WINNER THE COFFIN CLUB

A SALLOW moon shines like a jaundiced eye through the bedroom window. Watching her. Sleep will be elusive tonight, Betty knows. Always the way when it’s a full moon. She really ought to close the curtains, but it would make no difference. The moon will still be there, whether she can see it or not; a monthly reminder. As if she could ever forget. From the bedroom next door, she can hear Tally’s rumbling snores. Her carer would have slept through the Blitz, Betty has no doubt. Lucky girl. Sighing, she hoists herself up in the bed, reaches for her glasses on the night stand. Yesterday’s paper lies folded next to them, half read. She’ll try the cryptic, see if that’ll send her off. The moon’s light is enough to see by, if she squints. She rummages in the pockets of her bedjacket. But instead of the pencil she expects to find, she unearths a balled Kleenex, a rusty hat-pin, and a key whose lock she cannot recall. She wipes at her eyes with the crusty tissue, peers at the key, turning it over in her wrinkled palm. It is an odd shape, with too many protrusions. How had it come to be in her pocket? She turns the key over and over, her brain grinding with the effort of remembering. An image flickers in the recesses of her memory and she thinks she has it, but no. She tries again, groping in the dark, her mind tripping and stumbling over memories long forgotten, terrified of the empty spaces she can sense, but not see. The dog emits a soft growl. ‘What is it boy?’ Betty pushes herself further up the pillows, and as she does so a vaguely familiar, smoke-hoarse voice comes clear to her across the years. ‘A skeleton key’ll open almost anyfing.’ A movement snags her eyes; there, in the far corner of the bedroom, almost invisible in the shadows, stands a figure. As the person slowly approaches, Betty’s fingers instinctively tighten around the key. She knuckles her glasses further up her nose, trying to bring the man into focus. He is almost at the bed when recognition pierces the blackness of her memory like a lighthouse beam; it is a man she knows only as ‘Mr Smith the lock-picker’. Betty’s heart stutters. Is she hallucinating? She hasn’t seen her security instructor ‘Mr Smith’ since 1943. Yet here he is, looking exactly the same as he did back then, face narrow as a ferret’s, greasy haired, wearing the same threadbare brown suit. There is a sudden waft of Woodbines, a smell that takes Betty straight back to Wanborough Manor, Special Training School No 5.