-two years without paying it any attention. She pressed it — nothing. Then, without knowing why, she turned it, like the knob of an old wireless, and pressed again.

Something clicked softly. A narrow board slid back, revealing a shallow hiding place.

Inside lay two things. A small brass key — odd, short, with a square bit, unlike any key she had seen in the shop. And a card — an ordinary price ticket, one of the hundreds she had cut herself — with a pencil drawing. A rectangle. Several lines crossing it, like floorboards. A small square against one of the walls — a cabinet? a shelf? And a tiny cross. And beneath it, in the sharp, slanting hand: "Where the horse stands. Only lower."

The back room. The shelf above the desk, where for forty years the bronze horse had stood. Where no one looks at it, because everyone is looking up.

Maureen stood in the middle of the empty shop with the card in one hand and the little key in the other, and her heart was pounding so hard she thought it must be heard in the street.

Only she must trust no one.

She put the little key back in the hiding place, pressed the board until it clicked, and closed the glass door. The card she put in her cardigan pocket. If she found what she was looking for, the key would still be there. And if anything happened to her — she brushed the thought away, as one brushes away a wasp — let the key lie where no one would think to look.

* * *

At home she sat over a sheet of paper for half an hour. She could not go there alone. She was afraid. Afraid of the dark, of the seal on the door, of the dark stain on the carpet, afraid of that "he" who had laughed as he confessed. But going to Doyle meant handing the notebook to the police, and then the whole town would know, and Oscar's name, his signature, his forty years of spotless reputation — all of it would go under, just as he had feared.

She could not allow that. Not after he had written: I'll drown honest. He had wanted to drown by his own hand. He had not wanted others to drown him.

Trust no one. Not even those who hold keys.

But to trust no one you have to be alone. And she could not be alone.

In the end she took up her pen and wrote, carefully, the way she wrote price tickets, in her very best hand:

"Mr Hale. I know where to look. Please come to the shop tonight at nine o'clock, by the yard. I will let you in. Tell no one. I beg you. M.C."

She hesitated to the last. Mr Hale had a key. Mr Hale was the only one who knew that lock. Constable Doyle had taken his tools. But Mr Hale was also the man who for forty years had never told anyone else's secrets, though he knew more of them than anyone in Marlow Cross. And he was the man who on Friday morning had put his hand on her shoulder and said, "Sit down, Maureen. I'll see to everything."

She folded the note, sealed the envelope and went out into the street. Under the lamp on the corner, as always at that hour, stood Tommy Beckett — ginger, freckled, with a canvas bag of evening papers slung over his shoulder.

"Tommy," she said. "Take this to Mr Hale. Into his own hands. Here's sixpence."

The boy's eyes lit up at the coin, and he tucked the envelope into his bag between the newspapers.

"Right away, Miss Cobb. I'll just nip round to William Street with one paper, and then straight to Mr Hale."

He ran off, his boots slapping the cobbles. Maureen watched him until the ginger head disappeared round the corner.

At half past eight, unable to sit at home any longer, she went out again. She had decided to arrive early. To open the yard door, light the lamp, so that Mr Hale wouldn't have to stand about in the dark. And perhaps — only perhaps — to look for herself. Just to look. Just a peep.

The shop greeted her with darkness and the ticking of clocks. She went down the passage with a pocket torch in her hand and stopped in front of the doorway of the back room, where the two paper strips with the seal made their cross.

"Forgive me, Constable," she whispered, and carefully, so as not to tear it, peeled back one end.

Then she unlocked the yard door, as she had promised. And went back to the back room.

The shelf above the desk was empty. She knelt on the carpet, avoiding the dark stain, and began to count the floorboards beneath the shelf, checking them against the drawing on the card. One. Two. Three.

Behind her, the door to the yard creaked softly.

Maureen raised her head, and on her face, lit from below by the trembling beam of the torch, there appeared a relieved, almost happy smile.

"Mr Hale," she said. "You're early."