Chapter 5: Working Time
The door weighed forty-one kilos, according to the label, and Euan took the heavy end down the side path without being asked, the way he always did, walking backwards, talking.
"You'll want the long screws for the frame. The hundred-mil ones. That frame'll be like toast."
"I've got them."
"And the intumescent stuff. The strips."
"I've got the strips."
"Course you have." He grinned at her over the top of the door, his breath smoking in the security light. Ten past six on a Friday in November, Gilmerton black as a coal bunker, the van on the drive with its back doors open and its inside lit up like a fridge. "Mind the step, boss. On three."
They slid it in on its blankets. He shut one back door and left the other, and put the van keys in the pocket of his fleece, because on door days he drove them to the stair and she did the rest. He'd done it that way for two years. He'd done it that way at eleven stairs.
She'd texted Gail at twenty to four from the bathroom floor with the tap running. He's swapped his shift. He's coming with me to fit the door. He wants to leave at quarter past six.
Then don't leave, Gail had sent back. Still half six. Keep him in the house till we're there. Make him a coffee. Lose your keys. Anything.
Afterwards, before she went back to bed, she'd gone down to the door from the house into the garage and put a barrel bolt on the house side of it, four screws, by hand, in the dark. It opened into the garage. You can't kick a door into its own frame.
So she'd lost her keys. She'd been losing them for ten minutes, patting her pockets in the kitchen while he waited with the flask, and then she'd found them, because he'd started to help her look and she couldn't stand to watch him do it. Now it was quarter past and she was in the workshop looking for hinge bolts that were in the box in her hand.
"They're in your hand," Euan said from the door.
"I'm counting them."
"You're counting them." He came in and leaned on the bench beside the Silca with his arms folded and watched her, smiling. "What's up with you?"
"Nothing's up with me."
"You've been like a hen on a hot girdle since Wednesday."
"Somebody got into my client's house, Euan."
"I know they did." He said it softly. "I know, boss."
She'd taken her phone out at six to look at the time and put it down on the bench, and it was lying there between them, face up on the ply, beside the envelope with the old boy in Liberton's key in it that she still hadn't posted. Shannon had told her to keep it in her pocket. She looked at it and thought: put it in your pocket. She didn't.
At 06:19 it lit up and buzzed once against the wood.
GAIL RAMSAY POLICE: 2 mins. Keep him in.
She'd saved her like that four years ago, for referrals. The screen threw its little light up under his chin. He was nearer. She watched him read it, and he looked down at it with no expression at all until the screen went dark.
"That's early for Gail," Euan said.
"Must be a referral."
"At twenty past six."
"They come in at all hours."
He picked the phone up and held it out to her at arm's length.
"You've a message," he said.
She didn't take it.
He stood there holding it out. She watched him understand. It didn't go across his face; nothing ever went across his face. It went down the rest of him, a big careful man going very still from the shoulders, as if he'd heard a bird he couldn't see.
"Lindsay," he said. Not boss.
"Aye."
"What did she tell you?"
"She didn't tell me anything."
"Who did?"
She looked at the Silca under its cover. She didn't mean to. And he followed her eyes, and looked at it too, and then at her, and she saw him do the sum.
She was a step nearer the door than he was. She'd made sure of that when he came in, without deciding to, the way Shannon had told her. She took the phone out of his hand and took the step, and she was out on the path before his fingers had closed on nothing, and she pulled the steel door to behind her with both hands and got the key into the five-lever and turned it, twice, and felt the bolt go over into the keep.
She stood with her forehead against the cold steel and her hand still on the key.
He didn't hammer. He didn't shout. She heard him come to the door and stop on the other side of it, close, so close she could have heard him swallow.
"Lindsay," he said. "Open the door."
She said nothing.
"You've got this wrong. Whatever she's said to you."
"She didn't say anything." Her voice came out of her flat and level, her work voice, the one for screws. "The Silca did. Wednesday. Two fourteen."
Silence.
"Boss," he said, very gently, and she put her hand over her mouth.
Inside, the handle of the door through to the house went down, once, and came back up. The bolt held. She heard him stand there and think about it.
The phone was still in her other hand. She couldn't remember taking it off him. She rang Gail.
"He knows," she said. "He's in the garage. I've locked him in."
"Christ. Right. We're two minutes out. Get away from the door, Lindsay. Get out of the house. Go and sit in a neighbour's."
"If I go, he's out."
"If you stay, you're there when he is."
Through the steel she heard him move. Then a sound she knew better than her own voice: a pin punch set to the bottom of a hinge and a hammer on the punch. Tap. Tap. Tap. The squeal of a hinge pin rising in its knuckle.
The door opened inward. The hinges were on his side. She'd hung it like that herself because it suited the bench, and she'd meant to put hinge bolts in it since the day she'd done it, and on a Sunday last spring she'd shown him how you got a shed door off its hinges when the padlock had seized, with her own pin punch, her own hammer. Three hinges. A minute each if you knew what you were doing.
SR2, she thought, absurdly. That was what the steel door was rated. Three minutes of a man actually working at it with hand tools, from outside. That was what the rating meant. Nobody had ever tested it from inside a room full of every tool she owned.
The first pin came out and hit the concrete with a clink.
"Lindsay?" Gail's voice in her hand, small. "Lindsay, talk to me."
"First hinge," she said. "He's on the second."
The hammer again, slower.
Then it stopped.
She waited with her whole body for the next tap. It didn't come. Nothing came. There was only the hum of the strip lights through the steel and her own breath going in and out, and for a moment she thought he'd given up and sat down on the floor of the workshop with his back to the bench.
Then a bang that went right through the house, so loud the security light came on next door, and she flinched from the steel door as if it had come at her. It hadn't moved.
The van started on the drive.
She ran. Round the side of the house on the wet slabs, and the front of the garage was open. The old up-and-over she'd bolted from the inside and boarded over and never opened since stood swung up on its rusted springs, and her boards were lying face down across the drive where they'd come off it in one sheet. She'd fixed them to stop anyone getting in. From the inside it was just four bolts and a shove.
The van was reversing out into the road with its back door swinging. She saw his face in the cab for a second under the streetlight, not looking at her, looking over his shoulder at the road, careful, indicating. He indicated. He pulled away down Gilmerton Road at thirty miles an hour with the safe-room door sliding about in the back, and was gone.
Gail was saying something in her hand. Lindsay said, "He's in my van. He's going to Gorgie," and ran back into the house past the hook where the van keys should have been, to the hook beside it, and took the keys to the cab.
She had never driven it. She'd never been allowed; it was his work, he said, the one thing in the house that wasn't hers. It was big and black and silent and smelled of him and of pine air freshener, and when she got it going the yellow light on the roof came on by itself and said FOR HIRE to the whole of Gilmerton, and she couldn't find how to turn it off, and she left it. At the bottom of Gilmerton Road she passed a police car coming the other way with its blue lights going, and didn't stop.
Shannon's phone rang out. She rang it again. It rang out.
He'd take the bypass. He always took the bypass; he said the lights through town would kill you. She went through town, down Minto Street in the bus lane with the FOR HIRE light on, past a 31 at a stop and a man who flagged her down and stood looking after her with his arm still up. Nobody looked twice at a black cab in a bus lane; Euan had told her that once, laughing, that folk looked right through a taxi. She went through a red on Clerk Street. Along Melville Drive with the Meadows black on her right, and the lights at Ardmillan were green, and she was on Gorgie Road at ten to seven, and her van was already there.
It was on the double yellows outside the stair with its hazards going. Its back door was open. The door was still in it.
Shannon had seen it pull in.
She'd been at the front window with Harris's toast in her hand, watching for nothing, the way she'd watched for nothing since four. The police car that had sat at the bottom of the stair all night had gone at six; the man in it had come up at ten to and knocked and told her through the door they were wanted for the job in Gilmerton, he'd be in custody inside the hour, there'd be a car back by eight. She'd said thank you through the door, and watched it go from the window, and stood there since. Her phone was on charge in the bedroom. The charger lived in there now; the locksmith had said.
The white van came along Gorgie Road from the Stenhouse end with its hazards on and stopped below her. KINNEAR SECURITY on the side, the phone number, the wee padlock drawn in red.
She was glad. For one second, with the toast going cold in her hand, she was so glad she could have cried. The door. Friday. Lindsay early.
Then the driver's door opened, and the man who got out of it didn't look up at the window. He never looked up. He never needed to. He always knew where you were.
He was wearing a fleece with the firm's name across the back.
Every buzzer in the stair went at once. Hers screamed on the wall beside her head, and she heard Isa's go across the landing, and the ones above, and the ones below, eight of them, a racket at twenty to seven in the morning like a fire drill, and then the hiss and clunk of somebody on the top floor letting him in.
"Harris," she said. "Come here, loon. Come and stand with me."
He came out of the bedroom in his pyjamas with the blank key on a string round his neck. He'd made the string himself out of a shoelace. She took his hand.
The bedroom door was the hollow one; it opened in; a big lad would put his foot through it first go. The bathroom had a bolt she could have undone with a teaspoon. The best door in the house was the front door. The locksmith had made it the best door in the house. So she stood in the hall with her son in front of it, and listened to him come up the stair.
She'd have known the feet anywhere. He took stairs the way he did everything, unhurried, one at a time, as if he was carrying something that might spill. She heard the light click on. She heard him reach the landing and stop.
Then nothing. She could hear the stair light's timer ticking.
The letterbox flap lifted. She heard it lift; she heard the little steel box behind it take whatever he'd tried to put through, a hand, his fingers, and stop it.
"Shan," he said.
She held Harris's hand.
"Shan, I know you're there. I can hear you breathing." His voice came through the box flattened and close, as if he was in a cupboard. He sounded tired. He sounded kind. "I've not come to shout. Have I shouted? I've come all this way."
She said nothing.
"Is that him?" A pause. "Harris. Is that Harris?"
Harris looked up at her. "Is it the puffin man?"
She put her hand on top of his head.
"That's right, son," said the letterbox, warm. "I showed you my puffin. Remember?" A pause. "I'm your dad, Harris."
Harris went completely still under her hand. She felt it go through him. He looked at the door, and at the viewer, too high for him, and at her.
"Is it?" he said.
She'd lied to him about one thing in six years, and it was on the other side of the door. She didn't answer. He was hers; he knew what that meant.
"Just five minutes, Shan." Rab's voice went lower. "That's all I want. Five minutes with my boy, and I'll go. You can stand right there. You can stand right there the whole time. I'll not even come in past the mat."
Something scraped at the lock. A key, she thought, and the hall went a long way off; then she understood it was the old key, the one he'd cut, trying to get into a lock that wasn't there any more. It scraped against the new keyway and wouldn't even go in. He tried it twice more and stopped. He knew it wouldn't go in. He'd done it so she'd hear it.
"Let him decide," he said. "He's old enough. Harris. Do you want to see your dad?"
Harris's hand came out of hers.
She saw it go to the thumb-turn. It was right at his height. Then you tell him, the locksmith had said, and she had; she'd told him on Monday night, never touch the turny thing, never ever, and he hadn't, he was good, he'd never touched it, and his fingers were on it now and she could see it begin to go over.
She caught his wrist.
He pulled. She held. He wasn't strong. He was six and all elbows, and he pulled against her with his whole body and his face going red and his mouth open, not crying yet, just pulling, and she held his wrist and didn't pull back, only held, because it was a stupid fight. Nobody won it quick.
"Shan," said the letterbox. "Let the boy go."
Across the landing, Isa Gourlay's door opened.
"Who's that," said Isa's voice, "making a racket at this hour of the morning?"
"Sorry, hen." Rab's voice, turning, friendly. "Domestic. I'm her man. We've had a wee falling-out. Go back to your bed."
"Have you now," said Isa. She didn't shut her door. "I'm fine where I am, son."
Lindsay hit all eight buzzers with the flat of her hand and leaned on them.
"It's the locksmith," she said into the panel, loud. "There's a man on the stair at 2F2 and the police are coming. Open your doors."
Somebody let her in. She never found out who.
The stair light was on. She took the steps two at a time. On the first floor she hit both doors with her fist as she passed, and shouted it, open your door, police are coming, stand in your door, get your phones out, and she heard them open behind her, a chain, a bolt, a man's voice saying what the fuck. On the half-landing she looked up.
He was kneeling at Shannon's letterbox with his back to her, in her fleece. Isa Gourlay was in her doorway across from him in a quilted dressing gown and the Hearts scarf, with her phone held up in front of her in both hands like a hymn book.
He stood up when he heard her. He turned round.
Behind Lindsay the doors were opening. 1F1, the big lad from the bakery on Gorgie Road, already in his whites. 1F2, the young Polish couple, him with a baby on his shoulder and her with a frying pan, which she seemed surprised to find she was holding. Up above, 3F1's door, and somebody's bare feet, and 3F2, and the student off the top floor in a towel, leaning over the banister to see, who must have been the one who buzzed him in and knew it. Somebody kept hitting the light switch so it couldn't time out. Up and down the stair every door stood open with a person in it and a hall light behind them, and every one of them was looking at him.
He looked at them. He looked up the well of the stair, at all of it, the open doors, the faces, the phones, and down at the ones below, and Lindsay saw him not know where to put his hands.
"Boss," he said.
"Don't."
"You've got the whole stair out." He said it almost admiringly. That's terrifying.
"Aye."
"Your door's in the van."
"I know where my door is."
He looked at Shannon's door, and back at her, and his voice went soft and reasonable.
"Tell her it's fine, boss," he said. "She'll open it for you. Tell her."
Lindsay looked at the door. Four panels of green gloss and a fat glass eye at Shannon's height. Shannon would be on the other side of it with her eye to the glass, seeing the pair of them standing side by side on the landing.
"Shannon," she said, loud, to the door. "It's me. I'm not on my own. Don't open it."
Below them, a long way off down Gorgie Road, the first siren started up.
He heard it. She watched him hear it. He looked at her, and his voice when it came was very reasonable, the voice he used for a hen party, for a man from Houston, for her.
"Are they coming?" he said.
He knew. He was asking her a question he already knew the answer to, and she saw that he was doing it, and she saw that he didn't know any other way to talk.
"You know they are," Lindsay said.
He sat down. He sat on the top step of the stair with his big hands hanging between his knees and his back against the banister, and looked at nothing, and waited, the way he'd sat at the lagoons at Musselburgh at an hour she'd considered medically unwise. Waiting with your eyes open, he called it. Nobody on the stair moved or shut a door.
They came up through all of it, Imrie first, three steps at a time, then two more she didn't know, then Gail Ramsay in a parka with the hood up, breathing hard. Imrie said, "Mr Rennie?" and Gail said, "Duguid," behind him, and he stood up when they told him to and turned round and put his hands behind him, politely, as if somebody had asked him to pass the salt.
They took him down past every door. Past the baby and the frying pan and the bakery whites and the old man from the ground floor who'd come out with his stick and stood in his doorway in his vest. Past Isa Gourlay, who watched him come level with her, and pointed with her phone at her doormat.
"Can you read, son?" she said.
Lindsay stood on the landing with her phone in her hand, and texted.
It's me. I'm not on my own.
Through the door she heard Shannon move. Then the small sound of the viewer's cover coming off, and the eye at the glass. Lindsay didn't know what she'd see through it. Her, and Isa, and Gail on the stair with her hood down. The bakery lad. The baby. All of it, bowed round the edges of the glass.
"Are you on your own?" said Shannon, through the door.
"No," said Lindsay. "The whole stair's here."
The thumb-turn went over. The latch drew back. Shannon opened the door from the inside, with her son's hand in hers.
On the Monday Kai from the timber yard carried the heavy end, and put it through nothing, though he took a chip out of the stone on the second turn that Isa said she'd be sending a bill for. The door had a long scrape down one face where it had slid against the wheel arch on the Sighthill roundabout. Lindsay filled it, sanded it, and painted it in the hall with the radio on.
Harris held the screws. He had the blank key round his neck on its shoelace. Every so often he'd hold it up and ask if it had decided yet, and she'd say not yet, and he'd nod as if that was the right answer.
She rehung the door to open out into the hall. Hinge bolts. Intumescent strips. A thumb-turn on the inside and a key on the outside, and the only other key in a padded envelope for Gail. She swung it shut and the hinge bolts dropped into the frame.
Shannon stood in the hall with her arms folded and looked at it.
"Did you do yours?" she said.
"Sunday. Every lock in the house. Hinge bolts on the workshop." Lindsay put the drill in its case. She'd given Gail the diaries on the Friday afternoon, ten years of them in an evidence bag, every margin, and on the Saturday she'd sat at the kitchen table and phoned all eleven women. Nine had picked up. She hadn't known what to say to any of them, and she'd said it anyway.
"And the doors?" said Shannon.
"I left them open," said Lindsay. "It's freezing."
Shannon nodded. She looked at the new door a while longer, forty-one kilos of solid core, an hour's fire rating, a man could kick it all night. Then she bent and took one of the grey rubber wedges off the radiator shelf, and swung the door back flat against the wall.
"That's a sixty-minute fire door," Lindsay said.
"Aye, well," said Shannon. "It can be a sixty-minute fire door with a wedge under it," and she kicked it in with the side of her trainer.