I Know What I Saw

‘You can always find a place if you use your nut,’ he said. He would say this kind of thing – meaningless leftovers from some other half-digested conversations he’d once had.

I nodded. Sometimes it was better to let the talk exhaust itself.

‘Arches. Disused shops. Commercial property. Lock-ups – that’s my thing,’ he said, taking a gulp of lager from a can. For breakfast.

‘So, if it’s a lock-up, how do you get in? Isn’t it locked up?’ an older man next to me said drunkenly.

‘Ha! Yeah, mate. But you got to choose your whatsit.’

I looked blankly at him as I turned out my boots to dry them.

‘So, certain locks you can open. Like Yales. If they got a Yale or even a small padlock, then you’re in, mate.’

‘How?’ I said, suddenly interested, remembering my picking days.

‘Lloyd key,’ he said. I looked at him and waited.

‘What, you don’t know what a Lloyd key is? ’kin’ hell, mate.’

Within five minutes he had made me one from an old plastic cider bottle. It was just a strip of plastic around three inches wide and about six inches long.

‘It’s the curve on the bottle that gets round the door jamb. You just shove it in through the gap and over the lock bit and then push. Most doors will open to that. Design flaw, innit,’ he said, before flicking it away on the ground.

How many years ago was that? Ten? Twenty? Longer? There is nothing in my memory of that place that ties it to a time period. No flat-screen TVs. No chintz. No shagpile carpet. Just bare floors and boarded-up windows. The heavy, toxic scent of mould.

A siren blares in the distance and I am jolted out of the reverie. Midday has long gone and from the position of the sun in the sky, I know it must be late afternoon. I walk to a parade of shops near the library and look for a recycling bin outside one of the shops. I find one and scavenge what I need and return to my spot. The Porsche isn’t there – Ebadi hasn’t returned. Hunger makes a call but I dismiss it to sit and carve out my own Lloyd key from a plastic bottle. The cans these days are flimsy and won’t cut so I scout around until I find an empty lager bottle. I tap its neck against the kerb until it breaks. Now I test the edge with my finger – it’s sharp and slices easily through the plastic. The key cut, I settle in to wait. I can’t do this in the light. It will have to wait until the sun has gone and I have gathered some darkness over me.

I turn the plastic in my hands. An hour passes. With each spent minute I know he is closer to returning home. And now the light has finally dropped, I am here, up against the door to 42B. Those large stone steps up to my left shield me a little from view, but there is nobody around anyway.

I press the edge of the Lloyd between the door and the frame where the Yale is. My heart is beating faster than I want it to, so I have to take a break to give it time to settle. But my headache has returned and I’m beginning to think of it as an alarm or a warning. What I am doing here? Breaking into this house seems like the worst thing that I can do. I don’t know what I am hoping to achieve except I know there is something going on. Either that footage was showing the wrong house or something behind this door is a fraud.

My breathing settles somewhat and I grip the plastic hard and shove it into the gap. It bends, too early. I withdraw it, straighten it and put it through again from a different angle where the plastic seems more rigid. Then the edge hits something solid and what must be the edge of the latch.

Suddenly the sound of a siren in the distance sends my heart into my throat. I know that it’s not near enough to be a threat but I have pulled the plastic out again. I pause, attuned and ready for the slightest sound now my back is against the street.

Silence again. I put the Lloyd key, this plastic scrap, back into the gap and push hard. Then through the wood I sense that the plastic has caught the smooth curve of the lock. And then it hits me, and I freeze: the beep when he left. That sound – the long beep. There’s an alarm. I can’t break in. But, more than that, the alarm is new. It wasn’t there before. He’s just installed this. To hide something? What else could be the reason for the sudden need for security? And then there’s my story – he knows having an alarm will interfere with my account. I won’t be able to explain how I got inside if there had been an alarm to get past.

21 Sunday

Money. With enough money you can do anything.