Chapter 1: The Bell Above the Door

The shop bell had not rung in seven years, and when it did, it startled the spider in the doorframe so badly that it fell directly into Nettie Crawe's hair.

She did not scream. She had been raised by a woman who considered screaming a waste of perfectly good oxygen, and although that woman was now dead -- the reason, in fact, that Nettie was standing in this dim, dust-furred shop in the village of Thrumble Magna at half past nine on a Tuesday morning -- old habits held firm. She removed the spider with two fingers and set it on the counter, where it sat looking stunned and personally affronted.

"I know the feeling," Nettie told it.

The shop was called Morrow & Crawe: Small Repairs. The sign outside had once been green but had faded to the colour of old illness. The window displayed a typewriter with no ribbon, a mantel clock with no hands, and a china shepherdess missing her left arm. It was, Nettie thought, less a shop than a museum of defeat.

She had not seen her grandmother in eleven years. They had exchanged precisely four Christmas cards and one letter -- the letter being from a solicitor in Ipswich who informed Nettie, in language that managed to be both florid and blunt, that Eudora Crawe was dead and had left her the shop and everything in it, "including all obligations thereto."

Nettie did not know what obligations thereto meant. She suspected it was nothing good.

The back room was worse than the front. Shelves climbed every wall, and on every shelf sat objects in various stages of brokenness: watches, music boxes, spectacles, a violin with a crack running through its belly like a fault line. Each item bore a small tag written in her grandmother's cramped, furious handwriting. Nettie picked up the nearest one.

Alderman Fitch's barometer. Received 4 March 2011. DO NOT RETURN until he tells the truth about the Whitsun fete.

She picked up another.

Mrs. Donne's wedding ring. Resized and repaired, 19 Sept 2013. She will not collect it. She cannot bear to.

And another, attached to a child's wooden toy train with a broken wheel:

For the boy who stopped speaking. Fix when he is ready.

Nettie set the train down very carefully. Something was tightening in her throat, and she did not trust it.

The shop bell rang again. This time the spider had the sense to stay put.

A woman stood in the doorway -- small, furious, wearing a waxed jacket and the expression of someone who had been owed money for a very long time. She looked Nettie up and down with the kind of assessment that could curdle milk.

"You're the granddaughter," she said. It was not a question.

"I am."

"I'm Patricia Gull. I'm the Parish Council chair, and I need my clock back."

"Which clock?"

Mrs. Gull's eyes narrowed to slits that could have posted letters through.

"The one your grandmother stole from the vestry seven months ago and refused to return. She said it wasn't ready." Her voice dropped to something between outrage and bewilderment. "It's a clock. It tells time. How can it not be ready?"

Nettie looked at the hundreds of objects lining the walls, each tagged with a secret, each apparently held hostage by a dead woman's judgement.

"I'm sure I can sort it out," she said, with more confidence than she had felt about anything in recent memory.

Mrs. Gull did not look sure at all.