legends · 4 min read ·
The Locksmith's Second Visit
A night locksmith opens a flat for a woman in a coat, returns to find the same call again, and then finds his own door standing open.
The call came in at ten past one, a lock-out on Carver Road, and the woman on the phone gave the number of the flat in the voice people use when they have been standing outside in the cold for some time. I told her forty minutes. I was there in thirty-five.
She was on the landing in a long coat over what looked like pyjamas, holding a phone with the screen turned to the wall so I would not see how little battery it had. She said the key had been in her hand when she shut the door. I have heard that sentence about four thousand times. It is nearly always true.
The lock was a five-lever mortice and a cylinder above it, both fairly new. I put the torch in my teeth and began on the cylinder first, because it is quicker. It was while I had the tension wrench in that I noticed the keyway was wrong. Not damaged. Wrong. The wards were cut the way an old lock is cut, and the brass was dull in a pattern I know from pre-war work, though the cylinder had a date stamp from three years ago.
"Has it been changed recently?" I asked.
"I've been here eleven years," she said. That was no answer, and she knew it.
The mortice gave in about four minutes. I like to say I felt the lever sets click, but what I felt was a kind of give, as though the lock had been waiting for the pick the way a hand waits for a handshake. The door swung inward on a dark hallway and a smell of someone else's cooking, onions and something sweet.
She thanked me, and she paid, cash from the coat pocket, a note folded in four. I wrote her an invoice by torchlight against the wall, the way I always do, name, address, time, the work. She gave her name as Mrs. Okafor, and I wrote it down.
I was back in the van and halfway through the flask before I looked at the note properly. It was a ten, but it was printed with the old portrait and the old colour, a note withdrawn years ago, soft as cloth. I thought, well, it is still money to the bank if I take it in, and I put it in the tin.
The second call came at ten to three. Same address.
I told the dispatcher I had been there already. She said the caller was the same woman, locked out again, and was I the nearest. I was. I went.
She was on the landing, same coat, same phone turned to the wall. I said, politely, that I had let her in barely an hour and a half ago. She looked at me without any change of face.
"You haven't been here before," she said.
"Mrs. Okafor, I did the door. You paid me with a ten."
"I don't know you," she said. "I'm Mrs. Okafor. I have been here eleven years."
This time the cylinder would not lift. I tried the picks, then the bump key, then the drill kit in the van, and none of it did anything. The lock gave to nothing. I knelt in front of it, a man of fifty-three on his knees on a cold landing, and I put my eye to the keyway and the torch beam went in and stopped. There was no inside to it. Brass, flat, a surface with a keyhole drawn on it.
"It was open earlier," I said. "I opened it."
"Did you," she said. She was not asking.
I stood up too fast and my knee cracked. The door was shut. The landing smelled of onions. I went down to the street and sat in the van with the engine off.
My invoice book was on the passenger seat. I turned to the last carbon. The first visit was there, my handwriting, the time, the address. Under customer name I had written not Okafor but my own surname, and under the address, my own address, the flat I have lived in for nineteen years. I had not noticed. I would have sworn to the other name.
I drove home. I did not use my key, because the door of my flat was standing wide, the hallway light on, and a smell of onions and something sweet coming out of the kitchen. There was a coat on the hook that I did not own. Somebody was running a tap.
I stayed on the mat. I said hello. The tap stopped.
"You're early," said a voice I know very well, because it is mine. "Take your boots off. I've only just got in."