Traces in the Metal

At midnight the police station in Marlow Cross was dark, except for a desk lamp in the back-room window, dimmed with a sheet of newspaper. Constable Doyle opened the side door without switching on the porch light and let Edwin in, glancing up and down the empty street as though the whole county were watching.

"If Grimshaw finds out," he whispered, "I'll spend the rest of my life directing traffic at the crossroads in Hartford. And there isn't even a traffic light there."

"He won't find out, Percy."

"You don't know that."

"I don't," Edwin agreed. "But I know metal. And metal doesn't tell anyone anything, except those who know how to listen to it."

On the desk under the lamp, on a clean white towel, lay two probes. On the left, Edwin's, forged forty years ago, its handle dark with the patina of thousands of touches. On the right, the one found in Maureen Cobb's hand. Beside them Doyle had laid out everything Edwin had asked for: his father's magnifying glass in its brass mount, a bottle of spirit, cotton wool, a sheet of white paper and a fine sewing needle.

Edwin sat down. Put on his spectacles. And for long minutes ceased to exist for anyone but the two slivers of metal.

He looked at the copy the way a doctor looks at an X-ray. The bend — a hair wider. The tip — flatter, as if it had been dressed with a file. The surface — not smooth like forged metal but faintly grainy, with tiny bubbles like poppy seeds. He ran a fingernail along it.

"Cast," he said. "Not a sand mould, like at a foundry. That leaves a seam down the middle. There's no seam here. This is lost wax."

"What?"

"An old method, Percy. Older than Rome. You make a model in wax — in our case, an impression of my probe pressed into a slab of wax, then trued up and built out. You coat the model in clay. Heat it. The wax runs out and leaves a hollow. You pour molten metal into it. Then you break away the clay. That's how bells are cast, jewellery, bronze statuettes." He turned the probe under the glass. "And that's how antiques are faked, when you need a new handle for an old teapot or a foot for a Georgian candlestick that nobody can tell from the original."

Doyle stopped breathing.

"This metal," Edwin went on, "isn't steel. It's bronze. Very hard, with a lot of tin in it — bell metal. Otherwise it would have bent like lead when it was used to hold the pawl. To melt bronze like that you need a torch, a crucible, and hands that have done it hundreds of times. Whoever cast this probe did it at the first attempt. Look — not a pit, not a flaw. This is a master."

He took the needle, moistened a wisp of cotton wool with spirit, and carefully, the way one gathers pollen from a flower, drew it along a tiny groove near the handle where the metal had formed a barely visible fold. A spot appeared on the white cotton. Reddish-brown, like dried blood.

Doyle leaned closer.

"Blood? Maureen's?"

"No." Edwin held the cotton to the lamp and studied the spot through the glass for a long time. Then with the needle he picked out another grain, lodged deeper, and laid it on the white paper. It gleamed. Dully, warmly, like the sun through autumn fog. "Bole. The red clay laid under gilding. And this — gold leaf. A crumb of it. Whoever cast this probe did it on the same table where he gilds frames and candlesticks. Or handled it with gold still on his fingers."

"Gilders," Doyle muttered. "Who does gilding in Marlow Cross?"

"Restorers," Edwin replied. And after a pause he added, because he was an honest man and did not want his honesty to depend on whom he suspected: "And the Reverend Pembry. He's restored the church plate himself for thirty years. He regilded the altar candlesticks at St Michael's last spring with his own hands; the whole parish came to watch."

Doyle slowly wrote down both names, one beneath the other.

* * *

Gwendolyn knocked at the side door at half past twelve — three short, two long. Doyle groaned, but opened it.

"I couldn't sleep," she said, pulling off her gloves. "And I noticed something. It may be nothing. But…"

She laid the price ticket with the cross on the desk. Then she turned it over.

On the back, in faded ink, in a round, neat hand — not Oscar's, but someone else's — was written: "No. 1".

"That's Maureen's writing," said Gwendolyn. "I've seen hundreds of her tickets. My uncle drew his plan on an old ticket Maureen had once filled in. The ticket for item number one. I don't know what item that is. But perhaps it isn't a coincidence?"

Edwin took the card, and for the first time that night his fingers trembled.

"Number one," he said softly. "The first thing Oscar Renwick ever bought for himself, as a young man, long before he had a shop of his own. 1929. He told the story to everyone who'd listen and plenty who wouldn't. An eighteenth-century Dutch longcase clock with a moon on the dial."

"Old Jan," Gwendolyn whispered. And went pale. "Mr Hale, this evening, when I walked past the shop, I thought I saw a shadow move beside old Jan."

* * *

Marlow Street was asleep. The fog had risen from the river again and lay on the cobbles like wet wool. Gwendolyn unlocked the front door, and the bell rang so loudly in the silence of the night that all three of them started.

Doyle switched on his torch. The beam slid over the display cases, the clocks, the Chinese vase — and stopped on old Jan.

The glass door of the case was ajar. Only slightly, a finger's width. Behind it the pendulum hung motionless — the clock had stopped.

"Someone's been here," Doyle whispered, feeling for the whistle on its chain. "You kept it shut, didn't you?"

"I've never opened it," Gwendolyn replied.

Edwin went over to the clock. He crouched without touching it and shone the torch into the case. On the back panel, beside the small knot just below the pendulum, there were fresh dark scratches — as though someone had been digging at the wood with a knife. Someone knew there was a hiding place here. But not how it opened.

"He was searching," said Edwin. "With a knife. The knot's a button, I can see that. But you can't just press it. It turns. A quarter turn anticlockwise, and then you press. Oscar always loved mechanisms with a bit of character." He reached in, took the knot between his fingertips, turned it and pressed.

There was a soft click. A narrow board slid back.

In the shallow cavity lay a small brass key — short, with a square bit. Nothing else.

Edwin took it on his palm and looked for a long time at the torchlight playing on the brass. Gwendolyn watched his face change — slowly, the way the sky changes before dawn.

"I know it," he said at last. "I made it. 1946, just after the war. Oscar ordered a steel box from me with a combination lock and a key — a small one, the size of a chest-of-drawers drawer. Said it was insurance against fire. I made it, handed it over, and never saw it again. He put it somewhere himself. I never even asked where." He closed his hand round the key. "For nearly twenty years it's been sitting somewhere in this shop. And two people have died because someone doesn't know where."

"The yard door," Doyle said suddenly. He was standing at the entrance to the passage, shining his torch down it. "Come and look at this."

The door from the scullery to the yard was shut. But there was no longer a key in the lock — the key that had been sticking out on the inside on Friday morning, when Edwin first noticed the door was not locked.

"On Wednesday evening," Edwin said slowly, "Maureen unlocked this door for me. And when I came at nine, it was locked. Someone came in before me, locked it behind him with the key that was in the lock. And took the key away with him."

"So," Gwendolyn wrapped her arms round herself, "the murderer has a key to my shop. And can come in whenever he likes."

"He did come in," said Edwin. "This evening. To look for what Maureen was looking for. Because now he has the notebook, and the notebook probably says enough for him to understand that Oscar hid something. But not where." He looked at the key in his palm. "We've got the card. We've got the key. Which means he'll come again."

The town hall clock struck two, dully. Outside the shop windows the fog was beginning to thin, and somewhere far off, beyond the bridge over the Avon, on the road from Bristol, as if in reply, two yellow headlamps flashed and were gone.