The Rival on William Street

Tobias Lane's shop on William Street was as neat as its owner. A window polished until it squeaked, velvet stands, and on every object a card with a calligraphic label and a price that made the ordinary resident of Marlow Cross catch his breath. Georgian silver. Meissen porcelain. A French bracket clock with gilded cupids. And in the left-hand corner, under glass, a whole collection of antique craftsmen's tools: gravers, templates, tiny blacksmith's hammers, brass dividers fanned out like cards in a sharper's hand.

Edwin stopped in front of that window at eleven o'clock on Tuesday morning and stood there longer than he had meant to. Something was bothering him, like a pebble in a shoe — unpleasant, elusive, like a name on the tip of the tongue. He looked at the brass dividers, at the gravers with their darkened handles, and could not work out what it was.

"Admiring, Mr Hale?"

Tobias was standing in the doorway — no mourning band now, a grey suit, a waistcoat with a watch chain. The smile in place.

"Come in. I've put the kettle on. You won't refuse an old acquaintance a cup of tea, will you? Especially now, when," he lowered his voice, "we both have something to talk about."

Edwin went in. He was not really sure himself why he had come. That morning there had been a note from Tobias in his letterbox: "It would do us both good to talk. T.L." And in forty years Edwin had learned that when a man who has never wanted to talk to you suddenly does, it is worth going. If only to hear what he wants to tell you, and what he doesn't.

Tobias's back room was a workshop. Not like Edwin's — it did not smell of oil and iron. It smelled of turpentine, varnish, warm wax and something else, sweetish and bitter, that caught at the throat. On the broad table under the lamp lay a snuffbox in pieces. Beside it, a blowtorch, crucibles, jars of pigment, bunches of fine brushes.

"Restoration," Tobias explained, catching his glance. "People bring me the broken past, and I make it whole again. Isn't it a beautiful trade?"

"Beautiful," Edwin agreed. "As long as you don't confuse 'whole' with 'new'."

Tobias laughed. He poured tea into thin porcelain cups and sat down opposite.

"You always did have a sharp tongue, Hale. Oscar loved that in you. He loved people who say unpleasant things. He couldn't do it himself — that's why he kept people like you about him." He sipped his tea. "I hear Doyle's taken your tools."

"News travels faster than the telegraph in Marlow Cross."

"And they say scratches were found on the lock. From your probe."

"People say," Edwin replied calmly, "a great many things. Why did you ask me here, Lane?"

Tobias put down his cup. The smile vanished — not slowly, but all at once, as if it had been switched off.

"Because I want you to know the truth before others twist it." He leaned forward. "You'll have heard that Oscar and I fell out once. Everyone's heard. No one knows why. Well, then. In 'thirty-eight, when we still had the shop together, Oscar accused me of selling a forged Georgian teapot as genuine. To a collector in Bath. A great deal of money. The scandal was only just hushed up. We parted. He opened his shop, I opened mine. And for thirty years he looked at me as if I were a thief."

"And you weren't a thief?"

"I didn't sell that teapot." Tobias looked him straight in the eye. "Oscar sold it. And when it all came out, he put the blame on me, because I was younger and poorer and hadn't got an aunt in London to pay for lawyers. I kept quiet for thirty years, Hale. For the sake of our old friendship. Because once we were like brothers."

Edwin said nothing. Somewhere beyond the wall a clock struck the quarter.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because in Oscar's archive, which half the town is already gossiping about, there may be papers. Old papers. And someone will want to read them so that I come out guilty all over again." Tobias spread his hands. "I simply want at least one honest man in Marlow Cross to know my side before someone reads out theirs."

It was well said. Very well said. Too well, Edwin thought — like a line repeated in front of a mirror until it began to sound sincere.

"You went to see Oscar on the evening of the twenty-second," he said suddenly. It was not a question. He did not know it for certain. He only remembered Maureen saying, "I heard voices." And he remembered that yesterday Jenkins the baker, gossiping with someone outside the bakery, had mentioned in passing that he'd "seen Lane coming back late down the lane behind Marlow Street, with a candle in his hand, like a ghost".

Tobias did not flinch. Only his moustache twitched very slightly.

"I did," he said after a pause. "He sent for me. He wanted to talk about selling the shop. He thought he was dying — the doctors had told him something about his heart. He asked whether I'd buy the business so it wouldn't go to waste. We sat, we drank sherry, he grew sentimental, I grew sentimental… I offered a good price. He said he'd think about it."

"And the next day he changed his will and left everything to his niece."

"Old men are changeable," Tobias shrugged. "I'm not offended."

"And on Thursday, when I was there, he said to you, 'I've given you my answer.' You said, 'That isn't an answer, that's a mood.'"

This time Tobias was silent for longer.

"You remember conversations very well, Hale," he said at last, and for the first time there was something like cold in his voice. "A dangerous habit in a small town. Here everyone remembers something. And everyone forgets something. Do you know who lives longest? The ones who know how to forget."

He stood, making it clear the conversation was over, and he was smiling again — broadly, warmly, neighbourly.

"Do come again, Mr Hale. I'm always glad to see Oscar's old friends."

* * *

At that same hour Gwendolyn was sitting in the shop on Marlow Street among stacks of thick ledgers which she had dragged from the scullery shelves on to the counter. The back room was still sealed, but the accounts were not kept there — Oscar had kept them nearer the counter, "so the figures don't get bored without people".

She did not know herself what she was looking for. Something. Anything. A trace of the matter her uncle "must finish" and had not.

The ledgers were perfect. Oscar had recorded every purchase, every sale, every trifle — date, object, provenance, price, name of buyer or seller. The same sharp, backward-slanting hand. Page after page, year after year.

At the third volume — 1951 to 1954 — she stopped. At first she did not know why. Then she looked more closely and saw: one name in the column headed "Acquired from" came up more often than the others. Much more often.

"T. Lane, William St."

A silver sugar bowl, London, 1780s. A pair of candlesticks, Sheffield. A miniature on ivory. An enamelled snuffbox. Another snuffbox. A clock. Another clock. And opposite each entry, in the column headed "Sold to", stood the buyer's name — mostly London dealers and private collectors. And beside the selling price, a small note: "Cert. O.R."

Oscar Renwick's certificate. His signature, vouching that the object was genuine.

Gwendolyn turned the pages. 1955. 1956. The entries with Lane's name grew more and more numerous. And then, about two years ago, they abruptly stopped. Not one. As if someone had slammed a door.

And in the latest volume, on a page dated August — the very August her uncle had written to her in London — beside one old entry she had at first overlooked, there was a small pencilled cross. And another, on another page. And another. She began to count and lost track at twenty-seven.

Opposite every cross was the same name.

Gwendolyn sat over the ledger for a long time without moving, only her fingers slowly tracing the pencilled crosses, as if they were scars.

When Edwin knocked on the glass — three short, two long — she let him in without a word and silently laid the open book in front of him.

Edwin looked at the page for a long time. Then he turned it. Then another.

"Twenty-seven," Gwendolyn said quietly. "Twenty-seven things my uncle bought from Lane, signed a certificate for, and sold. And now, all these years later, he went back and marked them with crosses. Why would a man mark his own sales, Mr Hale? Unless…"

"Unless he'd suddenly realised he'd been selling something other than what he'd vouched for," Edwin finished.

They looked at each other. And each saw in the other's eyes the same word, which neither of them dared say aloud.

Forgeries.

"But whose forgeries?" asked Gwendolyn, and her voice shook. "Lane says that in 'thirty-eight it was my uncle who sold the fake, not him. What if that's true? What if my uncle spent forty years…" She did not finish. "'My archive.' 'The truth from which I have hidden for too long.' Mr Hale, what if he wasn't hiding from Lane? What if he was hiding from himself?"

Edwin did not answer at once. He was thinking of Oscar at the oak door, his palm on the cold handle, the fear in his eyes that Edwin had not once seen in forty years. A man afraid of someone else's secret looks different from a man afraid of his own. He knew that from experience: in forty years he had opened hundreds of doors for people who had lost their keys, and he could always tell which of them wanted to get home and which wanted to take something while no one was looking.

He could not decide which kind of look Oscar had worn that evening.

"I don't know, Miss Renwick," he said honestly. "But whoever killed your uncle knew the answer. And killed him precisely so that we wouldn't find it out."

He remembered the window on William Street — the brass dividers, the gravers with darkened handles, the tiny blacksmith's hammers — and at last he understood what had been bothering him all morning. Among those antique tools of every trade there was not a single locksmith's tool. Not one. A trifle. Chance. Perhaps Tobias simply hadn't got round to it.

But Edwin Hale had lived among trifles for forty years. And he knew that it is trifles that open the doors a crowbar can't.