"The service-door key," Sylvia said quietly, into the silence. "Someone had it in their hands, months before last night. Find me who."
Chapter 10: The Copied Key
By the second morning, the unsigned note on the service card had become a paper trail, and paper, Sylvia said, was harder to frighten than people.
She sent for records the way other people sent for coffee: without apology and in quantity. The locksmith who had changed the service-door lock in February was Mr. Azevedo, seventy-one, whose memory was kept, as he put it, in books, not in his head. He came himself, carrying a leather ledger in a plastic bag against the rain, because he did not care to discuss keys on a telephone.
"April," he said, turning pages that smelled of oil and dust. "I did not go to the restaurant in April. I have not been since February, when I fitted the lock and cut three keys. Three. I cut no other."
"Yet a man came here in April," Sylvia said, "and took an impression of a key, and wrote it on our card. What would he need, to have a copy made elsewhere?"
Azevedo looked over his glasses with the disgust of a craftsman asked about other men's shortcuts.
"He would need the key itself, for a little while. Long enough to press it. He would need a shop less particular than mine. A copy made that way carries no proper mark. Mine carry mine — a small stamp, by the shoulder. A copy made elsewhere would be clean."
"And if I showed you such a key?" Nico asked.
"Then I would tell you it is not mine," Azevedo said, "and whoever holds it did not get it from me. I keep books. I do not keep accusations."
Detective Okafor, by telephone, asked for the ledger page and the service card to be photographed and left where they were, and said a phrase Harper had heard in training and never since: chain of evidence. This was a record now, and records outlive tempers.
When Azevedo had gone, Sylvia laid out the facts like place settings, one by one.
"A lock fitted in February. Three keys cut and accounted for. In April, someone with access to this office — to a key itself, for long enough — arranges for an impression to be taken. In the week of the dinner, a busboy's jacket leaves in the wrong laundry bundle, signed for by a driver who does not exist. On the night, a man no agency supplied fills a relief place, wearing the jacket. He has, we must assume, a copied key to the service door, which is how he comes and goes unseen. He leaves a cloakroom token beside the thing under the table. Every step required time, access, and knowledge of this house. None of it was improvised."
"No," Ferrante said. He had aged, Harper thought, in two days. "None of it."
"Then we must ask," Sylvia said, "who has had long access. Not who was here on the night — everyone was here on the night. Who has had the office, the keys, month after month, without anyone thinking it remarkable?"
She did not look at anyone. That was courtesy, and it made it worse.
Ferrante answered first, because a man who owns a house should.
"Me," he said. "Emil the porter. Marco. Tomas, the maître d', nine years with me, who has the run of the office for the wine lists."
"Marco," Nico said quietly.
"Marco runs my events," Ferrante said at once. "Of course Marco has the office. Marco printed the roster. Marco told me Piotr was sick and a relief was coming. If you ask whether my son's work touches every one of your place settings, Miss Grant, then yes. Because it is his work."
"I am aware," Sylvia said, "of what his work means. We did not choose these facts. They assembled themselves."
"He was in the dining room all night," Ferrante said. "Ask Harper. Marco poured wine at my elbow half the evening. A man cannot be under a table and at my elbow."
"No one has said he was under a table," Sylvia said.
"Then what are you saying?"
"I am saying his name is now on a list I did not write," she said. "We do him no kindness by pretending it is not, because others — the police, in time — will write it too, and less gently. We look at Marco clearly, precisely so that we can clear him clearly, if clear him we can."
Harper had been silent, because anything she said would weigh too much. Now silence weighed more.
"I need to say something," she said. "Nothing I saw points at Marco Ferrante. Nothing. The man I saw was a stranger. Marco isn't — I've worked his events for a year, I'd know his walk across a dark room. It wasn't him. And I won't have my statement used as if it says more than that."
"It will not be," Nico said.
"It might be," Harper said. "Not by you. By the shape of it. A list, a son, a waitress who saw a stranger — people fill gaps. I know. I filled one myself, about the limp."
Sylvia regarded her. "Which is why you will be present whenever your statement is discussed in this house. You are its author. You will correct it yourself, every time, including when it is inconvenient to men older and louder than you. Agreed?"
"Agreed," Harper said.
Ferrante had gone to the window. His shoulders were not steady. "He is my son," he said, to the street. "If someone has used his work to dress their crime in, I will not forgive it. If —" He stopped, and no one asked him to finish.
The meeting broke without conclusions, which Sylvia said was correct at this stage. As Harper reached the kitchen door, to telephone her mother, Nico stopped her with a hand that did not quite touch her arm.
"You heard Miss Grant," he said. "A copied key, made months ago. A man who knows which door will open for him."
"Yes."
"Then you understand why I cannot let you go home unguarded tonight. He has had months, Harper. He has had keys. Your flat has a lock that works — those were your words — and so did our service door."
She wanted to argue. She had her speech ready: her mother, her rent, her life, small and hers. It died, not because he was Nicholas Barone and could compel her — he had not tried to — but because he was right, and her training had a plain word for a witness who will not be protected. The word was not brave.
"Guarded," she said at last. "Not kept. There's a difference, and I'll hold you to it. I ring Mum myself. And the man outside my door had better be very boring indeed."
"He will be invisible," Nico said. "Until the moment he must not be."