Somebody Had Been in the Hall Before Six in the Morning

Priya got to the hall at twenty past eight to put the flowers out, and she knew straight away that somebody had been in.

It was not dramatic. Nothing was broken and nothing was missing. There was no note. It was just that the tables were wrong.

She had set that room the night before with Dan, both of them slightly hysterical with tiredness, laying out eighty name cards in an order that had taken four evenings and two arguments to agree. She could have recited it. Table one, godparents. Table two, Dan’s side, the ones who would talk. Table three, the cousins who needed watching. It was, by the end, less a seating plan than a piece of engineering.

Now the cards were in a different order.

She stood in the doorway holding a bucket of gypsophila and did a slow count, and the count kept coming out wrong, and she had to start again twice because her eyes kept going back to table one.

What table one had been

Her parents. Her sister Meera. The two godparents, Ruth and Femi, who had driven down from Sheffield the night before and who were the entire reason table one existed in the shape it did.

What table one was now

Dan’s mother. Dan’s mother’s sister. Dan’s mother’s neighbour Wendy. And three people Priya could not immediately place, though she was fairly sure one of them was somebody from the church flower rota.

Her own parents had been moved to table four, by the door to the kitchen, next to the man who was doing the sound.

“Right,” she said, to nobody.

---

She put the bucket down on the nearest chair and did a slow circuit of the room, and the more of it she saw, the more careful it looked.

That was the thing that got her. It was not vandalism. Somebody had not come in and swept the cards onto the floor. Somebody had gone round eighty places, one at a time, and made a series of decisions, and several of those decisions were — she could see it even standing there with her coat still on — actually quite sensible. Two of the cousins had been separated, which Priya had agonised over and then not done. The man doing the sound had been given somebody to talk to.

Whoever had done this had not been careless. They had been thorough.

She got her phone out to ring Dan and then did not, because she could hear how the call would go. She put it back in her pocket and stood in the middle of the room instead, in a church hall smelling of floor polish and cold radiators, and made herself go through it properly.

---

The hall was locked at night. She knew that because she and Dan had locked it themselves at half past ten, and she had watched him try the handle twice, because he always does.

So somebody had opened it.

The caretaker had a key. The caretaker was seventy-four and had made it very clear that he would be arriving at nine and not a minute before, and the idea of him coming in at dawn to rework a seating plan was so unlikely that Priya discarded it while she was still forming it.

The vicar had a key, or the parish did. The vicar had been at a funeral in Bicester the day before and had told them so twice.

The hall committee had a key, in a lockbox, which required ringing Maureen.

And then there was the fourth one.

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Priya knew about the fourth key the way you know about a draught in a house you have lived in for years: not as information, exactly, but as something you route around without thinking.

Two years ago, before Aanya, before any of it, Dan’s mother had run the Scouts’ jumble sale in this hall for three years running. She had been given a key for the duration. At the end of the third year the Scouts had moved to the school, and Maureen had asked for the key back at a committee meeting, and Sandra had said, cheerfully, in front of eleven people, that she was sure it was in a drawer somewhere and she would have a look.

That was two years ago.

Priya had been at that meeting. She had been there because Dan had a cold and somebody had to go, and she remembered it chiefly because of how smoothly it had happened — the asking, the promising, the moving on to the next item — and how obvious it had been to absolutely everyone in the room that the key was not going to come back.

She stood in the hall for a moment longer, with eighty name cards in the wrong order and a bucket of gypsophila going over on the chair behind her.

Then she picked up her phone again, and this time she did ring Dan, and when he answered she said: “Your mother’s got a key to this building, hasn’t she.”

There was a pause on the line that lasted slightly too long.

“Oh,” said Dan.