The Locked Cabinet

Katherine's apology was exactly what Florence had expected: short, businesslike and almost inaudible.

"I was wrong. Sorry."

Nigel nodded without looking at her. None of them knew what to do with the apology after that, so Florence suggested what Mum had always suggested when the house got too crowded with words:

"Let's go and have dinner. At the Royal Oak. Like we used to."

Nothing had changed in the pub in twenty years — not the blackened beams, not the "pie of the day," steak and ale. Old Roger recognised them at once, brought three pints on the house and said Margaret had been the best person in Little Ashford. They sat at the same table by the fire where they'd once celebrated Nigel's sixteenth birthday.

"Mum knew," Florence said when the pies arrived. "About you, Nige. That you were struggling with money."

Nigel froze, fork in hand.

"She said last Christmas there was something in your voice — like that time you got chucked out of college and spent three weeks pretending you were going to lectures. She wasn't cross. She was waiting for you to tell her yourself."

Nigel was silent for a long time. Then he took a folded sheet with a red stripe out of his pocket and laid it on the table between the plates.

"Eleven thousand," he said. "Not a hundred and twenty. But I lied to her too. Right up to the end."

Katherine read the letter. Florence watched something change in her sister's face — not judgement, something she couldn't name, something old and very tired.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Katherine asked quietly. "I could have helped."

"Because you'd have looked at me the way you looked at me today."

Katherine opened her mouth and closed it again. And then she did something Florence hadn't seen her do in twenty years: she reached across the table and laid her hand on Nigel's for a moment. Only a moment. But he didn't pull away.

They got home at half past nine. The house was dark except for the light over the porch, which Mum had set on a timer, throwing a yellow patch across the gravel.

Florence came in last and was the first to notice that the door to Dad's study was open.

She remembered closing it deliberately before they left — after Derek's visit that morning.

"Did either of you go into the study before the pub?"

Katherine and Nigel shook their heads.

Florence switched on the light. At first glance — nothing. But on the floor by the filing cabinet lay a curl of grey paint, thin as a fish scale. Florence crouched down. Around the keyhole on the top drawer the metal was scratched — freshly, down to the shine, in a few short, nervous strokes.

"Nige," she called. "Look at this."

Her brother crouched beside her and ran a finger over the scratches the way he'd run it over a plank, checking for splinters.

"Fresh," he said. "A couple of hours, no more. Someone tried to open it with a hairpin or a thin screwdriver. Didn't work — it's an army lock, they don't give that easily."

"Were the doors locked?" Katherine was already at the window, checking the catches. "Front? Back?"

"I locked the front," Nigel said. "The back… I don't remember."

The back was locked. So were the windows. No sign of a break-in.

"Then someone has a key to the house," Katherine said, very calmly. Florence remembered that calm from childhood: it was how her sister spoke when she was truly frightened.

Three drawers, one shared lock at the top. Katherine tugged at each one — none of them gave.

"We need to find the key," Florence said.

"I can open it," Nigel said. "Drill out the cylinder, five minutes' work."

"No." Katherine answered so fast that they both looked at her. She looked away. "I mean… let's look for the key first. Mum never threw keys away. It's here somewhere."

Florence could see her sister was holding something back. She saw Katherine's hand drift, without her meaning it to, to the pocket of her jeans. But there was no fight left in her.

They searched until midnight: in Dad's desk, in Mum's button box, in the biscuit tin full of keys to everything in the world. None of them fitted.

When her brother and sister went to bed, Florence stayed in the study alone. She sat in Dad's chair and looked at the filing cabinet.

Mum had lived with Dad in this house for almost forty years, raised three children with him, buried him seven years ago under the old yew in the churchyard. And all that time, in the corner of his study, there had stood a locked cabinet that — Florence was suddenly certain of it — Dad had never once looked inside. Because a man who leaves an unfinished game of chess untouched for seven years, so as not to disturb the last move, would never have unlocked someone else's secrets. Not even his wife's.

Not even — especially not — his wife's.

Florence switched off the light and went to the stairs. On the first step she remembered: Dad never closed the door of his study. Never. He used to say closed doors were for people who had something to hide.

And Mum, after he died, closed that door every single day. And not, Florence understood now, because it hurt her to go in.

She had been guarding something in there.

And someone with a key to their house had just tried to take it.