"Then there may be something inside it that survived a fire, a wedding, and a judge," Noah finished. "Something your mother hid, or something he did. Either way, that key has exactly one job in this world, and it is not lying in a tissue in your purse."
Priya appeared at Clara's elbow with the unhurried timing of an attorney entering an objection into the record. "Before this becomes a heist film," she said, "Sinclair House is trust property, Clara is frozen out of the trust, and breaking in would give Vivian Ashford a Christmas present in October."
"No breaking in," Noah said. "Not yet. Not by me. I am asking her to decide, that's all. It's her mother's house, whatever a trustee says, and it's her key."
"All right, Mr Wren," she said. "Noah. We investigate. Together, on my terms: nothing published, nothing recorded, nothing of my mother used without my consent, until we know what we actually know. And when we go to Sinclair House, we go legally, or we go cleverly — but we go."
"We go," he agreed, and held out his hand across the key, the sketch, the spilled coffee.
Chapter 11: Sinclair House
Sinclair House had been shut for eleven years, and it looked like a place that had learned how to hold its breath.
The wrought-iron gates on Meeting Street stood chained, their scrollwork choked with jasmine gone wild. Beyond them, the great white house rose three storeys above a garden that no one tended any longer — camellias blooming madly in the wrong season, moss hanging from the oaks in grey curtains, a fountain choked with brown leaves. Clara Bennett stood on the pavement with Noah Wren beside her and felt, absurdly, like a trespasser at the door of her own childhood.
"I spent every Christmas here until I was twelve," she said. "Grandfather Charles at the head of the table. Nobody was allowed to speak about art. Or feelings. Or my mother, if she wasn't in the room."
"And when she was in the room?"
"Then everybody pretended she was happy."
Noah said nothing. In the three weeks since the locket had broken Clara's life apart — since an appraiser at her engagement party had opened her mother's heart-shaped locket and found, hidden behind Rose's portrait, a miniature painting of a man, and the police and the newspapers and Julian Ashford had all done the rest — Noah had learned when her silences were questions she was asking herself.
She took the tiny brass key from her coat pocket. It had fallen out of the locket's false back along with the miniature: a key no longer than her thumbnail, green with age, its bow shaped like a treble clef.
It did not fit the gates. It did not fit anything Clara had tried — not her mother's jewellery box in Charleston, not the desk Henry Bennett had given her, not any lock in the apartment she had already half moved out of, having lost Julian, her gallery job, and the easy trust of everyone who had once called her respectable.
But she had remembered, at four this morning, the music box.
"You are expected, Miss Clara."
She jumped. The side gate — the tradesmen's gate, painted green — had opened without a sound, and Mrs Delia Brooks stood in it, seventy-eight years old and straight as a ruler, her white hair pinned in the same knot she had worn for fifty years, first as the Sinclair family's housekeeper and then, after Rose married Henry, as the woman who had quietly followed her girl into exile and stayed until Rose died.
"Delia." Clara's voice broke on the name. "You still come here?"
"Every Tuesday and Friday. I air the rooms. I dust your mother's piano. Mr Charles's will pays a company, and the company pays me, and nobody asks what an old woman does in an empty house." Delia's eyes, dark and shrewd, moved to Noah. "This is the journalist."
"Former journalist, mostly," Noah said. "Thomas Wren was my uncle. I'm here for Clara."
"Then you are here for Rose too, whether you know it or not." Delia stepped back and held the gate. "Come in through the garden. The front hall makes people whisper, and I am too old for whispering."
The house smelled of lemon polish, damp, and roses left too long in water. Sheets covered the furniture in the drawing room like patient ghosts. But Delia had, as she said, aired the rooms, and in the morning room at the back — Rose's room, the one with the French windows and the piano — the covers were folded away and a vase of garden camellias, pink as cheeks, stood on the sill exactly as Rose had always kept them.
Clara stopped in the doorway, undone.