Mostly, it was the usual items of furniture stored after a house move, or sometimes catering equipment, packs of party blowers and joke hats belonging to event planners whose businesses had gone bust, that kind of thing. But every now and again there would be a veritable treasure trove of intrigue. She once found a pair of stuffed parrots. Another time a collection of fossils – she’d contacted the Natural History Museum in London on that occasion and they had sent a curator to collect them when numerous attempts to make contact with the owners had proven fruitless. And then there was the World War II medal collection a little while ago. Grace, Larry and Betty had all agreed that it just wouldn’t have been right to sell the medals to recover the rental arrears when they hadn’t been able to contact the owner. It had then turned out that the owner had died six months earlier. Luckily, Larry had managed to find a relative … the son of the deceased soldier, who had stored his medals at Cohen’s for over fifty years in one of the small safety deposit boxes, and that had been a happy day. The grateful son had travelled all the way from Scotland to collect the medals in person and to shake Larry’s hand. A reporter from the local newspaper had even come along too, and then written a lovely piece featuring a black-and-white photo of the man in his soldier’s uniform during the Second World War.

‘I can do that for you,’ Grace offered, indicating the bunch of keys that Larry was fiddling with. ‘They can be very tricky sometimes,’ she added tactfully, knowing how Larry struggled with arthritis in his age-gnarled fingers.

‘Thank you, Grace. You are kind.’ He smiled gratefully, handing the clipboard and the bunch of keys over.

Having found the right key, Grace had pushed an empty trolley along the length of the corridor on the ground floor and was now standing outside the door to unit 28. It was one of the oldest large walk-in units, occupying a corner space, and Grace wondered when it had last been opened as the key was stiff in the padlock, which had rust all around the edges. So after walking back along the corridor and locating a can of WD40 in the cleaning cupboard, she had returned and managed to spruce up the padlock and get the key to turn.

Gingerly, she pulled the metal door, which scraped across the floor as if it hadn’t been opened in years, and felt around for the light switch. Larry had first set up the storage company in the Fifties, and the older units didn’t have automatic motion-sensor lighting installed. She felt a whoosh of anticipation in the middle of her stomach as the old-fashioned strip light flickered into action before eventually settling to bathe the contents of the unit in a bright, wondrous light.