The second key

This is a short story. It is fiction.

The lock had not been forced. Marguerite could see that from the doorway, before she had put her bag down, and she said so, which was a mistake, because the man in the hallway had wanted her to say something else.

“It must have been forced,” he said.

“It was opened with a key.”

She crouched anyway, because being right quickly is a poor way to be believed, and put the light on the cylinder. Clean pins. No scoring across the face, none of the bright hairline scratches that a rake leaves, no compression marks at the edge of the keyway where a bump key hammers home. The brass had the even dull polish of long ordinary use.

“A key that fits well,” she said. “This lock has been opened with the same key hundreds of times.”

“There is one key. I have it.” He held it up, as though the object settled something.

She looked at the door frame for a while instead of at him. It is a useful habit. People will fill a silence with the thing they have not decided to say yet, and in the meantime the frame of a door will tell you what has been done to it.

The paint on this one had been touched up, badly, in a slightly wrong white, in a rectangle about the size of a strike plate. The edges of the rectangle had been feathered by somebody in a hurry with a brush that was too wide. Under it, where the light caught, the older paint had the faint ridging of a screw hole filled and sanded flat.

“How long have you lived here?” she asked.

“Four months.”

“And you had the lock changed when you moved in?”

The pause told her the answer. It was not a guilty pause. It was the pause of a man reviewing a decision he had never made, looking for the moment he had made it, and not finding one, because there had not been a moment. There had been a Tuesday with a van and a deposit and a list, and the lock had not been on the list, and the list had felt complete.

“The letting agent had one,” he said slowly. “And the last tenant handed hers back. They told me she handed it back.”

“She handed one back,” Marguerite said.

He did not say anything to that.

“It might be nobody,” she said, because it was true and because he had gone a bad colour. “A cut key gets copied for a cleaner, or a builder, or a brother who was going to feed the cat for a fortnight in 2019. It goes into a drawer in a house you have never been to. Most of them stay in the drawer.”

“And this one?”

“This one did not.”

She stood up, and her knees made the noise they now made, and she opened the bag.

“I will fit a new cylinder. It will take twenty minutes and it costs less than the coat on your hook. You should have done it in the first week.” She set the new barrel on the hall table where he could see it. “Everybody says that afterwards. Almost nobody says it before.”

The question is rarely how someone got in. It is usually who was never asked to give the key back.

For another story about a record and the person who keeps it, read The cartographer’s error, or The lamp room. For a conversation in which the official answer and the real one part company across a returns desk, The complaint.