A Key That Isn't Mine

It rained on the fourteenth of October.

Claire took her rain jacket out of the hall cupboard at a quarter to seven, put it on in the corridor, and put her hands in the pockets out of reflex, to check what was in them.

Left pocket: nothing.

Right pocket: a parking ticket from September.

Front pocket: the two fruit-paste sachets, the pen, and something hard.

She took out a key.

She looked at it under the hall light.

It was a flat brass key, eight centimetres long, with a square head and a three-notch bit. The brass was tarnished but not worn. There was no ring, no key fob, no label.

On the head, stamped, was: AL-4.

Claire Baumann stood in her hallway with a key that was not hers.

She made an inventory of her keys aloud: the flat, the letter box, the cellar, the bike store, the office, the samples cabinet, the car. Seven keys, all on the same ring, all flat or Euro-cylinder, none of them brass, none of them engraved.

She called Noé.

— Did you put something in my rain jacket?

— No.

— Are you sure?

— Maman, I never open the hall cupboard.

That was true. His things were on a hook by his bedroom door, and always had been.

She took the key out again on the doorstep, put it back in her pocket, then took it out once more in the lift.

What troubled her most was not the key itself: it was its position. The front pocket of a running jacket closes with a zip. You do not slip anything into it by accident, nothing is put into it, nothing falls into it.

Somebody had opened a zip, put in a key, and closed it again.

And the only person who could have done that was wearing the jacket.

She did not run that morning.

She sat down at the kitchen table with the key in front of her and did what she knew how to do: she dated it.

The question was not where does this key come from. The question was when did it get into this pocket, and that question, unlike the other, had an answer.

The front pocket of a rain jacket does not open by itself. It contains what you put in it.

When had she last worn that jacket? She opened her weather app and went back through the rainfall history for Besançon.

It had rained on the morning of the eighth of October. Then nothing until the fourteenth.

She emptied the pockets at the end of the season, in April, and she had not touched that jacket since the eighth.

And she would not have worn it to go anywhere else: fluorescent yellow, reflective strips, a running jacket.

She wrote on a sheet of paper.

Key entered the pocket on 2 October or 8 October.

She looked at that line for a long while.

The second of October: twenty-two minutes missing.

The eighth of October: twenty-three minutes missing, and seven minutes spent talking to a woman she had no memory of.

She took the key and turned it between her fingers.

AL-4.

She searched the internet for forty minutes. AL could be anything: initials, a make, a model, a serial number. She found letter-box locks, electrical cabinets, swimming-pool lockers, meters.

She found nothing.

She also tried the key on everything to hand, because that is what one does: the letter box, the cellar, the bike store, the landing meter, and even the padlock on the courtyard gate, which had no reason to be opened by a flat key.

She got into nothing. The bit was too thick for the two locks in the building and too thin for the cellar one.

At nine she rang her office and said she would be in at eleven.

At a quarter past nine her telephone rang.

Unknown number.

— Madame Baumann? Corinne Delvaux.

Claire sat down.

— How do you have my number?

— You gave it to me on the eighth of October. It is in my notebook, line six.

Claire closed her eyes.

— You didn't come running this morning, said Corinne. I waited twenty minutes for you.

— It was raining.

— You run in the rain. You were running in the rain on the eighth.

Claire looked at the key on the table.

— Madame Delvaux, you told me I had given you a name.

— Yes.

— I'd like you to tell me it now.

There was a silence at the other end.

— Are you sure?

— Yes.

— You asked me to wait.

— I have found a key in the pocket of a jacket I have not worn for six days, said Claire. So I think I am past the stage of protecting myself.

She heard Corinne Delvaux turn a page.

— Line four, she said. You told me: “Somebody has to know. Her name is Delphine Arnoux.”

Claire wrote the name on the sheet, under the line of dates.

— Does it mean anything to you? she said.

— To me? said Corinne Delvaux.

And after a second:

— Madame Baumann, don't you read the papers?