She stubbed out the cigarette on a saucer. The top of her chest flushed – red and bare. She caught me looking at the place where her pendant used to sit. ‘I lost it somewhere in the move,’ she said, fingering the space. ‘In the flat.’

Now I see the door to number 42B open. Ebadi steps out and shuts it behind him to an elongated beep. He walks along the street away from me, merrily almost, jangling keys at his side and over to a small silver Porsche. The indicators flash as he opens the door and gets in. Then he is gone, the car growling as it powers up the road and away out of sight.

I look up again at the house. Silent. Locked. Empty. Can I get in?

That door opened once before. I try and remember what it was like on the inside and the lock, was it an old Yale?

When we were teenagers at school, there was a craze of trying to pick locks. We had all seen something on TV with the Man from U.N.C.L.E. or James Bond or something else implausible. A hairpin would go in, the hero would grin at the girl and a flick of the wrist later there’d be the confident oiled click of an opening lock.

When Rory and I tried it, it didn’t work. Not once in hours of trying.

Then, because we were who we were, we took out books and read in encyclopaedias about how locks worked. Some of the words come to mind now: base pins, cylinders, the shear line where all the pins line up. We learned about ‘bumping’ and how you could force a key through the lock to make the pins jump before quickly turning the lock.

But it never worked. We never managed to pick a single lock, though we pretended to the others at school that we had. That we didn’t have the tools on us, but we could do it if we ever needed to.

There was another way, though. Funny, I haven’t thought of this for so long I have to close my eyes to lure the memory into light.

In the early days when I squatted, when the street hadn’t yet penetrated into me. When I was fresh. I remember how much I hated communal living, the smells, the grating nerves and tensions. But occasionally people shared tips. Where to get soup on Monday, who had a supply of methadone. Which shelters had waiting lists and which ones would never turn you away.

In one of the bigger communes, I remember a man – I don’t remember his name – a snake-faced man with no hair and round blue eyes. He grinned all the time as if he knew something nobody else did.