Guests hand the key in when they go out. It comes back on the hook at about ten to two, from the far side of a locked front door, and room 12 has not been let since 1998.
I was a night porter at a seventeen room hotel for nine years and I have never had a job I liked better.
It is a job that has almost gone. A night porter is the person who is awake in a building full of people who are asleep. You do the door, because the front door is locked from eleven and guests ring the bell. You do the phone. You do the boiler, which on that building meant going down to the cellar at two in the morning and doing something with a valve that a man showed me once in 2011. You do the fire panel. You lay the breakfast room.
And you do the keys.
I said seventeen rooms and there are twenty two hooks. That is the first thing to explain.
The board is behind the desk, a wooden thing screwed to the wall since about 1950, with twenty two brass hooks in two rows and a little painted number over each one. When the hotel was bigger it had twenty two rooms. Then in the eighties they knocked the back stairs about and made two of the singles into a linen store and a lift shaft, and in 1998 they closed 12 and 13 when the roof went over that corner and never opened them again.
The board stayed as it was. Nobody takes a board like that off a wall.
So there are twenty two hooks and seventeen of them mean something.
The key system is not complicated and it is the whole of this so I will be careful.
Every guest gets a key on a fob. The fob is the size of a small potato, deliberately, so that people do not put it in a pocket and take it to Norway. When you go out, you hand it in at the desk and it goes on its hook. When you come back you ask for it and it comes off the hook.
At eleven the door is locked and after that guests ring and I let them in and hand them their key.
By about one in the morning every hook that means something is empty, because everybody is in their room with their key. That is the state of the board at one o'clock and it was the state of the board at one o'clock about three thousand times while I worked there.
Except 12.
Number 12's fob is on the board.
It is the original, brass, worn smooth, with a leather tag, and the key on it is a long old lever key for a lock that has not been opened since the roof came in.
It hangs on hook 12. That is where it lives. It has no reason to be anywhere else.
And two or three nights a week, it was not there when I did my one o'clock walk, and it was there again when I did my half two.
I noticed it in my first winter because I am the sort of person who looks at a board.
The first time I assumed the housekeeper had it. She did not, she had her own set, and 12's key was not on it because 12 is not cleaned.
The second time I assumed I had misread the board, which is fair, because in a dim reception at one in the morning a brass hook with nothing on it and a brass hook with something on it are not as different as you would like.
By the fourth or fifth time I had started standing in front of it with the desk lamp on.
Hook 12: empty at one. Full at half two.
I got it down to about ten to two.
I did that over about six months, by moving my walk earlier and later, and by finally just sitting on the stool at the desk with a book from ten past one.
At about ten to two, on the nights it happens, the key is on the hook and you did not see it arrive.
Not a swing. Not a sound. I have sat six feet from that board with my eyes on it and had it happen, and there is no moment. There is a stretch of time where I am reading and looking up, reading and looking up, and one of the times I look up it is there.
Exactly that: I never once saw an empty hook and then a full one in the same glance. Whatever it is, it is not in a hurry to be seen doing it.
Here is the part that took me four years to work out, and it is why I have never been able to leave it alone.
I said guests hand the key in when they go out.
A key on a hook means the room is empty and the guest is out of the building. A key in the room means the guest is in.
So a key that is missing at one and back by two is a key somebody took out with them and brought home.
The front door is locked from eleven. It is a Victorian door with a mortice and a nightlatch and I hold the only keys on shift. There is a fire door at the back that opens outwards and cannot be opened from outside at all, because I have tried, at four in the morning, standing in a yard in the rain, feeling extremely stupid.
Nobody comes in that I do not let in.
I have let a lot of people in over nine years. I have never let in anybody for room 12.
I asked about it twice.
I asked Bill, who had done the nights before me for eleven years and who trained me over two shifts and who is dead now. I asked him in my second year, at a Christmas do, when we had both had a drink.
He said: does it still do that.
And then he told me a fact and not a story, which I think was deliberate. He said that when he started, in 1999, the manager at the time told him not to move the key off hook 12, and he had asked why, and the manager said because the last time somebody did, it was on the desk in the morning.
Not on the floor. On the desk.
I asked the owner, in about my sixth year, in daylight, sober. She is a sensible woman in her sixties who has had that hotel since 2004.
She said: I know. Leave it.
Then she asked me whether I wanted anything doing about the draught in reception, which there is not one, and I understood that we had finished.
I left in the spring, for reasons that have nothing to do with any of this, and my last shift was a Tuesday in April.
I did all of it properly. Door, phone, boiler, panel, breakfast room. Nobody rang the bell after half twelve.
At one o'clock hook 12 was empty.
At about twenty past two I was laying the breakfast room, which you do from the far end so you finish nearest the door, and I heard the front door.
Not the bell. The door. The particular flat knock a Victorian front door makes when it comes to against the frame, which I had heard several thousand times and which I could pick out of anything.
I went through.
The door was shut and locked. The nightlatch was on. The chain, which we put on at one, was on, and it was on from the inside, which is the only side it can be on from.
And 12's key was on its hook, swinging.
That is the only time in nine years I have seen it move.
I have thought about that walk through from the breakfast room a great deal, and about what I would have seen if I had been thirty seconds quicker, and I have decided I am glad I was laying forks.
They still have not opened 12.
The roof got done in 2019 and the corner is sound and the room is a store now, with a hoover in it and about forty chairs, and the door has a Yale on it that the housekeeper opens with a key off her own ring.
The old lock is still in the door, under the new one, and nothing opens it.
The brass key is still on hook 12, on the board behind the desk, and the girl who does the nights now is twenty three and asked me once, when I went back in for a coffee, whether I had ever noticed anything odd about that board.
I said what sort of odd.
She said: nothing. Forget it.
And she looked at me the way you look at somebody when you have decided they are not going to be any help.