It was mean and despicable. Whatever was locked in that room had attracted the interest of the police. Messiter must have known this was a possibility when he took the rooms. He had cynically and deliberately put at risk the reputation of the shop. Customers were quick to pick up the taint of scandal. When this got into the papers, years of goodwill and painstaking service would go down the drain.
That afternoon, when Braid’s eyes turned to the ceiling, he was not merely curious about the locked room. He was asking questions. Angry, urgent questions.
By six, when he closed, the thing had taken a grip on his mind. He had persuaded himself he had a right to know the extent of Messiter’s deceit. Dammit, the room belonged to Braid. He would not sleep without knowing what was behind that locked door.
And he had thought of a way of doing it.
In the back was a wooden ladder about nine feet long. Years before, when the shop was a glover’s, it had been used to reach the high shelves behind the counter. Modern shop design kept everything in easy reach. Where gloves had once been stacked in white boxes were displays of Marlboro country and the pure gold of Benson and Hedges. One morning in the summer he had taken the ladder outside the shop to investigate the working of the awning, which was jammed. Standing several rungs from the top he had been able to touch the ledge below the window of the locked room.
The evening exodus was over, consigning Leadenhall Street to surrealistic silence, when Braid propped the ladder against the shopfront. The black marble and dark-tinted glass of banks and insurance buildings glinted funereally in the streetlights, only the brighter windows of the Bull’s Head at the Aldgate end indicating, as he began to climb, that life was there. If anyone chanced to pass that way and challenge him, he told himself, he would inform them with justification that the premises were his own and he was simply having trouble with a lock.
He stepped onto the ledge and drew himself level with the window, which was of the sash type. By using a screwdriver he succeeded in slipping aside the iron catch. The lower section was difficult to move, but once he had got it started it slid easily upward. He climbed inside and took out a flashlight.
The room was empty.
Literally empty. No furniture, no curtains, no carpet. Bare floorboards, ceiling, and walls with paper peeled away in several places.
Uncomprehending, he beamed the flashlight over the floorboards. They had not been disturbed in months. He examined the skirting board, the plaster cornice, and the window sill. He could not see how anything could be hidden here. The police were probably mistaken about Messiter. And so was he. With a sense of shame he climbed out of the window and drew it down.
On Friday, Messiter came in about eleven as usual, relaxed, indistinguishable in dress from the stockbrokers and bankers: dark suit, old boys’ tie, shoes gleaming. With a smile he peeled a note from his wallet and bought his box of five Imperial Panatellas, a ritual that from the beginning had signaled goodwill toward his landlord. Braid sometimes wondered if he actually smoked them. He did not carry conviction as a smoker of cigars. He was a quiet man, functioning best in private conversations. Forty-seven by his own admission, he looked ten years younger, dark-haired with brown eyes that moistened when he spoke of things that moved him.
“Any letters for me, Mr. Braid?”
“Five or six.” Braid took them from the shelf behind him. “How is business?”
“No reason to complain,” Messiter said, smiling. “My work is my hobby, and there aren’t many lucky enough to say that. And how is the world of tobacco? Don’t tell me. You’ll always do a good trade here, Mr. Braid. All the pressures — you can see it in their faces. They need the weed and always will.” Mildly he inquired, “Nobody called this week asking for me, I suppose?”
Braid had not intended saying anything, but Messiter’s manner disarmed him. That and the shame he felt at the suspicions he had harbored impelled him to say, “Actually there was a caller. I had a detective in here — when was it? — Wednesday — asking about you. It was obviously a ridiculous mistake.”
He described Inspector Gent’s visit without mentioning his own investigation afterward with the ladder. “Makes you wonder what the police are up to these days,” he concluded. “I believe we’re all on the computer at Scotland Yard now. This sort of thing is bound to happen.”
“You trust me, Mr. Braid. I appreciate that,” Messiter said, his eyes starting to glisten. “You took me on trust from the beginning.”
“I’m sure you aren’t stacking stolen goods upstairs, if that’s what you mean,” Braid told him with sincerity.
“But the Inspector was not so sure?”
“He said something about a search warrant. Probably by now he has realized his mistake. I don’t expect to see him again.”
“I wonder what brought him here,” Messiter said, almost to himself.
“I wouldn’t bother about it. It’s a computer error.”
“I don’t believe so. What did he say about the lock I fitted on the door, Mr. Braid?”
“Oh, at the time he seemed to think it was quite sinister.” He grinned. “Don’t worry — it doesn’t bother me at all. You consulted me about it and you pay a pound extra a week for it, so who am I to complain? What you keep in there — if anything — is your business.” He chuckled in a way intended to reassure. “That detective carried on as if you had a fortune hidden away in there.”
“Oh, but I have.”
Braid felt a pulse throb in his temple.
“It’s high time I told you,” said Messiter serenely. “I suppose I should apologize for not saying anything before. Not that there’s anything criminal, believe me. Actually it’s a rather remarkable story. I’m a philatelist, as you know. People smile at that and I don’t blame them. Whatever name you give it, stamp collecting is a hobby for kids. In the business we’re a little sensitive on the matter. We dignify it with its own technology — dies and watermarks and so forth — but I’ve always suspected this is partly to convince ourselves that the whole thing is serious and important.
“Well, it occurred to me four or five years ago that there was a marvelous way of justifying stamp collecting to myself and that was by writing a book about stamps. You must have heard of Rowland Hill, the fellow who started the whole thing off?”
“The Penny Post?”
Messiter nodded. “1840 — the world’s first postage stamps, the One-Penny Black and the Twopence Blue. My idea was not to write a biography of Hill — that’s been done several times over by cleverer writers than I am — but to analyze the way his idea caught on. The response of the Victorian public was absolutely phenomenal, you know. It’s all in the newspapers of the period. I went to the Newspaper Library at Colindale to do my research. I spent weeks over it.”
Messiter’s voice conveyed not fatigue at the memory, but excitement. “There was so much to read. Reports of Parliament. Letters to the Editor. Special articles describing the collection and delivery of the mail.” He paused, pointing a finger at Braid. “You’re wondering what this has to do with the room upstairs. I’ll tell you. Whether it was providence or pure good luck I wouldn’t care to say, but one afternoon in that Newspaper Library I turned up The Times for a day in May 1841, and my eye was caught — riveted, I should say — by an announcement in the Personal Column on the front page.”
Messiter’s hand went to his pocket and withdrew his wallet. From it he took a folded piece of paper. “This is what I saw.”