back through the gate, into his garden, and he was about to lock the padlock. But he decided not to. He didn’t really have to. It was only a ten-second walk from the gate to the house. Did he really need to lock the padlock just for that? Maybe he would have if it wasn’t for the padlock being rusty, which made it a pain in the arse to get the key in and out of. It could sometimes take almost a minute to lock and unlock it, and he couldn’t be bothered with that.
So instead, he left the key in the padlock. He was sure it was safe. It wasn’t as if somebody was going to rush up and grab the keys from the padlock during the ten seconds or so that he was away. But he had a look down the lane, just in case anybody was about to walk by. When he saw that nobody was there, he walked back to his house to get the bottles. If anybody managed to jump out from a hiding place and grab the keys from that rusty padlock in under ten seconds, well, they’d earned them.
He walked through the back door and into his kitchen where the bottles were. There were over a dozen of them, so he opened the cupboard under the kitchen sink, with the intention of getting one of the reusable bags to carry the bottles out to the bin.
But then his dad phoned, wanting some computer advice.
He wanted to know how to move a video off his phone and onto his computer, because his phone was running out of space. So Gary talked him through it.
By the time he came off the phone, Gary had forgotten about the bottles, and he’d forgotten about the keys that he’d left in the padlock. He closed the door of the cupboard under the kitchen sink, without remembering why it was open in the first place.
The next day, Linda asked him to take the bottles out to the bin at the back, and that’s when he remembered that he didn’t get round to doing it the day before. He felt daft for forgetting to take out the bottles, but then the daft feeling was replaced with dread, when he remembered that he’d left the keys out there overnight.
He was about to tell Linda what had happened, but he hadn’t yet checked to see if the keys were still there. There was no point in owning up to making such a stupid mistake if nothing bad had come from it. They had a spare key for the back door, so maybe it wasn’t all bad. But it was. She’d know that somebody out there had the other key. Even if they didn’t, even if the keys were still there, she’d know he left the back door unlocked overnight.
He’d check first. There was no point in sticking himself in it when he didn’t need to.
He picked up the bottles in the house and put them in a bag, then carried them out to the gate. He could see that the gate was open, and he looked behind to see if Linda saw it as well. There would be questions if she saw that. But she wasn’t looking.
From a distance, it looked like the keys were no longer in the padlock. That was a sight that he did not want to see, so he looked away until he got closer, hoping that when he got to the padlock, he’d see that the keys were there.
But the keys were gone.
He felt his heart begin to thump.
He was about to search the ground to see if the keys had dropped down, maybe with the wind blowing the padlock during the night, but first he had another look towards the house to see if Linda was looking. And thank fuck she wasn’t.
He put down the bag of bottles and looked around in the pebbles that made up the path to the gate. While he was pushing the pebbles around, he was pushing the thought out of his head that somebody had stolen the keys. Somebody had stolen the keys from the padlock, which included the key to the back door. The back door to their fucking house.
He pushed the pebbles around some more, then looked in the same place over and over. He stood up and looked at the padlock. It was a pointless thing to do, and he knew it.
He took in a deep breath. He could feel his pulse in his temples.
This was bad. Seriously bad.
He remembered that he was supposed to be putting bottles in the bin, and he was certain that if Linda didn’t hear the sound of bottles crashing on top of bottles, she’d be wondering why. So he picked up the bag and emptied out the bottles. Then he had another look for the keys.
He looked at the grass in the lane, to see if the keys were there. He knew that he himself didn’t drop them there, he definitely left the keys in the padlock, but maybe the person who took them from the padlock then dropped them in the lane accidentally. It was possible.
He got down on all fours, then looked at the lane from down low, hoping to see the shiny keys sticking up from the grass. But he couldn’t see them.
He was going to have to tell Linda. He was actually going to have to tell her.
His throat tightened and his heart beat faster. He had to tell Linda that somebody had the key to their back door.
But he didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to.
It wouldn’t just be a case of getting the lock in the door changed, because it wasn’t as simple as that. The back door wasn’t a normal door like that. They had fancy patio doors that they’d spent a fortune on, and the lock was part of the door. You couldn’t just unscrew the lock and then put in a new one. If you replaced the lock then you’d probably have to replace the door as well, and that would cost a fortune. And he just did not want to tell Linda that. So he kept his mouth shut. He knew he was putting the security of their home at risk, but it was a risk worth taking for now, until he worked out what to do.
For now, he would just keep a lookout.
He spent the next few days looking out the window of the room that faced the back garden. The toilet window also faced the back garden, and after every visit to the toilet, he’d look out it, towards the gate and the lane behind.
One day he forgot to lock the toilet door. It was shut, but he had forgotten to lock it. After he washed and dried his hands, he had a look out the window. To do so was always an effort, because the window was high, and in order to look out it he had to step into the bath, and go on his tiptoes.
Linda walked in and saw him peering through the window, and asked him what he was doing.
He nearly fell in the bath. He said he wasn’t doing anything, just looking out the window. He couldn’t think of what else to say.
She looked through the window, and asked him if he was looking at their neighbour, Teresa.
He told her that Teresa wasn’t there, but when he looked out, there she was, lying in her garden, reading a magazine.
When he pictured how it looked through Linda’s eyes, it looked bad. He looked like an old-school pervert.
Linda walked away, and Gary was about to call her back to say that it wasn’t what she thought. But he knew that if she asked what it was he was looking at, he’d probably have to tell her that he left the keys in the padlock and now they were gone. Maybe he would have owned up if she kept at it, but because she walked away, he just left it.
A week passed, with no break-ins. It surprised Gary, especially considering that they’d left the house unoccupied for a few hours here and there at various times of the day.
There was even a time when they went through to Linda’s mum and dad’s for the night, and they’d made it quite obvious that they weren’t home. Gary tried hard to not make it so obvious, by leaving all the lights on and turning on the radio.
