Every one of them had the deeds. Every one of them had a solicitor, a completion date and a key that did not fit. The Land Registry shows one sale on that house since 1968.
I have been a locksmith in this town for twenty-six years. My father had the shop before me and his name is still on the van because it is cheaper than a new van.
Most of the work is not exciting. Lockouts, uPVC gearboxes, a lot of elderly people who have snapped a key in a back door. And change-of-ownership work, which is the bread and butter: somebody completes on a house, they ring us, we go round the same afternoon and put new cylinders in, because you do not know who has the old ones.
I have done 14 Mill Road eleven times.
Not eleven visits. Eleven separate change-of-ownership jobs, for eleven different people, each of whom had just bought that house.
The first one was 2003 and I have no reason to remember it except that I keep everything. Every job is a docket: date, address, what we fitted, who paid, signed. I have them in box files going back to my father, and that is the only reason any of this is more than a feeling.
Second was 2006. Third 2007. Then 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2022, and the last one in the February just gone.
I did not notice for years. It is a normal thing to do a house more than once over two decades; people move. What made me look was the 2015 one, because the woman who let me in said the same sentence the man in 2012 had said, in the same place, standing at the same spot in the hall with her hand on the newel post.
She said, the surveyor said it was dry as a bone, and I thought, so did the last one.
So I got the box files out.
Here is what the dockets say, and I have laid them out on the kitchen table more times than is good for me.
Eleven jobs. Eleven different names, none of them repeating. Eleven different phone numbers. Seven different solicitors, and I know that because the invoice goes to the client but the completion is chased by the firm, and their names are on the file.
Every single one of them was a completion. Not a landlord, not a relative, not a probate clear-out. Somebody who had that day taken possession of the house and wanted the locks changed before they slept in it.
And every single one of them had the same problem, which is the actual reason they rang me and not somebody else.
Their key did not fit.
I want to be plain about this bit because it is the mechanical heart of it and it is the only part I am truly expert in.
When you complete on a house, the estate agent gives you a set of keys in an envelope. Those keys open that house, because the seller used them that morning to lock it.
Eleven times, at that address, they did not.
The people who rang me were stood in the front garden of a house they legally owned, with the agent's envelope in their hand, unable to get in. That is not a common call. I get maybe one a year across the whole town, usually because an agent has mixed up two envelopes.
I get in the way we get in, which I am not going to describe, and I put new cylinders on, and I hand over three keys, and they go inside.
And here is the thing I did not see until I had all eleven dockets in front of me at once.
Every time, the cylinder I removed was one of mine.
I know my own work. I have fitted the same make for nineteen years and I stamp the barrels, which nobody asks me to do and my father did it so I do it. Eleven times I have pulled a barrel out of that door with my own stamp on it, from the job before, and the key I cut for the previous owner was in a drawer in my van and it did not fit either.
The same barrel. My mark on it. And the key that opened it three years ago no longer opens it now.
I looked the house up properly in 2019, the way anybody would.
The Land Registry title for 14 Mill Road shows one transfer since 1968. One. A sale in 1974, to a couple, and the register has not moved since. No charge on it, no mortgage, nothing.
There is no record of eleven sales. There is no record of any of the eleven names.
I paid for the official copy and I have it in the same box file as the dockets and it is a perfectly ordinary document about a perfectly ordinary house that has not changed hands in fifty years.
I have tried to find them.
Of the eleven, I have phone numbers for nine, and none of them are in service, which for the recent ones is odd and for the 2003 one is not.
I have found two of the solicitors' firms still trading. I rang one and asked, carefully, whether they had acted on a purchase at that address. The girl was helpful, put me on hold, came back, and said they had no file for that address ever, and did I have a matter reference. I said I would ring back.
I have driven past 14 Mill Road several hundred times because it is on the way to the tip.
It is occupied. Somebody puts the bins out. There is a car that changes.
I have never once seen a for sale board go up on it, and I would have. I know every board in this town and where it comes from and I know the lads who put them in the ground.
The February one was a young couple with a baby in a sling and they were lovely and they gave me a cup of tea, and I did the job, and I stood in that hall with my hand on the newel post while she told me the surveyor had said it was dry as a bone.
And I said, can I ask you something, and she said of course.
I said, who did you buy it from.
She said, an executor sale. A woman's estate. She had lived here a long time. The solicitor handled it all, we never met anybody, we did the whole thing on email and we never even met the agent, and I know that is unusual but everything is now, isn't it.
I said, do you have the name.
She went and got the completion statement and showed me, and the name on it was the name of the woman who let me in in 2015. The one who said the sentence.
I did not say anything about that. I finished the door, I took the money, and I gave her three keys and I told her what I tell everybody, which is that the back door is the one they will try.
I have not been back. I will not go back. If they ring, my lad will go, and I have not told him why and I probably should.
There is one thing I have not been able to leave alone, and it is small and it is the reason I have written any of this down.
The old barrels. I keep them. A locksmith always has a tin of dead cylinders because the springs and the pins are worth having.
I have all eleven from that house, in a tin, on the shelf above the bench, with my stamp on each of them.
Last month I put the tin out on the bench and I took the eleven keys I had cut for those eleven people, which I also keep, because I keep everything.
Every key opens the barrel that came after it. Not the one it was cut for. The next one.
The key I cut in 2003 turns the 2006 barrel sweetly, first time, like it was made for it. 2006 turns 2007. On and on, all the way up.
And the key I cut for the young woman in February, for the barrel that is in that door right now, with a baby in the house, turns nothing in that tin at all.
There is one more barrel coming. I have the key for it already and I do not know what it opens yet.