Chapter 1: Non-Destructive Entry
Lindsay pressed all eight buzzers at once with the flat of her hand and waited to see who'd crack first.
It was usually the top floor. Top floors were students or the very old, and both would let in anybody who sounded like a parcel. This time it was second floor left: a crackle, then a woman's voice saying, "If that's the Hermes boy you can bring it up, son, I'm not doing those stairs for a hairdryer," and the release buzzed and Lindsay shouldered in off Gorgie Road with the toolbag on one hip and the drill case on the other.
The stair smelled of bleach and somebody's fried breakfast. The steps had been worn into dips by a hundred and twenty years of feet, and the banister was painted the brown that every council in Scotland seemed to buy by the tanker. The light was on its timer. She took the steps two at a time to beat it and lost, so the first she saw of Isa Gourlay was a door opening in the dark and a voice saying, "You're no' the Hermes boy."
"Locksmith," Lindsay said. "For across the landing."
"I know fine who it's for." A hall light came on behind a small woman in a lilac fleece and a maroon Hearts scarf, glasses on a cord round her neck. Seventy-five, maybe eighty. "She said a woman was coming. I said there's no such thing as a lady locksmith. She said there is now. You'll be drilling."
"Some."
"How much is some?"
"Most of the morning."
Isa Gourlay took this the way people in tenements took everything, as a thing that was going to be done to her personally. "I've the chiropodist at eleven," she said, and shut her door, which Lindsay decided to count as permission.
The door opposite was the original. Four pine panels under fifty years of green gloss, a brass letterbox gone the colour of stewed tea, a Yale nightlatch fitted around the time of decimalisation and a mortice somebody had added later, squint. Lindsay looked at it the way a dentist looks into a mouth. A credit card and a bit of patience. A shoulder and no patience at all.
She put her ear near the letterbox. A radio, low. Something dragged across a floor. Then nothing, the particular nothing of a person standing very still on the other side of a door.
She didn't knock. She texted the number on the referral: Hi Shannon, Lindsay the locksmith. I'm outside. On my own.
The nothing went on for a while. Then a chain came off that she hadn't known about, and the Yale, and the mortice, which stuck and had to be fought, and the door opened eight inches on a woman in her early thirties with wet hair scraped back and the sleeves of her hoodie pulled down over her hands. She looked past Lindsay at the stair before she looked at Lindsay. Then at the bags.
"You don't look like a locksmith," she said.
"What does a locksmith look like?"
"Fat. Called Gary. Smells of WD-40." An Aberdeen voice, the vowels flattened and pulled long. "Sorry. I'm Shannon. Come in. D'you want tea? There's no milk. There's oat stuff but it tastes like the inside of a shoe."
"I'm fine."
"Nobody's fine," Shannon said, and stood back to let her in.
The flat was a room and kitchen with a box room off the hall, the kind the council had bought back in the nineties and painted magnolia ever since. Tynecastle's main stand filled the front-room window from across Gorgie Road, so close you could have hit it with a tin of beans. Every door in the place stood open. Not ajar: open, each one pushed back flat to the wall and held there with a grey rubber wedge, the bathroom too, so that from the front door you could see straight through the flat to a clothes horse of school polo shirts by the kitchen window.
Lindsay noticed it the way she noticed everything in a client's house, and filed it, and didn't ask. She never asked about him. The referral had told her what she needed: risk high, perpetrator's whereabouts unknown, believed north-east, non-harassment order in place, police aware. She didn't need his name to keep him out. His name was for people with different jobs.
"Right," she said, and opened the drill case on the hall floor. "Here's what you're getting. Stop me if it's boring."
"It'll not be boring."
"It's mostly screws."
"I like screws." Shannon shut her eyes. "I didna mean that how it—"
"I know how you meant it."
Lindsay talked while she worked, because people liked to know what was being done to their door and because it gave her hands something reasonable to do. The old nightlatch came off first, four screws and a lot of paint. In its place went a British Standard one that deadlocked itself when you shut it, so nobody could slip it with a card, and a cylinder she held up for Shannon to see.
"This is temporary. Your proper one's restricted, keys only cut against a card with your name on it, and it's on back order till Wednesday because the whole of Scotland's decided to be careful at once. This one'll hold till then. Four keys." She lined them up on the shelf over the radiator. "Count them every night if you want. Some folk do."
"I'll count them," Shannon said.
Then the frame. In old tenements the frames were the weak point, never the doors: pine gone dry as a biscuit, so that a good kick split the wood round the keep and the lock went with it, still locked, still useless. Lindsay screwed a steel strip the height of the frame down the lock side and another down the hinge side, long screws through the plaster into the stone where she could find it. Then two hinge bolts, steel pegs in the back edge of the door that dropped into holes in the frame when it shut.
"Fit are they for?"
"Most folk never think about the hinge side. If somebody gets your hinges off, the door's still locked. It's just not attached to anything." She swung it shut. The pegs went home with a sound like teeth. "Now it's attached."
The letterbox came out. In went a new flap with a steel box behind it on the inside and a fireproof bag in the box to catch whatever came through.
"Is that for the post?"
"It's so nobody can put anything burning through your door." She said it in the same voice she'd said screws in. There wasn't another voice to say it in. "Also so nobody can get a tool through and turn your latch from out there. You'd be amazed what a man can do through a letterbox with a bit of coat hanger."
"Would I," said Shannon.
The chain went in Lindsay's bin bag. "A chain holds about as long as its screws are long," she said. "So, not long. And folk open the door to the chain and think they've been careful." In its place she drilled a viewer, a fat little glass eye through the top panel at Shannon's height, not hers, after making her stand against the door twice to get it right. "Have a look."
Shannon put her eye to it. The landing came up fish-eyed and bright: Isa Gourlay's door bowed towards her, the banister bent into a grin, the top of the stair dropping away at the edges.
"I can see her mat," Shannon said. "It says Go Away."
"It does say Go Away."
"I like her." Shannon stayed with her eye to the glass longer than she needed to.
At ten to eleven Isa knocked on the open door with one knuckle to say she was away to the chiropodist and they could do as they liked, and Lindsay put the big bit into the old mortice and made the whole stair ring like a bell for a quarter of an hour. A new mortice deadlock, British Standard, the kind that took a cylinder, keyed alike to the latch so the one key did both, with a thumb-turn on the inside, so that if there was ever a fire Shannon could get out without hunting for a key in the smoke.
"So anybody inside can open it," Shannon said. "Without a key."
"Anybody inside, aye."
"Harris can reach that."
"Then you tell him." Lindsay sat back on her heels and wiped the bit on her jeans. "I'll say this because I say it to everybody, and you'll know it already, and I'm going to say it anyway. Every door I've ever seen opened was opened from the inside. Somebody answered it. Somebody was told it was the gas, or a parcel, or that it would only take five minutes. The lock's not the weak bit. The lock's the easy bit."
"I know," Shannon said.
"I know you know."
Shannon looked at the thumb-turn as if it might go over by itself. Then she went and filled the kettle, though there was still no milk.
The box room had a single bed in it with a Spider-Man duvet, and the double bed in the main room had two sets of pyjamas on the pillow, which told Lindsay where the wee boy actually slept.
"This one," Shannon said, from the bedroom doorway. "If it's going to be anywhere. The phone works in here. In the box room you have to stand on the bed."
Lindsay ran her tape up the frame and wrote the numbers on the back of her hand and then on the job sheet. A sanctuary room wasn't anything clever. It was the room you went to when the front door had stopped mattering: a solid fire door in place of the hollow thing that was there now, rehung so it opened out into the hall.
"Why out?"
"Because you can't kick a door into its own frame. The frame's in the road." She pushed the old door, which swung into the room with a sigh. "This one, a big lad puts his foot through it first go. The new one opens towards him. He can kick it all night. It's going nowhere."
"What if he pulls?"
"Then he's a man pulling a door while somebody holds it on the other side. Ever tried? It's a stupid fight. Nobody wins it quick." She tapped the frame. "Hinge bolts again, because the hinges'll be on his side. Thumb-turn your side, key his side, and the only other key goes to the police. Your phone charger lives in here. A bottle of water. Something for Harris to do."
"Like what?"
"Whatever he's into."
"Keys," Shannon said. "Honest to God. He collects them. Anything with a key on it. Leave your bag in here and he'll have your van away."
Lindsay laughed, the first proper one all day. "The door comes in Thursday. I'll fit it Friday. It's forty kilos, so it'll take me most of the day on my own."
"Just you?"
"I've usually a lad that carries it, but he's working." She stood. "So that's four nights with the front door and no room. The front door's good now. It's not magic. If anything happens before Friday you phone 999 first and me second, and you don't open it."
"Not even to you?"
"If it's me on my own, I'll text first, like today. You look through that." She nodded at the viewer. "And if I'm ever at your door and I'm not on my own, don't open it. Even if it's me telling you it's fine."
Shannon looked at her. "Why would you not be on your own?"
"I wouldn't. That's the point."
"What if you've brought a pizza?"
"Then I'll leave it on the mat and you can watch me go down the stair through the glass."
"Pepperoni," Shannon said. "Deal."
Before she went she put restrictors on the kitchen window, which looked over the back green beside a downpipe you could have climbed, and which wasn't on the order.
"Who's paying for them?" Shannon said.
"Council," said Lindsay, and packed the drill.
Shannon got Harris from after-school club at half five, because she'd gone in to the dry cleaner's when the locksmith left and Mr Zaman had kept her till five doing a wedding party's kilts, and he came out of the hall at a run with his coat half on and a painting held over his head like the Scottish Cup.
"It's a key," he said, before she could ask.
"I can see it's a key."
"It's the key to everything."
It was a yellow shape with teeth along one side and a hole at the top, and a great deal of glitter. She told him it was the best key she'd ever seen and carried it home the length of Gorgie Road by one corner so it wouldn't smudge, past the bookies and the Polish shop and the chippy with the Hearts crest painted on the window, Harris walking along every low wall he could find with his hand on her shoulder.
He saw the new door before she'd got her key out. He stood in front of it on the landing with his mouth open.
"It's got an eye."
"So we can see who's knocking."
"Can I look?"
She held him up. He was getting too heavy for it, six and long, like a bit of string. He put his face to the viewer and squealed. "I can see Isa's mat."
"It says Go Away."
"I know what it says, I can read." He wriggled down. "Can I have the keys?"
"You can look at the keys."
She let them in and shut the door and heard the latch deadlock on its own the way the locksmith had shown her, a heavy little clack like a full stop. She turned the thumb-turn on the mortice and felt it go over. She counted the keys on the shelf. Three. She put hers beside them and counted four.
Harris had gone through to the kitchen. She heard the fridge, and then him singing something about a dinosaur who'd lost his shoes, and she stood in the hall and looked at the flat with every door in it wedged back against the wall and let herself have one minute of being glad.
Open doors. That was the rule. Harris thought it was so the house could breathe; she'd told him that when he was three, in Dundee, and he'd believed it the way he believed the moon followed the car. In Dundee she'd used books, the big ones from the charity shop, a Reader's Digest atlas against the bathroom door. Here she'd bought the wedges from the pound shop on Dalry Road, a pack of ten. She'd needed six. She'd felt at the till like she'd won something.
Rab used to go round the house at night closing them. Every door, in order. The kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, the wee room he kept saying would be the baby's. She'd lie in bed in Torry and hear them coming. Click. Click. Click. The last one was always the bedroom, and then he'd be in the room with her and the door shut behind him, and the whole house closed round the two of them like a hand.
If she'd left one open he'd stand in it and say, quite nicely, "You're heating the street, Shan." Then shut it. Then look at her until she said sorry.
She went through to the kitchen and put the oven on for fish fingers and propped the oven door open with her foot for a second, just because she could, until Harris told her she was wasting the heat.
"Who told you that?"
"Miss Campbell."
She laughed so suddenly he jumped.
After his bath she did something she hadn't done in two years. She went into the hall cupboard and got the bag out from behind the hoover: the holdall with everything in it, his birth certificate and hers, two hundred pounds in tens, a change of clothes each, his inhaler, a charger, the one photo of her mum, a tin of pineapple chunks because he'd eat those anywhere. She had carried it out of three houses.
She unpacked it onto the bed. She put the clothes in drawers. She put the money in the tin on top of the fridge with the gas bills. She folded the holdall flat and pushed it under the bed, right back to the wall, where she'd have to lie on the floor to get at it.
Then she lay on the floor anyway, cheek on the carpet, and looked at it under there. Harris came and lay down beside her in his pyjamas and looked too.
"What are we looking at?"
"Nothing," Shannon said. "It's away."
Euan had the radio on in the kitchen and onions going, and he'd lit the candle on the windowsill that she pretended to think was naff. She came in the back door, which had a lock on it she'd have condemned in anybody else's house, and he turned from the cooker with the wooden spoon still in his hand.
"There she is. How's the boss?"
"Knackered."
"Sit." He hooked the chair out with his foot. "Tea's ten minutes. It's the dal again and I've put too much ginger in, so you'll have to lie."
"I always lie."
"I know. It's what I love about you." He kissed the top of her head and went back to the onions.
He was a good cook, Euan, the way men who'd lived on their own a long time sometimes were, as if he'd decided once to take it seriously and never stopped. A big man who moved carefully, like the world was full of things he didn't want to knock over. Forty-two. A black cab off the Haymarket rank four days a week, and on his days off a pair of binoculars and a flask and the lagoons at Musselburgh at an hour she considered medically unwise. He'd come down from Aberdeen four years ago, after his mum. You could still hear it in him when he was tired, the vowels going long. She'd heard the same vowels all morning in Gorgie and thought of him once, and put the thought away. Clients didn't need your life.
She got the diary out of her bag and opened it on the table.
It was a black Collins desk diary, a page a day, and she'd kept one every year since she'd gone out on her own. Everything went in it. The job, the address, what she'd fitted, how long it took, what she'd charged. And in the margin, in pencil, for the sanctuary jobs, the code off the cylinder card.
It went against every bit of advice she'd ever been given. She knew that. But half the women she fitted for had left with nothing. They lost keys and bags and phones; they had their bags taken off them by the men they'd left. She'd once had a woman ring her at eleven at night from her own landing with a baby asleep on her shoulder, locked out of the one door in Scotland that was meant to be keeping her in one piece, and the cylinder was restricted and the card was inside. Three working days to get a key cut against a card. The woman had sat in a refuge in Leith with the baby and a carrier bag for three days. Since then Lindsay wrote the codes down. With the code she could cut a key in her own garage in four minutes at any hour of the night. She'd done it nine times.
She wrote up Monday. Gorgie Rd, 2F2. Nightlatch BS, euro mortice BS, KA. London bar, Birmingham bar, hinge bolts x2, anti-arson box, viewer 200°, kitchen window restrictors x2 + lock. Temp cylinders. Restricted Wed. Door Fri. And in the margin, small, the six figures off the temporary pair's card.
Euan put a mug of tea down on the corner of the diary, the way he did every night, and she moved it off, the way she did every night, because rings.
"Bad one?" he said.
"They're all bad ones. Gorgie. You can see Tynecastle out her front window." She thought of Shannon with her eye to the viewer, not moving. "She's nice. She's funny. She called me Gary."
"Gary?"
"She said all locksmiths are called Gary."
"Fair." He tasted the dal and made a face at it. "Is there a door?"
"Friday."
"Ah, boss. I'm on Friday." He looked properly sorry about it. He always carried the doors. Forty kilos of solid core up a tenement stair was a two-person job whatever she told the council, and he'd done it on his days off for nearly two years without being asked, in one of her Kinnear Security fleeces that didn't quite go round him. The women liked him. He was good with the kids; he told them about birds. "Get the boy from the timber yard?"
"Kai's a liability. He'll put it through the cupola."
"Tell them I've got the flu."
"You don't get the flu."
"I could." He sniffed, hugely. "I feel it coming on."
She laughed and wrote Kai?? in the margin of Friday and underlined it twice to show she didn't mean it.
They'd met over a door, which she supposed was the only way she was ever going to meet anybody. Two years ago in November, a Sunday, a lockout at a flat in Leith. He'd been standing on the landing in his socks with a bag of shopping and a tub of ice cream melting through the plastic. His keys were on the hall table inside, right by the door; he'd shown her through the letterbox, a bunch of them on a ring with a wee wooden puffin. He'd found her on the council's approved list, he said, because the ones on Google were all cowboys and he didn't want some guy with a van and no address knowing where he lived. She'd liked that. She'd checked his ID, because she checked everybody's, and the council tax letter he fished out of the glovebox of his cab said Euan Rennie and the address of the flat, and she'd opened the Yale in forty seconds without leaving a mark on it. He'd said, "That's terrifying," with real admiration, and asked her out for a drink before she'd got her picks back in the pouch.
She'd said no. A week later a card came to the workshop: a drawing of an oystercatcher in biro, quite good, Thank you for not judging the ice cream on the back, and a number. She'd said yes to that.
She took the receipt for the window restrictors out of her jacket and put it in the brown envelope at the back of the diary, the one the council never saw. There were a lot of receipts in it now. Euan, stirring, didn't say anything. He never had. He'd known about the envelope since the start and he'd never once asked what was in it.
They ate. The dal had too much ginger and she lied. They watched half of something about a hospital and she fell asleep against his shoulder and woke with the credits going and his hand in her hair.
"Bed, boss."
She went up first. She heard him go round the house the way he did every night: the kitchen, the living room, the downstairs loo, the door through to the garage, and then his feet on the stairs. She'd left the bathroom door open, the way she always did, and he stopped in it on his way past.
"You're heating the street," he said, and shut it.
She smiled into the pillow. She was asleep before he came to bed.