The Key Board

The key board at the Beaumanoir was a varnished oak cabinet from 1954, screwed to the wall behind the front desk, with forty hooks in four rows and a brass plate above each one. It had served no purpose since the rooms went over to keycards, except for three things: holding the housekeeping pass keys, holding the keys to the plant rooms, and looking well in the photographs on the website.

Anaïs climbed onto the step stool and looked at it properly for the first time in her adult life.

First row: the ground floor, the cellars, the linen room, the store, the boiler room — no, not the boiler room, she corrected herself, reading it again: plant room. Second row: the first floor, 101 to 108. Third row: the second floor.

209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 215. 216.

Seven brass plates, seven hooks, and between 213 and 215 an empty hook whose plate had been taken off. You could see the two screw holes, and a darker rectangle in the varnish, exactly the size of a plate, where the wood had not caught the light for fifty years.

She came down off the stool.

— Sylviane.

The housekeeper stopped with her pile of sheets.

— The empty hook on the second floor, between 213 and 215. What was there?

— Nothing.

— There are two screw holes.

Sylviane Berthoud was fifty-seven, with twenty-nine years in the house and the rare ability to say she did not know without it costing her anything at all.

— Then there was a plate, she said. As far as I'm concerned, since I've been here, there's been a hole. You know how it is with these cabinets, they've been messed about with a hundred times. They renumbered the whole floor while I was on maternity leave, in 2004. After that I had rooms with new numbers, and it took me six months to stop getting them wrong.

Anaïs went still.

— They renumbered in 2004?

— They changed the whole floor. There was building work. There was building work everywhere that year, because of the regulations. I came back to my rooms with new numbers and one corridor short.

— One corridor short?

— Manner of speaking.

She went off with her sheets. Anaïs stayed in front of the cabinet.

She could do two things properly in this trade: read a profit and loss account, and read a building. A building lies less than an account. A corridor has a length, doors have spacings, and when you have seven doors along a distance that once carried nine, it shows a mile off.

She went up to the second floor by the service stairs, took the corridor from the north end, and walked slowly, counting her paces between the doors.

209, eleven paces. 210, eleven paces. 211, eleven paces. 212, eleven paces. 213, eleven paces.

Then twenty-three paces.

Then 215.

She walked it again the other way to be sure. Twenty-three. A double gap, with no door, papered in the same beige wall fabric as the rest of the floor, and a wall light in the middle of it, perfectly centred, as though someone had wanted that stretch of wall to look as if it had been designed that way.

At the end of the corridor, past 216, there was a grey steel door with no plate, no number, a security cylinder and a rubber strip along the bottom.

She put her hand on it, out of curiosity, the way you touch a door. Then she took it away and looked at her palm without understanding why she had done that.

She went back down for a tape measure from the workshop and came up again.

Between the frame of 213 and the frame of 215 there were four metres sixty. The other spacings were two metres twenty, to within three centimetres, which is the normal regularity of a 1954 building whose partitions went up in one go. Four metres sixty was exactly twice two metres thirty.

She noted the figure on her phone, because she always noted figures, and went down to the lounge.

In the small lounge there were six framed photographs of the hotel at different periods. Her grandmother outside the door in 1961. The façade under snow. A wedding party from the seventies, forty people on the stairs. And a view of the second floor, taken straight down the corridor, in black and white, printed on paper that had yellowed along the bottom edge.

Anaïs took the frame down and carried it to the window.

You could see the corridor running away, the wall fabric of the period, a console table with a vase, and the doors following one another left and right. On the first one on the left a brass numeral caught the light. On the second one too. The third was too far off to read.

She counted the doors.

Nine.

She put the frame back on the mantelpiece, very gently, as though setting it down gently changed anything.

She went back down.

— Mehdi, where are the paper registers?

— Which ones?

— The ones from before the computers. The police registers, the night logs, whatever we keep.

— In the basement, in the store at the back. Everything from the eighties onwards. Your father never threw anything away.

Every key in the house carried a label. It had been her grandmother's rule, taken up by her father: an unlabelled key is a lost key. There were yellowed labels from 1980 and printed labels from last year, but there were labels on everything, right down to the key to the gas meter.

She took the plant room bunch off the board, and as she lifted it she saw that there was one key more than the label announced. A flat brass key, square-headed, with no coloured ring and no label.

She looked at it for two seconds, put it back, and went down to the basement.

The store smelled of cardboard and heating oil. The registers were there, forty years of them, ranged by year on steel shelves, with her grandmother's handwriting on the oldest and her father's after that.

She took 2003 because it was the first volume within reach.

She opened it at November.

On the seventeenth of November 2003, on the line for room 214, someone had written by hand, in careful capitals, a name she did not know.

ROUSSEL DANIÈLE.

Paid in cash. One person. One night.