39. Testing the Password
In which more questions arise...
“What do you mean it’s the same window as the one Fenella Burnish is working on?” asked @AngleofRepose, with her pencil ready to write.
“It’s the same woman,” said Gimbal. “Deep water blue. Three keys on a ring, all of them different. A purse at her belt with something heavy in it. It came in a crate on a trolley, and it took four of us to get it onto the bench, and it doesn’t have lead in it. It’s glass pieces laid out flat in a frame with straw instead of lead and it is the same window that Fenella has been working on.”
“Is it exactly the same or is it a bit different?” asked @Hedgehogforshort.
“It is exactly the same,” said Graphic.
“No, there is one difference,” said Gimbal. “The original has a crack in it. I looked at it while everyone was standing round the new one.”
Griffin spoke next, “The copy hasn’t got one. Fenella checked for that specially. She said, ‘there is no crack, just as I asked’.”
Angle wrote it all down.
“So the copy doesn’t have a crack,” said @inkymoose, “but the old one does, and Fenella hasn’t fixed it?”
“That’s right,” said Gimbal.
“If Hedgehog’s theory is right that Gemma Glasswing’s window will be installed into Winchester Cathedral,” said Inkymoose, “then why has Fenella not repaired the crack in the original?”
Nobody had an answer to that, so Gasket topped up everyone’s tea.
Gosie and Hedgehog took their teacups to the far end of the bar.
“Both marks are in that workshop now,” said Gosie. “In the same box, in one room, and Graphic, Gimbal and Griffin are working there.”
“I know,” said Hedgehog.
“When we started, they were three gerbils with jobs. Now they are three gerbils who know more than they should.”
“I know that as well.” Hedgehog fidgeted with her cup and then put it down. “If we pull them out now we have a password we cannot use, a courier we cannot follow and a window we will never see again after it leaves that bench. And we would still be exactly where we were on the day Gemma Glasswing told you she was copying five windows that were all too fragile to be reinstalled.”
“I am not saying pull them out immediately,” said Gosie. “I am asking how will we know when it is time to pull them out.”
“I don’t know,” said Hedgehog. “That is the honest answer. But we need to know what’s on the spreadsheet, and we need to know whether Fenella marks the windows, and where the restored window goes when it leaves the workshop. After that, I will listen to any argument you want to make about getting them out, and I will not put up much of a fight.”
“Good,” said Gosie.
“Griffin gets one try at the password,” said Hedgehog. “One. And she will try it tomorrow.”
•
Graphic spent the day working with Fenella Burnish, stamping the marks into the new lead of the window Fenella was restoring.
Griffin watched while Gimbal and Halcyon spent the day populating the Stamp tab in the spreadsheet. They had almost finished when, at ten past four, the courier knocked on the door.
She was brisk, in a way that suggested a full van and a bad day, and she wanted the crate and the paperwork and nothing else at all. Halcyon signed and both she and Fenella went out to the yard to watch the crate being wheeled up the ramp on a trolley. The van doors shut on it, and the whole business took under six minutes from the knock to the sound of the engine going away down the drove.
The moment Halcyon and Fenella left the workshop, Griffin was at the laptop.
Graphic sat at the end of the bench where she could see both the door and the drove through the window at the same time and picked up a pencil so she looked like a gerbil doing something.
Gimbal came and stood at Griffin’s shoulder.
Griffin opened the Dispatch tab, found the reference, and the grey sheet came up with the password box in the middle of it. She typed the ten characters the way Angle had written them, F, u, 5, 5, b, u, c, k, £, t, and she did not look at the screen while she did it.
The sheet opened.
“Read,” said Gimbal. “Do not stop to think about it. I will do the remembering.”
Griffin read.
The rows nearest the top were red and amber, and there were more of them than she had been ready for. Winchester was there, amber. Under Winchester were four more rows, all in red, four references and nothing much else, which were presumably the windows Gemma Glasswing had been asked to copy.
Then Griffin scrolled down, and kept scrolling, and the sheet went green and stayed green, and went on going.
“Durham, 2021. Delivered. Ripon, 2021. Delivered.” She stopped. “No. I skipped four.”
Griffin scrolled up a few rows and read the entries in amber, “Norwich, delivered, no, not delivered, Returned and today’s date in the Delivery Date column,” she said.
“That is the one that went to Maine,” said Gimbal.
“Yes, and I think that’s in the crate that was picked up today,” said Griffin. She read the three other amber rows, “These three also have today’s date. Carlisle. Returned. Saint David’s. Returned.” She paused. “Sainte-Chapelle. Returned.”
“Say that again.”
“Sainte-Chapelle. It is on the same sheet as the others, in the same column, with today’s date and Returned against it.” Griffin scrolled down again, faster now, past years of rows, past whole screens of green. “It does not stop. Gimbal, it does not stop. 1958, Glasgow, the Eve window, Delivered. 1951, Liverpool, Lady Chapel, twenty-one lines together in a block, all saying Delivered.”
“1951,” said Gimbal.
“And there are so many more below it and I cannot get to the bottom.”
“The live one,” said Gimbal. “The crate. Where is it going?”
Griffin went back to the amber rows at the top with today’s date and read the Destination column and then read it a second time.
“Consignee 3859,” she said. “That is all it says. It is a number. Everything before it has a place in that column and this one has a number.”
Then they heard footsteps on the ramp outside.
Graphic resumed her position back at the bench. Gimbal retook her seat next to the laptop. Griffin closed the locked tab, and had the Stamps tab up on the screen with her paws in her lap before Halcyon and Fenella came through the door.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/39-testing-the-password