Chapter 2: Keyed Alike
The man in the waxed jacket had the cash out before Lindsay had the van door shut.
"Two hundred," he said, fanning it at her across the pavement like a hand of cards. "For the inconvenience. It's a five-minute job, I'm told."
"Who told you?"
"The internet." He smiled. He had good teeth and a good haircut and the kind of voice that had been to a school with its own chapel. Morningside on a Tuesday morning: a crescent of sandstone villas where every second car was electric and every third front garden had a sign up about hedgehogs. "Graeme. Thanks for coming out so quick."
"What's the job?"
"Change the locks. Front and back. My wife's having a bit of a—" he waggled a hand "—she's at her mother's. She's not been well. I'd just feel better if the house was secure."
"Secure from who?"
The smile stayed exactly where it was. "It's a big house. She's got keys. She leaves them places."
Lindsay looked up at the house. Three storeys, a monkey puzzle tree, a doorbell camera watching the pair of them with its little blue eye. "Is she on the title?"
"Sorry?"
"The deeds. Is her name on them."
"It's joint. Look, it's my house, I pay for it." He'd put the money back in his pocket, which she took as progress. "You're not a solicitor. You're a locksmith. I'm asking you to change a lock."
"If her name's on the deeds I'm not locking her out of her own house. Nobody decent will. Some guy off Gumtree might." She opened the van door again. "I'd not use him, mind. He'll have a copy of your key cut before he's back in his car."
"She's not well," Graeme said, and his voice went lower and kinder, a man explaining something sad to a slow person. "You don't understand. She isn't safe on her own."
That was the line. They nearly always got to it in the end. She'd heard it in Wester Hailes and the Grange and once from a firefighter in Sighthill who'd cried while he said it.
"That's sixty-five for the call-out," she said.
"For doing nothing?"
"For coming out to do nothing. The nothing's free." She got in. "I take cards."
He didn't pay, which she'd expected, and he didn't shout, which she'd also expected; the shouters were never the ones to worry about. He stood on the pavement in his good jacket and watched her go, and she watched him in the wing mirror until she'd turned the corner, and then she pulled in on Comiston Road and wrote his registration in the diary under Tuesday with a word next to it she'd not have said to his face.
She sat for a minute with the engine running.
She was good at them. You didn't fit sanctuary doors for six years without getting an ear for it, the way a mechanic hears a bearing going from the other side of a forecourt. They wanted the locks changed, or the locks taken off. They wanted to know who else had a key. They told you she wasn't well. They were nearly always lovely to you.
She thought about Carol in Restalrig, which she tried not to do while driving.
The winter before last. Carol had been one of her first council jobs, after four years of doing them for Women's Aid on whatever the charity could raise, back when the council's scheme was still a pilot and a man from Housing had told Lindsay, quite cheerfully, that Scotland had always preferred to move the woman rather than keep the man out. Ground-floor flat. Front door on the street, kitchen window at the back onto a lane. Lindsay had flagged the window on the survey in red pen. The council paid for the door. The window, said the email, was outwith scope.
Four days after she fitted the door, somebody forced the kitchen window with a bar. Nothing taken. Carol had been at her sister's in Bathgate that night, by sheer luck. The police said kids. Carol said it wasn't kids. Carol was in Fife within the month and Lindsay never found out what happened to her after, and that was the week she'd started the envelope.
She'd never thought it was kids either.
She put the van in gear and went to Liberton, where a retired joiner had managed to lock himself out of his own allotment shed with his own padlock, which was the kind of job she'd started to think of as a holiday.
The press came down with a hiss like a bus kneeling, and Shannon lifted it, turned the shirt, flattened the yoke with the side of her hand and brought it down again.
She'd been at the dry cleaner's on Dalry Road since August. Eight till two, Monday to Saturday, paid on a Friday in an envelope that said SHANON on it because Mr Zaman had spelled it that way the first week and she hadn't the heart. The front shop smelled of hot cotton and the stuff they called perc, which nobody ever explained, and the back had two presses and a steam iron on a hose and a radio that only got Forth 1. She liked it more than any job she'd ever had. Nobody looked at you in a dry cleaner's. They looked at their shirts.
She knew the regulars by their stains. The minister from St Michael's with his collars. The man in the grey suit who brought in one tie every Tuesday, always a different tie, always egg. The woman with the blouses, five a week, red wine on the left cuff of every single one, as though she toasted with the wrong hand. Shannon liked to make up her life. Dinner parties. A husband who did a speech.
From the front window, between the tickets and the sign that said ALTERATIONS & REPAIRS, you could see down Dalry Road to Haymarket, and all day long the black cabs came up it from the station rank, one after another, lights on, lights off, like beetles.
That was partly why she'd chosen Edinburgh. She'd said so to the woman at the refuge in Dundee and the woman had looked at her as if she'd lost the plot, but it was true. Edinburgh was full of taxis, more than anywhere she'd ever been, hundreds and hundreds of them, and none of them were his. In Aberdeen there'd been four firms and everybody's cousin drove for one, and Rab had driven for the one off Union Street, and wherever she'd gone in that city, her pal's or the doctor's or the big Asda at Bridge of Dee, she'd come out and there'd be a cab across the road with its light off. Not always his. Often enough.
"A taxi's invisible, Shan," he'd told her once, pleased with it. "Folk look right through it. You could sit outside a house all day."
He used to sit outside her pal Jodie's in Kincorth with the engine off and the radio low, for hours. When they'd first been going together he'd take her out to Girdle Ness at dawn, the lighthouse and the wind and the eider ducks muttering on the rocks like old women at a bus stop, and he'd pour her tea out of a flask and say, "This is the whole of it, you know. Watching birds is just waiting with your eyes open." She'd thought it was the most romantic thing a man had ever said to her. She'd been twenty-two.
The press hissed. She turned the shirt.
"Shannon." Mr Zaman in the doorway with a pink ticket. "This lady says her husband's suit was to be ready today."
"It's ready, it's on the rail, the one with the cover on." She didn't look up. "Tell her it was a curry. Tell her I got most of it."
She was at the school gate at quarter past three with her hood up against a thin rain that had started at two and showed no sign of having a point.
Harris came out with his bag dragging and a plaster on his chin that hadn't been there at breakfast. He'd fallen off the climbing frame being a bat, he said. He'd been very brave. He'd had a sticker. On the way home he walked every wall again, and at the corner of Wheatfield Street he said, "A man waved at me."
"What man?"
"In a taxi." He jumped down. "At dinner time. When we were out."
She kept walking. That was the thing they taught you. Keep walking, keep your face the same. Children read your face before they read anything. "Where was the taxi?"
"At the railings."
"And what did he do?"
"He waved." Harris did it for her, very slow, like the King. "And he showed me his keys."
"His keys?"
"He had a bird on them. A wee wooden one. It was a puffin." He said puffin like a word he'd been saving. "I like puffins. They're like penguins but they're allowed to fly."
"Did he say anything?"
"No. He just did his keys. Then Mrs Hutchison rang the bell." He took her hand. "Can I get a puffin?"
She walked the rest of the way up Gorgie Road with his hand in hers and her heart going like the press. A taxi at a primary school at dinner time. A hundred reasons. A fare in one of the houses across the road. A man eating his piece in peace. A man being nice to a wee boy with his face between the railings, because some of them were nice, Shannon. Some of them are just nice. That was what the support worker in Dundee had said. Not every car is him. You'll see him everywhere for a while; that's your body looking after you. Thank it, and then check.
So she checked. Rab hadn't had a puffin. Rab had had a Saltire on his keys and a bottle opener shaped like a fish. Rab didn't wave at children. Rab had never seen hers. She'd been nine weeks gone the night she left Torry and she'd never told him; he'd found out in Dundee, from the inside of her house, the wee wellies by the door and the car seat in the hall. But he'd never once laid eyes on him. She'd made sure of that. Nobody in Aberdeen even knew his name.
Not every car is him.
At home she counted the keys on the shelf, four, and looked through the viewer at Isa's mat and the empty stair, and watched the stair light click off on its timer while she watched. Then she texted the locksmith.
Is the door definitely good
The answer came while the fish fingers were in.
It's good. Is something wrong?
She looked at that for a while. She typed No just checking. She deleted it. She typed Harris says a taxi man waved at him at school, and looked at it, and heard how it would sound, and deleted that too.
No just checking sorry, she sent.
Never sorry. Text any time. Door Friday.
She put the phone face down on the worktop and propped the oven door open with her foot.
At bedtime Harris lay with his feet on the wall and his painting of the key propped against the lamp where he could see it, and asked her, for the first time in months, where his dad was.
She'd had her answer ready since he was two. "You've not got one. You've got me, and I'm two people."
"Ollie's got two dads."
"Ollie's greedy."
He thought about this. "Was my dad a puffin?"
"Your dad," Shannon said, "was a pigeon," and he laughed so hard he got the hiccups, and she lay beside him on top of the covers till they stopped, and then till he was asleep, and then a while after that, with her eyes on the bedroom door, which was open, and the hall beyond it, which was dark.
Euan was in a good mood. He'd had a hen party from Haymarket to the Dome, twelve women from Falkirk in pink sashes, and one of them had been sick into a handbag, her own handbag, "which I respected," he said, "as a decision," and they'd tipped him forty quid not to tell the bride.
"Tell her what?"
"No idea. I didn't ask. It was forty quid." He was peeling potatoes into the bin, one long curl to every potato, a thing he did without looking. "What's your night?"
"A key to cut. The old boy in Liberton lost his back door key at the allotment this morning, and I did his locks in March, so." She meant: so I've got the code. He knew what she meant. "Ten minutes."
"I'll have the tatties on."
The workshop was the garage, under their bedroom: a cold concrete box she'd lined with ply and pegboard and two strip lights, the only room in the house with a decent lock on it, because the insurers had made her. A steel door off the side path, a five-lever deadlock she'd have put her name to. The old up-and-over at the front had been a joke, so she'd bolted it shut from the inside and boarded it over and never opened it since. Nobody had ever looked twice at the steel door's hinges. She'd meant to fit hinge bolts to it since the day she hung it. Cobbler's bairns.
The Silca sat on the bench under its dust cover like a sewing machine. She took the cover off and switched it on and while it went through its little start-up hum she found the old boy's code in March. She typed it in and clamped a blank. The cutter came up to speed with the long climbing whine she sometimes heard in her sleep, and bit, and rasped along the brass, and forty seconds later there was a key. The screen said JOB 4417, and the code, and the time, 18:52, and kept it.
The machine remembered every key it had ever cut. Date, time, code, which blank. It had done it since the day she'd bought it; the restricted-key people insisted on a record and the insurers liked one. The history lived three menus down behind her dealer PIN, and she'd looked at it exactly twice in six years, both times to win an argument with a landlord. It was more than she could say for herself. She couldn't have told you what she'd had for her lunch.
She ran the key on the wire wheel to take the burr off and tried it in the test cylinder, and it turned without a catch. She put it in an envelope with the old boy's name on. When she came back up the tatties were boiling and Euan was leaning on the worktop with the paper folded small, doing the crossword with the pen she'd been looking for since Sunday.
"Four letters," he said. "'Fasten, or run off.'"
"Bolt."
"Show-off." He wrote it in. He kissed her neck on the way to the cooker.
They ate at the table. He'd done mince. She told him about Morningside, the deeds and the hedgehogs and the sixty-five pounds for nothing, and he put his fork down and listened properly, the way he did.
"You should report him."
"For what? Being a creep in a nice coat?"
"Somebody should know." He shook his head. "Poor woman."
"She's at her mother's. She's done the hard bit."
"Has she?" He picked his fork up again. "They always know where the mother lives, though."
She looked at him and he looked back, kind, worried, a big man worried about a woman he'd never meet, and she reached across and squeezed his wrist.
"Is Friday definitely a no?"
"Davie can't swap. He's at a wedding in Oban. I asked him." He pulled a face. "I'll do Saturday if it runs over. Is it the Gorgie one?"
"Mm."
"How's she doing?"
"She texted to ask if the door was good."
"Is it?"
"It's good," Lindsay said. "It's not magic. It's good."
He nodded. He said he was off tomorrow, and if she didn't mind he'd get up early and go out to Musselburgh; there'd been velvet scoters off the river mouth all week and he'd still not seen one. She said she minded very much, she'd miss him desperately, she didn't know how she'd get through the day, and he threw the tea towel at her.
She woke once in the night and didn't know why.
The room was black. The clock said 02:11 in red. Euan's side of the duvet was thrown back, and when she put her hand out the sheet was still warm. The loo, she thought. Or he'd got up to check the wind for his ducks. He did that. She'd find him at the back window at two in the morning in his pants, looking at a forecast on his phone.
Somewhere underneath her, in the garage, the Silca started its long climbing whine, the cutter coming up to speed, and then the rasp of it biting brass.
She knew the sound. She dreamt about that machine more than she dreamt about anything; ask any locksmith, they'd tell you the same. She turned over into the warm place where Euan wasn't, and slept.