The top of her phone peeked out, revealed by the missing top of the envelope, so Viv took that out first, and was both excited and worried to realise that she had been right—there was still something else in there.

  She tipped the envelope sideways so that whatever was still in there could drop into the hand that had released the pull-tab to flutter down onto the carpet beside her chair.

  It was a key that dropped heavily into her hand. No: it was two keys. The first key fell into her hand as if it had been waiting for her, an old, rust-dotted key with a fat shank and a bow nearly as big as the palm of her hand. It was so startlingly heavy out of the bag that the key dipped and hit her thigh as it nearly slipped out of her grasp. The second key had to be dug out of the package because it was long and rectangular but much slimmer and smaller than the first key. The shank of it was uniformly and geometrically cut, and the bow was squarish, with some letters that had been engraved, though they were now nearly impossible to see.

  Viv put the smaller, more geometrically sound key on her left thigh, and glanced from it to the larger, older key that was making indents on the other thigh. Then, puzzled, she felt around in the package for any kind of documentation that would tell her what she was looking at. She didn’t find it in the package, but the label seemed a little bit too thick for mere paper, so Viv carefully separated it from the padded bag they keys had come in, and found another slip of paper between the two surfaces.

  It was a note from Marazul.

  Your parents had these for a long time, it said. The smaller key is a safety deposit box key for the old ANZ bank on the corner of Collins and Queen Streets there in Melbourne; the larger is possibly a key to open whatever is locked inside it. I don’t know if it will do you any good, but I’ve sent you the ledger of visits to the specific lock-box; they’re coded into the scale I sealed the envelope with. Think of it as a usb stick—just don’t put it in your company tablet or anything connected to the internet. You can put it into your phone as it is now, but don’t trust it beyond one look.

  That didn’t leave a lot of other options, thought Viv rather dryly. In fact, it left no options after she used it the first time in her phone. She would have to visit the nearest supermarket when she could to buy a cheap smartphone or tablet that wasn’t attached to anything—including the internet.

  And she would visit the old gothic bank to see if they still had deposit boxes in general, and this deposit box specifically. Having the keys would do her absolutely no good at all if the box had been disposed of years ago.

  Her fingers closing coldly around both keys, Viv tried to concentrate on the note again. It was hard to make the words make sense, but she drew in a slow, steady breath, and tried again.

  As for your mother and the police report that vanished from your phone—I can see where the files vanished, and I can see where the hack initiated, but not who did it. It happened while you were in the Tea House, and whoever did it had access to your phone for long enough to do it directly.

  I haven’t been able to restore the photographs, but I was able to recover a bit of metadata, which led me to a police station that burned down in 2008. None of their files were digitised, and everything was lost in the fire, but I did some digging in local newspapers pre-2008 and I may have some idea of what it was: there was an incident where your mother apparently saved a child that everyone thought was dead from drowning. No online reports, as I said, but there are a few newspaper reports from the day. I’ll send those to you when I can.

  This incident was a few weeks before they opened the safe deposit box, if the timing matters at all. The keys were in the possession of an old woman who ran a hotel along Little Collins Street until two years ago, when the hotel went up in flames. They were kept in an evidence locker until this week, when I tracked them down. I hope they unlock something useful for you.

  Marazul

  P.S. Don’t tell Jasper I helped you.

  “You all right, little sis?”

  — Bazza

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  W.R. Gingell, Splintered Path (Shattered World Book 4)

 

 

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