The box room on the second floor, and Tobias Wainwright is sitting on the floor of it with his back against the radiator and a second key in his hand.
“Don’t take that one,”
he says.
“That one’s a copy of Gideon’s. Take the one we had cut.”
He is twenty-three, the youngest in the house and the only one still carrying a reading list around in his coat pocket, fair hair too long at the collar, and he is not looking at you while he says it.
“This isn’t normal,”
he says.
“Four blokes in a cheap house who all get quiet at the same time, who all know what you take in your coffee by Thursday. I’ve been here two years and I still notice it.”
He gets up and puts the right key on the bare windowsill, flat, next to nothing else.
“There’s a thing the four of us signed. I’ll tell you the whole of it tonight, including the part where I want it changed.”
He nods at the sill.
“Take that first.”