Lorna Vance

Lorna Vance is 36 and has a jeweller's workshop on the 3rd floor of the same building as the vaults. She was born in Brixton, in south London, the daughter of a seamstress and a bus driver who came from Jamaica, and learned the trade from an old stone setter who needed someone with fine fingers and patience. She opened her own workshop at 30, with a loan and an enthusiasm that, she says, yielded more interest than the loan.

The workshop is a narrow room with a low ceiling, with a wooden bench scarred by a thousand scratches, a small torch, pliers hung by size on a cork board and an articulated lamp that spends more hours on than off. Lorna works to order, wedding bands, repairs, settings, and says a small jeweller lives on repairing what the big jeweller sold. She speaks of her floor neighbors as of a cranky family: twelve jewelers, two watchmakers and a ring engraver who only shows up in the afternoon.

She has dark skin and curly hair tied in a red-patterned scarf, and a jeweler's loupe pushed up on her forehead, which she lowers over her eye when she wants to stop looking at someone. She wears a brown leather apron over a threadbare gray sweater and her fingers are marked with small cuts. Her dark circles are deep. She is quick, ironic and defensive, answers with a joke and changes the subject when the conversation gets close to her own life.

About the holiday, she tells what she heard: a hum, like a dentist's, rising through the building's floor in the small hours of Friday and again on Saturday night, until daybreak on Sunday. She thought it was construction in the neighboring building. In the basement vault, she says, she kept nothing, because a box in the vault is for people who have something to keep, and she has a bench, a loupe and bills. With the building closed from Thursday to Tuesday, no one can say for certain where each person was during the holiday.

Lorna knows that whoever heard the noise will also have to explain why she was close enough to hear it. When the detective suggests the thieves came in through her workshop, irony comes before anger: through a third-floor window, with a fire ladder, and she tells the detective to go write novels. It may be the humor of someone who has heard too many accusations in her life. It may be someone who jokes so as not to have to answer. The detective will have to decide which.