Inheritance

The solicitor was apologetic in the way of a man delivering something he suspects is a joke at someone's expense.

"The shop, the stock, and the contents," he said. "There's no cash. I should be clear about that."

"How much stock?"

He consulted the page. "It doesn't itemise. It says — and I'm reading directly — 'everything on the board.'"

The board turned out to be the back wall of Corrigan & Daughter, Locksmiths, established 1948, closed sometime around the point when Uncle Vincent stopped answering his phone. It was pegboard, floor to ceiling, four metres wide, and it held four hundred and eleven keys.

Ines counted them twice.

Each one hung on its own brass hook. Each hook had a paper tag. Each tag had a number in Vincent's small backward-sloping hand, and nothing else. No address. No name. No indication of what, anywhere in the world, the key opened.

The ledger that should have decoded them was not in the shop. It was not in the flat above the shop. It was not, according to the solicitor, in the estate at all.

"He was a private man," the solicitor offered.

"He was a locksmith," said Ines. "That's not the same as private. That's professional."

She meant to sell up. She had a job, a lease, a life two hundred kilometres away that did not have room in it for a dead man's pegboard.

She stayed a week. Then a month.

The thing about four hundred and eleven keys is that they are, individually, extremely boring, and collectively, impossible to walk away from. Ines started photographing them. Then measuring them. Then — this was the point at which she admitted to herself that she was not going home on Sunday — cross-referencing the blank profiles against manufacturer catalogues, so she could at least say what kind of lock each one belonged to.

The results were unhelpful and then, slowly, extremely interesting.

They were nearly all domestic. Front doors, back doors, a scattering of padlocks and window locks. Nothing commercial. Nothing valuable. No safes.

And they were old. Not antique — old the way a lock is old when it has been in a door for forty years and nobody has changed it, because why would you.

In the sixth week she found the second board.

It was behind the first one. Vincent had hinged the pegboard, badly, and painted over the hinges, and Ines only found it because she leaned on the left edge while reaching for a catalogue and the entire wall swung eight centimetres towards her.

Behind it: a second board. Ninety-two keys. Same brass hooks. Same paper tags.

But these tags had names.

Mrs Devlin, 14 Aster Row. The Okonjos, above the chemist. Peter, Mill Lane — do not use before ten.

And under each name, in the same small backward hand, a date. And under the date, a single word or two.

Hip. Lives alone.
New baby. Husband works nights.
Blind since March. Won't ask.

Ines sat down on the floor of her uncle's shop and read ninety-two paper tags, and then she read them again.

He had cut himself a key to half the town. Not to burgle it. To check on it. Ninety-two people who could not easily get to their own front doors, or would not admit they had fallen, or had nobody who would notice for a week — and one locksmith, quietly, for four decades, with a legitimate professional reason to own a key to every door in the county and never once explain himself to anybody.

The first board was the cover. Four hundred and eleven meaningless keys, numbered and anonymous, hung in front of the ninety-two that meant something, so that anyone glancing at the wall would see a working locksmith's clutter.

Ines took down a tag. Mrs Devlin, 14 Aster Row. Hip. Lives alone. The date was eleven years ago.

She thought: she's probably dead.

She thought: probably.

She got her coat.