Daisy scooched her chair closer. “What did you see?”
Fiona took a large gulp of tea, then poured herself a refill. It was going to take a lot of Twinings English Breakfast to get her through this.
“I saw two keys on his key ring, among all the others,” she said at last. “They stood out. They were shorter than the rest and weren’t shaped like regular keys. One was round, a stubby cylinder, the other triangular. Perfect size for fitting both types of telephone cabinet lock.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Maybe it was a radiator key and a key for a bike lock,” Daisy suggested.
Fiona shook her head. “Too large to be a radiator key. And when have you ever seen Oliver on a bike?”
Neither Partial Sue nor Daisy had a counter argument for that one. Oliver hated cyclists, as well as anyone on skateboards, electric scooters, mobility scooters, rollerblades and anything else on the streets that had wheels and wasn’t a car.
Partial Sue brightened. “Maybe they were left on there from his engineering days and he hasn’t got round to taking them off. I’ve got a key to an old suitcase on my key ring, but I’ve lost the suitcase. Heaven knows why I still keep the key. Can’t bear to part with it on the off chance that it shows up again. Highly unlikely, but there you go.”
“That’s right,” Daisy agreed. “I have a shed door key on my key ring, and I don’t have a shed. I’ve never had a shed, so I have no idea where it came from, but I’m loath to throw it away in case it fits some mysterious lock that I haven’t found.”
Fiona sighed. They made a good point. She had several redundant keys that still clung to her key ring for no reason whatsoever. Keys were hard things to throw away, even if the object that they fitted had long since disappeared. Parting with them was impossible, just in case there came a day when you would need them. “Yeah, you’re right. That’s probably what it is.”
“There is a way to be sure,” Daisy said. “When I was learning to pick the locks, I remember seeing something online about the triangular lock being introduced after the circular one. It’s more modern.”
“How modern?”
“Can’t remember. But the circular key has been around longer.”
“Are you sure Oliver stopped being an engineer twenty years ago?” Fiona asked.
“Definitely.” Partial Sue replied. “His bakery opened at the end of October 2002, Halloween. I remember because I bought a spiced pumpkin tart. Lovely, it was.”
“Can you remember the name of the website you read this on, about the triangular key?”
Daisy shook her head. “I went on so many.”
Fiona became determined. “Okay, we have some research to do.”
They all got their phones out and went online, searching for obscure, low-hit websites that appealed to people interested in the history of telephone cabinetry, the kind of people that even trainspotters looked down on.
“Got it!” Partial Sue announced. “Says here the triangular key was introduced in 2002, much to the annoyance of cabinet purists.”
“What site is that?” asked Daisy.
“Lord of the Phone Rings.”
“I’m on one called cabi.net. They say the same, 2002.”
“When in 2002?” Fiona asked.
“This one says early 2002,” Daisy replied.
“Mine too, February.”
“So there’s more than a strong chance he got issued with one of those keys before he left his job and never got round to taking it off.”
“Looks that way.”
“What should we do?” asked Daisy.
Conflicting thoughts were having a moral punch-up in Fiona’s head. There was a perfectly logical and innocent reason Oliver had those two keys in his possession. However, the police needed to know about Oliver’s employment history. It made him a suspect. Fiona knew full well they could be dropping a perfectly innocent person in the laps of the police, who’d go to town on him once they found out he’d been a telephone engineer. There was always the hope that they already knew about his past and had dismissed him from their list of possible suspects, which probably wasn’t very long. But if they weren’t aware of his background, then they needed to know, just in case there was an outside chance Oliver was the killer.
Reluctantly, Fiona put in the call to DI Fincher.