The Wrong Carriage

I'll say this up front: I'm Lyle, forty-four years old, and I drive the number 7 bus out of Brighton depot four days a week. The other three days I volunteer at the Coastal Rail Heritage Museum, which is a sprawling yard of old locomotives and carriages just outside town. I've been doing it for six years now. I like the work. It's quiet, it's practical, and nobody on a museum carriage has ever thrown up on the floor and then argued with me about it.

The Saturday in question was a mild one for October. There was a thin grey sky and the grass between the tracks was still wet from overnight. I had arrived at eight to sweep out the dining car before the general public came through at ten. That's the restored Victorian dining car in the main exhibition hall, the one with the brass fittings and the long table down the middle, and the cake stand that sits under glass at the far end. The cake stand is a prized piece. Silver plate, 1871, and it has its own little placard and everything. Nik, the curator, polishes it himself and trusts nobody else to touch it, which I respect.

I had the broom out and was working from the far end toward the door when I heard heels on the platform. Heels are not a common sound at the museum. I looked out the window and saw a woman crossing the yard in a red coat, carrying a laptop bag and a portfolio case, taking photographs of the locomotives with her phone as she walked. She was forty-one or thereabouts, well dressed for a Saturday, and she stopped twice to take a picture of the same signal post from two angles.

That turned out to be Mikayla, the website developer Nik had hired to overhaul the museum's online presence. I knew about the hire because Nik had mentioned it the previous Tuesday, mostly to warn me that there would be somebody wandering around taking pictures for a while. I had said fine, because it was fine. What I hadn't expected was for her to walk into my dining car while I was still sweeping it.

"Morning," she said. She had her portfolio case open before she'd finished the word, like she was about to deal cards. "I'm looking for Nik. Is he around?"

"Office, probably," I said. I kept sweeping. "You're the website woman."

"Mikayla," she said, with a small pause on her name that suggested I was supposed to do something with it. I didn't, mostly because I was holding a broom and a dustpan and my hands were full.

"Lyle," I said. "Volunteer."

She looked around the car, taking it in, and then her eyes landed on my phone, which was sitting on the padded seat by the window where I'd left it while I worked. I use it for the museum's temporary signs sometimes, when we need a photo of a carriage for a notice board. She pointed at it with her chin.

"Is that yours? I could set you up with something better than that for photos. That thing's what, eight years old?"

"Nine," I said. "It takes a picture and the picture is fine."

She made a small sound, the kind people make when they've decided not to say what they actually think. Then she said, "Well. It's just that the museum deserves better than a nine-year-old phone camera. That's kind of my whole pitch, honestly. The collection is spectacular and the website looks like it was built in 2009."

"It probably was," I said. "By a volunteer. On a budget of nothing."

I don't think I said it unkindly, but she looked at me anyway, the way people look at you when they're deciding how much of an obstacle you are. Then she smiled, a working smile, and said it was nice to meet me, and went off to find Nik. I went back to my sweeping. I want to note here that I had nothing against her at that point. I just don't think a website is a museum. A museum is carriages and a leaky roof and a tea room that only takes cash.

Nik came by around nine, walking fast, which was the first sign something was wrong. Nik is thirty-six and he walks fast anyway, but this was a different kind of fast. He came into the dining car, where Mikayla had already set up at one of the tables with her laptop open, taking reference shots of the fittings for the website.

"Right," Nik said, to both of us, because we were both there. "The inspection is Monday. The Heritage Assessor arrives at ten in the morning. And the key to the Royal Mail carriage is missing."

The Royal Mail carriage is at the far end of the yard, under a tarp, waiting on funding for restoration. The key is a big old iron thing on a ring, and it opens the door, and the Assessor is meant to go inside and check the original mail sorting fittings, which are the whole reason the carriage is listed. Nik keeps the key in a locked drawer in the office. The drawer was locked. The key ring inside the drawer was not there.

"Has anyone been in the office since Tuesday?" Mikayla asked, and I'll give her this, she asked it reasonably.

"Three people," Nik said. "Me, Lyle, and the tea room lady, who wouldn't know where the drawer was. Nothing else is missing. Just that key."

I put my broom down. "I'll go through the yard," I said. "It'll have been left somewhere. Somebody took it out to show a contractor and put it down. Happens with the shed keys all the time."

"Good," Nik said. "Mikayla, could you search the, I don't know, the digital side? Check if there's any record, emails, anything?"

"Sure," she said, and Nik hurried off, and then it was just her and me and my broom in the dining car.

She typed for about four minutes, then closed the laptop. "There's nothing," she said. "No emails about contractors, no diary entries, nothing. Which isn't surprising, because nobody emails you people. Your last newsletter went out in February."

"February," I said. "I know because I proofread it."

"Right." She stood up and pulled her coat on. "I'll help you search."

"It's a physical search," I said. "Cupboards, drawers, under tarps. Your skills don't really come into it."

I regretted the phrasing the moment it left my mouth, because it came out exactly like the kind of thing a man says to a woman in a red coat, and her face did something complicated and then settled on flat.

"My skills," she said, "include going through a client's messy digital records in an hour, which I just did. But fine. I'll search cupboards. Where do we start?"

"Dining car," I said. "It's got the most storage. Then the office, then the yard."

So we started in the dining car, which is where I'd already been all morning, and I will admit the search was not off to a flying start. There's a galley at one end with cupboards under the counter, and a storage locker under the table, and a partitioned box behind the bar that holds the good crockery. Mikayla took the galley and I took the locker. She went through the cupboards with more care than I expected, lifting out tea strainers and linen napkins and putting them back exactly as she'd found them, which is more than the tea room lady manages.

It was while I had my head inside the under-table locker that I heard her stop moving. I backed out and stood up. She was standing at the far end of the car, looking at the cake stand under its glass dome.

"Is this the famous one?" she asked. "The one on the website? Because the website photo is terrible. Grainy, badly lit, and it cuts off half the base."

"It's the one," I said. "Silver plate, 1871. Don't touch it. Nik polishes that himself."

She crouched down to the level of the dome, not touching it, just looking. "It's a nice piece," she said. "But it's just decoration, isn't it? In terms of the collection. It's not like it does anything."

"It's a cake stand," I said. "That's what it does. It sits there and it's from 1871 and it's one of the four objects in this museum that the Assessor specifically asks about. So no, I wouldn't call it just decoration."

She straightened up and looked at me, and I got the sense I'd made things worse again without quite understanding how. She was still looking at the stand, though, not at me, and something in her expression had changed from polite to interested.

"Lyle," she said slowly. "Has anyone actually opened this case since the stand was cleaned? Because there's something behind it. I can see an edge."

* * *

I told her she was seeing the reflection of the overhead light, which was partly true, and she gave me a look that said she didn't believe me and didn't care to argue about it before ten in the morning. She pulled out her phone instead and took four or five photos of the stand through the glass, adjusting her angle each time, elbow out, tongue between her teeth. I went back to the locker and finished going through it. Napkins, a tin of brass polish past its best years, a mouse dropping I chose not to mention to anybody.

"Right," she said, when I stood up. "Where's this office, then?"

The office search took forty minutes and produced three paperclips, a 2014 raffle flyer, and a dead pen. Mikayla went through the desk drawers in an order that made sense to her and none to me, starting from the bottom, and I did the filing cabinet and the shelf above the radiator where Nik keeps the old ledgers. No key ring. No iron key. The drawer with the lock was locked, same as before, and the little gap where the ring should hang was empty. It's a strange feeling, looking at an empty hook and knowing a Monday inspection is sitting on the other side of it.

She sat on the edge of Nik's desk with her phone out while I put the ledgers back. She was flicking through her photos, and I caught her frowning at the screen, zooming in with two fingers, then zooming out again. I thought she was checking her shots for the website, so I said nothing about it, and she said nothing either, which suited me. I had a shed to get through and a mild headache coming on from bending over lockers.

* * *

The engine shed is at the south end of the yard, a corrugated iron building from sometime in the fifties, and the grass between the office and the shed was still wet from the overnight rain. My boots go through it fine. Her shoes were some kind of flat leather thing with a bow on them, and I noticed that and thought nothing of it, because it wasn't my business what a website developer wears to walk through a wet field in October.

Inside, the shed smells of oil and old coal dust no matter how often we sweep it. The 0-6-0 saddle tank sits in the middle on a length of track, and the rest of the floor is given over to pallets of parts, drums, a workbench with a vice, and the sort of general clutter that accumulates in a shed over six years when three volunteers all have different ideas about tidiness. The key ring wasn't anywhere obvious. We went along the bench, under it, behind the drums, along the pallet stacks. Mikayla photographed the saddle tank for her reference folder, asked me twice what the fittings on the buffer beam were called, and wrote down the answers on her phone, which I will admit was more patience than I'd have shown.

It was on the way back toward the door, cutting between a pallet of wheel sets and the corner of the workbench, that her foot caught a bolt head standing proud of a loose baseplate. I heard the scrape and saw her go sideways, arms out, and I got a hand under her elbow before she went down properly. She's not heavy. She's average height, dark hair going grey at the front in a way she clearly doesn't fight, forty-one years old and dressed for an office, and for about two seconds she hung there with her weight in my hand and her other arm windmilling toward the vice.

"Careful," I said, which was a stupid thing to say, because she was already being careful or she'd have cracked her head on the bench.

"I'm fine." She straightened, pulled her elbow out of my grip, and looked down at the baseplate. "That bolt's been standing up like that for years, has it. Nice safety culture."

"It's on the list. There's a list."

"Of course there's a list." She brushed her coat off, though there was nothing on it, and I understood then that she was more rattled than she wanted to sound. "Thank you for the catch, by the way. I assume that was you."

"Who else would it be."