Page 39 of Right Place, Right Time
11
To our immense disappointment, we were unable to open the door on Sunday evening and find out what’s on the other side.
Just like a safe, the combination lock on the huge metal door has been secured, and, after a few attempts where Adam pretended to ‘listen’ to the lock like they do in movies to try to open it, we realised that without the right combination of numbers, there was no way the door was opening.
‘What do we do now?’ Adam asked as we sat on two full boxes of books, feeling deflated.
‘I don’t know.’ I felt immensely frustrated by this whole situation. ‘If we don’t have the combination, I can’t see how we’re ever going to get the door to open.’
‘I’m hoping to open this shop in a day or two – I can’t leave it like this with a great huge metal door in the middle of all the books. It’s hardly the aesthetic I was going for.’
‘But we can’t just cover it all up again. Then we’ll never find out what’s behind there.’
Eventually, with no permanent solution, we agreed to tidy the shop up a bit and sleep on it overnight. Adamlooked immensely relieved that at last he would be getting some rest as he headed up the stairs to his flat, while I went back to my own house, the mystery of the door still weighing heavily on my mind.
Now it’s bank holiday Monday and, as I wait for Barney to arrive at the shop so I can go next door and see Adam to discuss what we do next, I find myself thoughtfully munching on an apple while I think about the events of yesterday.
First, there was the missing building. Then the subsequent discovery of the metal door – which really could only be described as some sort of heavy-duty security door. But a door securing or protecting what? It was approximately adjacent to where I had placed the grandfather clock in my shop – and then, annoyingly, I then made an unwelcome discovery about the clock. I was going to call Freddy, my clockmaker friend, as planned, and ask him if he would come and take a look. But when I opened the front door of the clock to find out some more information about the maker and model, I discovered that there was no mechanism inside. Instead it was completely hollow.
‘Great!’ I had told it, closing the door. ‘Presumably one of your previous owners used you for display purposes only and took your insides to use on another, more deserving model. Luckily for you, I have a soft spot for broken and unwanted things, so I won’t chuck you on the rubbish heap just yet!’ And there the clock stayed – its time frozen at half past two. Customers would occasionally look at it or ask the price, but when I told them it wasn’t working, they would quickly move on to something else. So, it seemed for now that we were stuck with each other.
‘Morning,’ Barney says as he expertly wheels himself up and over the small ramp I have installed in the doorway of my shop. ‘How’s life with you today?’
‘Complicated,’ I reply honestly, throwing my apple core in the bin behind the shop counter. ‘Complicated and confusing.’
‘How so?’ Barney puts his rucksack out back and returns to the shop.
I tell him what had happened last night.
‘Ooh, the mystery deepens,’ he says. ‘People don’t put doors like that up unless they’ve got something extremely valuable behind it, or something they want to hide …’
‘I know, that’s what I thought. But what? I don’t know much about tools of the past, but I’d definitely say the nails we pulled out of that wood were old, and the first layer of wallpaper was likely from the thirties, maybe forties. It’s difficult to say when exactly, because nothing much changed in interiors during the war years.’
‘So you just need to figure out the combination, then?’
‘If only it were that easy.’ I sigh. ‘Where do we even begin?’
Barney grins. ‘No offence to you, Eve, but you don’t really have a mathematical mind, do you?’
‘Whereas you do, I suppose? I thought science was your thing?’
‘Close enough.’ Barney shrugs.
‘So wherewouldwe start, then?’ I ask, half smiling at him.
I’ve adored Barney since the first time he wheeled himself boldly into my shop, asking me for a job before I even realised that I needed anyone. There was no messing with him – he was matter-of-fact and he always told you the truth, even if you didn’t want to hear it. He hada confidence about him that I envied and he never let his disability get in the way of anything he wanted to do.
‘We can’t just sit at the door trying all the combinations, can we?’ I tell him. ‘It would take for ever.’
‘You could. But you’re right, it would be a long and frustrating process. I guess you need to know something about the person who had the shop when the door was likely to have been installed. Maybe then you could figure out what combination they might have used.’
‘I only know of Gerald owning the bookshop before Adam. I’m not sure how long he’d been there, though. I wonder if Ben might know?’ I look across to his shop. ‘He’s been in Clockmaker Court longer than anyone else.’
‘Why don’t you go and ask him?’ Barney says. ‘He was in his shop when I came in just now.’
‘He said he wasn’t coming back until next week.’
‘You know Ben – he does things when he wants to. In Ben-time, not everyone else’s.’
