13 Little Blue Envelopes(65)

Sluff, sluff, sluff, sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest.

Click.

Sluff, sluff, sluff, sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest.

“Who thought to put a window on a washing machine?”

Keith asked. “Does anyone just sit and watch their wash?”

“You mean, besides us?”

“Well,” he said, “yeah. Is there any coffee?”

Ginny got up, tripped over the long running pants, and

went to the cabinet for the jar of Harrods instant coffee. She set it on the table in front of Keith.

“Harrods,” Keith said, picking up the jar.

There was a nearly-audible click in Ginny’s head.

“Harrods,” she repeated.

“Harrods, indeed.”

“No. The key. It’s for Harrods.”

“Harrods?” Keith said. “You’re telling me your aunt had the magical key to Harrods?”

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“Maybe. Her studio was there.”

“Inside Harrods?”

“Yes.”

“Where was her bedroom? Inside Parliament? Top of Big Ben?”

“Richard works at Harrods,” Ginny said. “He found her a

space to work in. She kept everything in a cabinet there. A cabinet would have a small key, like this one.”

Keith shook his head.

“Why does this surprise me?” he asked. “Come on, then.

Let’s go.”

295





The Magical Key to Harrods

Ginny had switched off the “what am I wearing?” impulse in her brain several hours before as a means of survival. It wasn’t until she caught her reflection in the window at Harrods that she suddenly remembered how she was dressed and that she was accompanied by someone wearing a shirt that said, CORPORATE SWINE

ATE MY BALLS.

Keith looked equally distressed as he peered in through

the door that the Harrods doorman was holding open for

them.

“Cor,” he said, his jaw dropping at the sight of the oozing mass of humanity that completely filled every square foot of space. “I am not going in there.”

Ginny grabbed his arm and pulled him inside, leading him

down the now-familiar path to the chocolate counter. The

expression on the chocolate woman’s face said that she was not impressed with either of their outfits. But it also said that she 297

was a professional and that she had seen every kind of insane person pass through Harrods’ doors.

“Just a moment,” she said, “Murphy, yes?”

“How did she know that?” Keith asked as the woman

walked to the phone. “How do you have all of these strange connections inside Harrods? Who are you? ”

Ginny realized that she was biting at her cuticles. She never did that. She was suddenly very nervous about seeing Richard.

Her uncle. The one she’d run from.

“My mum used to drag me here whenever we came down to

London at Christmas,” he went on, bending down low and

scanning the contents of the chocolate counter. “It’s even worse than I remember.”

She had to move away from Keith, from the chocolate lady . . .

and she had to fight the desire to slip into the crowd and disappear. She almost lost the battle but caught sight of Richard’s short curls and his silvery tie and dark shirt coming at her through the crowd. She couldn’t look up at him as he approached. Instead, she simply opened her hand and stuck it forward, revealing the tiny key that had imbedded itself in her palm.

“I found this,” she said. “It was in Aunt Peg’s room, behind a poster. I think she left it there for me, and I think it’s for something here.”

“Here?” he asked.

“The cabinet. Is it still here?”

“It’s in a storage closet upstairs. But there’s nothing in it.

She brought her paints home.”

“Could this be the key for it?”

Richard took the key and looked it over.

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“It could be,” he said.

Ginny snuck a quick look at him. He didn’t look angry.

“Come on,” he said. “I have a minute. Let’s go have a look.”

Aunt Peg’s Harrods studio was not a glamorous place. It was a very small room on a top floor with a bunch of deformed man-nequins and discarded hangers. There was a cloudy window that pushed open and revealed only gray sky.

“It’s one of these,” Richard said, pointing to a clump of large, brown metal cabinets in the corner.

It wasn’t any of the front ones, so Keith and Richard were forced to start pushing the cabinets around so that Ginny could squeeze between the row and try the other locks. The fifth one was a perfect fit. The inside of the cabinet was completely hollow. There was plenty of room for the pile of rolled canvases at the bottom.

“The dead Harrods scrolls,” Keith said.

“It’s strange that she would take her paints home but leave the paintings here,” Richard said. “I never would have found them. They would have been thrown away.”

Ginny unrolled a few of the canvases and spread them out

on the floor. The work was clearly Aunt Peg’s: bright, almost cartoonish representations of now-familiar sights. There were the Vestal Virgins, the Eiffel Tower, the white-paved paths of Greece, the London streets, Harrods itself. A few were almost direct copies of the pictures on the envelopes. There was the girl at the base of the mountain under the castle from the fourth letter, the rising sea monster island from number twelve. Ginny had seen lots of amateur painters painting these sights on her travels to sell as souvenirs to tourists. These 299