The Honest Key

[SFX: Metal tools. Lock pins click]

NARRATOR: Ada dismantled the music-room lock on a white cloth. Mourning locks were famous because each internal lever recorded abuse. None had been touched. Yet the key found beside Gideon contained a shallow groove that belonged to no ward in the mechanism.

ADA MERCER: This key opened something else before it was placed by the body.

PETER BELL: The old lift has the same bow. Gideon believed servants should not carry keys that looked important.

NARRATOR: The service lift did not appear behind the music-room walls. It rose through a shaft six feet away, behind the organ pipes, and stopped in a chamber between floors. There Ada found carpet fibers matching the dead man's sleeve and a leather strap stained with tea.

CELESTE MOURNING: Someone put Father in the lift while he was alive?

ADA MERCER: After he was poisoned, before the snow began. The body waited here. At nine, a counterweight lowered the organ platform, opened a concealed panel, and tipped him into the chair.

LEON VALE: An ingenious fantasy. The chair did not move.

ADA MERCER: The chair did not need to. The floor did.

[SFX: Wooden platform groans; gears move]

NARRATOR: Peter released an old maintenance catch. A crescent of parquet beneath the organ rotated toward the hidden shaft. At the end of its travel, a spring pulled the music-room door shut and threw the bolt from inside. The locked room was a machine, not a room.

IMOGEN ROOK: Gideon designed this to frighten burglars.

PETER BELL: He designed it to frighten his children. Burglars came later.

NARRATOR: The reconstruction left one difficulty. The mechanism required a winding key, and the only winding key was supposedly the one under Gideon's hand. Ada tested its mysterious groove against the lift control. It fit.

ADA MERCER: The killer started the sequence, then allowed the machine to carry the key into the room with the body. An honest key can support a dishonest story if you ask only what it opens last.

CELESTE MOURNING: All of us knew the machine existed.

PETER BELL: No. All of us knew pieces. Gideon made certain no one person knew the house.

NARRATOR: Ada looked toward Leon. The solicitor had gone pale, but not at the mechanism. He was staring at the empty cylinder slot.