Chapter 3: No Sign of Forced Entry
Isa Gourlay was coming down the stair as Shannon came up it, bumping a tartan shopping trolley one step at a time ahead of her like a dog she didn't trust.
"Your man was up this morning," she said.
Shannon stopped two steps below her. "What man?"
"Wi' the bag. The locksmith's man, I took him for. About ten. I heard him at your door and I thought, here we go, she's getting more done, God help my ears." Isa lowered the trolley another step and got her breath back. "But he didnae drill. He wasnae long."
"Did you see him?"
"I'm not going out on the landing for every man with a bag, hen. I'd a look through my wee spyhole. He'd his back to me. Big fella. Dark jacket." She considered. "Bag like hers."
"Did he go in?"
"I couldn't tell you. I'd the kettle on." Isa looked at her properly then, over the glasses, and something in her face changed. "Are you all right?"
"Aye," Shannon said. "I'm grand. I'll get that for you." She took the trolley down to the bottom and stood it by the stair door, and came back up past Isa, and said something about the rain, and didn't hear what Isa said back.
Her door was locked. Both locks, the way she'd left them at twenty to eight: the nightlatch deadlocked, the mortice turned. She stood on the landing with her key out. The stair light clicked off. She hit the switch and it came on again and she stood there with her hand on the switch.
She'd done this before. Not here; in Dundee. She'd stood outside a door with her key and been sure, and gone in, and found nothing, and sat on the kitchen floor shaking for an hour over a window she'd forgotten she'd opened. Thank it, and then check.
She opened the mortice, and the nightlatch, and pushed the door.
The hall had four doors off it. Kitchen, bathroom, the box room, the bedroom. All four were shut.
On the shelf over the radiator, beside where the keys lived, somebody had lined up the six grey rubber wedges in a row, small end to big end, neat as the tickets on the rail at work.
She didn't go in. She stepped back out onto the landing and pulled the door to and heard the latch deadlock itself, that full stop, and stood with her back against Isa Gourlay's door, which said Go Away under her feet, and hit the light switch again, and phoned 999, and then she phoned Lindsay, who answered on the second ring and said, before Shannon had said anything at all, "I'm coming."
The police were a big young constable called Imrie, who called her Ms Leask every time he spoke, and a woman of about fifty called Baird with a cold and a packet of Halls. They went in first, the pair of them, and Shannon heard them open the doors one after another, kitchen, bathroom, box room, bedroom, and say "Clear" to each other in their ordinary voices, and then Baird came back out to the landing and said, "There's nobody in, love. Do you want to come and have a look and see if anything's missing?"
The flat looked the way it had looked at twenty to eight. The breakfast bowls in the sink. Harris's pyjamas on the bathroom floor. Her dressing gown over the end of the bed. The tin on top of the fridge with the gas bills in it, and in with the gas bills, when she lifted the lid with her sleeve, two hundred pounds in tens.
"So nothing's been taken," said Imrie.
Shannon was looking at the fridge door. There was a magnet on it, a Tunnock's teacake her pal had sent from Dundee, and the magnet was holding nothing.
"His photo," she said.
"Sorry?"
"His school photo. My boy's. It was there. It was there this morning." P2, in the green jumper, with his fringe squint because she'd cut it herself the night before with the kitchen scissors and he'd moved. She'd laughed at it for a week. "It's away."
"Could it have fallen down the back?"
They pulled the fridge out. Behind it there was a Lego man with no legs, a fish finger, and a great deal of grey dust. Imrie crouched and looked at the fish finger for a while as if it might be evidence.
"So there's no sign of forced entry," he said, standing up. "And nothing's been taken apart from the photo. Is it possible, Ms Leask, that you closed the doors before you left this morning? Just out of habit?"
"No."
"You're sure."
"I don't close doors."
"Could your son have—"
"He's six." She heard her voice go up and brought it back down. "He's never shut a door in his life. He thinks the house'll suffocate."
Imrie wrote something. Baird blew her nose and said, kindly, that people did all sorts on autopilot, she'd once put her car keys in the fridge and the milk in her handbag. Then she asked the name, and the date of birth, and wrote down Robert Duguid and the details of the order from Dundee Sheriff Court, and said she'd put a marker on the address so that any 999 call from it went to the top of the pile, and the domestic abuse unit would phone her tomorrow.
"He's been in," Shannon said. "That's him. That's what he does."
"I understand."
"You don't. He doesn't break things. He doesn't need to." She pointed at the wedges on the shelf, which nobody had touched. "Who does that? Who lines them up?"
Baird looked at the wedges. She didn't write anything down about them. Shannon watched her not write it.
That was when Lindsay came up the stair, two at a time with the toolbag, and stopped on the landing, and looked at the door before she looked at any of them.
She went over it with a torch for five minutes while the constables waited. She looked at the face of the cylinder close up and at the keep and the steel strips and the hinge side and the letterbox, and she put her eye to the gap between door and frame, and at the end she stood up and switched off the torch.
"Somebody used a key," she said.
"Or it wasn't locked," said Imrie.
"It locks itself when you shut it. It can't not be locked."
"Could it have been left on the snib?"
"It hasn't got a snib," Lindsay said. "I took the snib off."
Imrie nodded slowly and wrote that down too.
"Who else has keys to the property, Ms Leask?"
"Three on the shelf, and mine." Shannon held it up. "That's all of them. She gave me four."
Imrie turned to Lindsay. "Does the locksmith hold a key?"
"The locksmith doesn't keep keys," said Lindsay.
Shannon would think about that later, how fast she said it and how she didn't look at anybody while she did. At the time all she noticed was that Lindsay had put her hand flat on the door, as if she was checking it for a temperature.
When the police went, Isa Gourlay was on her own landing with the door wide open and a plate of caramel wafers, and she made Imrie take two.
The restricted pair had come into the wholesaler's that morning, which was the one good thing about the day, and they were sitting in the van in their box with their card. Shannon had to go for Harris at quarter past three. She hesitated in the hall with her jacket half on and looked at Lindsay, and Lindsay understood that she was being asked whether it was all right to leave her alone in the flat, and also that she was being trusted to be.
"Go," Lindsay said. "I'll be twenty minutes."
Before she went Shannon went round with the wedges. She did it quickly, without looking at Lindsay, the bathroom, the box room, the bedroom, the kitchen, each door pushed back to the wall and the wedge kicked in under it with the side of her trainer, the way you'd stamp on something. Then she went down the stair, and Lindsay was alone in a flat where every door stood open.
She took the temporary pair out. Two screws on the back of the nightlatch and its cylinder slid out of the door on its connecting bar; one long screw in the edge of the door and the mortice's came out of the lock body. She held them up to the hall light. They looked fine. They looked like cylinders somebody had used for two days. She dropped them into a sandwich bag and the bag into her jacket pocket and put the new pair in, heavy Finnish things keyed alike, whose key looked like half a pencil somebody had chewed at angles, and the card went on the shelf with its five keys. Nobody on earth could get a key cut for them without that card in their hand. Not her. Not anybody.
The old pair was another matter.
She stood in the hall with her hand on the pocket and made herself think it through the way she'd think through anybody else's job. The code had come printed on a card inside the box. The card had gone in with the keys to Shannon. The box had gone in the door pocket of the van with the rest of Monday's rubbish, and the van had been locked on Gorgie Road and then on her own drive, and nobody had touched it; she'd have known. And the code was in pencil in the margin of Monday in the diary, and the diary was on her kitchen table in Gilmerton, and the only other person in that kitchen was Euan.
She thought that, and heard herself think it, and set it aside, because it was stupid. It was exactly the kind of stupid you got from standing in a hall where a stranger had been that morning. Of course the only other person in her kitchen was Euan. That was what living with somebody meant.
Cylinders got keyed alike sometimes. That was what she'd come back to. A factory cut ten thousand of a pattern and a machine slipped and two pairs came out the same, one in a box in Gorgie and one in some other box in some other door, and somewhere in Edinburgh there was a man who'd bought a lock off the internet that happened to open Shannon's. It was one in a very large number. It happened. She'd read about it happening. She'd ring the supplier first thing.
The front door opened and Harris came in under his mother's arm and stopped dead at the sight of her toolbag.
He was six and long and serious, with a fringe that had been cut by someone in a hurry and was growing out. He looked at the bag and then at Lindsay and then at the bag.
"Are you the locksmith?"
"I'm the locksmith."
"Mum said you're not called Gary."
"I'm called Lindsay."
He took this in. "Have you got a van?"
"I've got a van."
"Has it got keys in it?"
"About four hundred."
He turned to his mother with his whole face lit up, and Shannon said, "I told you," and went through to the kitchen with her shoulders up round her ears.
Lindsay crouched and opened the small front pocket of the bag where she kept the odds and ends, and found a key blank, a plain brass one with no cuts on it yet, and held it out.
He took it like you'd take a bird's egg. "What does it open?"
"Nothing yet."
"Then what's it for?"
"It's a key before anybody's decided what it's for," Lindsay said. "That's the best kind. That one could be anything."
He thought about that with his whole body. Then he put it in the pocket of his school trousers and kept his hand on it there, and went off to the living room, and she heard the telly go on.
Shannon had the kettle on and her back to the door, and she didn't turn round when Lindsay came in.
"It's him," she said.
"The police—"
"The police said no sign. There's never a sign. There wasn't a sign in Dundee, either, and he'd been in my house twice before I found out how. He reads everything. Letters. Forms. My bank statements." She turned round. She'd been crying, quickly, and stopped, and washed her face at the sink, and you'd only have known from the edge of her hairline. "He doesn't break things. He shuts them."
"Shuts them?"
"Doors." Shannon got two mugs down. "He always shut the doors. Every night. Every door in the house, and then the bedroom. He'll have done it so I'd know it was him. That's the point of it. Anybody else would've taken the money."
Lindsay thought, for no reason she could have given, of Euan going round the house in Gilmerton at night, kitchen, living room, loo, the door through to the garage.
And then, straight after, of her own dad in Kirkcaldy, in his slippers, doing exactly the same, every night of her childhood, going round the plugs and the doors and saying the gas board would be on the phone personally to thank him for his custom. Half the men in Scotland did it. It was the heating bill. And the vowels were nothing either; half of Aberdeen had come south when the oil went.
She felt something like cold water at the back of her neck, and put it away.
"I'm going to find out how they got a key," she said.
Shannon handed her a mug. It was black; there was still no milk. Then she went through to the bedroom, and Lindsay followed as far as the doorway and watched her lie down flat on the carpet and reach under the bed, right back to the wall, and pull out a folded holdall, and shake it open.
"Are you going?"
"I'm packing." Shannon took two pairs of pants out of a drawer and put them in. "Packing's not going."
"The new ones are restricted. Nobody gets a key for them without that card. Not me. Not anybody."
"And the old ones?"
Lindsay looked at her tea.
"I'll find out," she said.
Euan wasn't back when she got in. There was a note on the table in his capitals, SEVEN!!! PINT WITH DAVIE BACK 9 X, and a drawing underneath of what she took to be a duck.
She took the sandwich bag down to the workshop and switched on the lamp with the magnifier.
A pin-tumbler cylinder was a brass plug that turned inside a brass body, and the only thing stopping it turning was five little stacks of pins sitting across the line between the two, each stack a pin from the key's side and a pin from the spring's side, cut to different heights. Put the right key in and every stack split exactly on the line, and the plug turned. That was all a key was. A list of heights.
She clamped the latch cylinder in the vice and pushed a follower through behind the plug to hold the drivers in, and drew the plug out, and tipped the key pins into the magnetic tray one at a time in their order. Then she put them under the glass.
Picking left marks. Not to a customer, not to a constable with a torch, but under a magnifier, if you knew what you were looking for: a pick scraped the tips of the pins and left fine bright lines across them, little scratches like someone had been at them with a needle, and it left the same lines along the bottom of the keyway. Bumping left dents on the tops where they'd been struck. Snapping broke the cylinder in half, which was hard to miss.
She looked for a long time.
There was nothing. The tips were dull and even, a faint polish worn on them by two days of a key going in and out, and the keyway was clean. Whoever had opened Shannon's door that morning had opened it exactly the way Shannon did. With a key that was cut right. She did the mortice's. It was the same.
Keyed alike, she thought. One in a very large number. She'd ring the supplier at eight.
The Silca sat at the end of the bench under its dust cover. She put her hand flat on the cover and left it there, and didn't lift it. In the morning it would be a stupid thing to have been afraid of.
She heard the door from the house, and Euan came down the two steps into the workshop with the cold still on him from outside, a mug of tea in each hand and a smell of the pub.
"Seven," he said. "Seven velvet scoters, boss. Off the river mouth. Like wee rubber ducks somebody painted black." He put one mug down beside her on the bench and leaned in over her shoulder with his own. He was warm and he was pleased with himself and he smelled of the sea wind and Tennent's. He looked at the cylinder in the vice and the five little pins in the tray.
"That the wee boy's door?" he said.
She looked at the pins.
She tried to remember telling him there was a boy. She went back through Monday night, the dal, She's nice, she's funny, she called me Gary. Tuesday, the mince, She texted to ask if the door was good. She couldn't find it. She talked about work all the time and he listened to all of it, and that was the trouble with a man who listened: you never knew afterwards what you'd given him.
She must have said. How else.
"Aye," Lindsay said. "That's his door."