The bolt of the main gate he had thrown at six twelve, as on every morning for eight years; as on every morning he had tried it again straight afterwards, pulling it toward himself by a centimetre, which is a gesture the others in the firm do not make, which had been taught him by an older man in a barracks where he had been at twenty, a gesture that serves no purpose if the bolt is sound and that serves for everything the two or three times in a life when it is not; while he was trying it again he had changed his glasses, that is, he had pushed the reading pair up onto his forehead and let the street pair down onto his nose, without taking either off altogether, because to take them off altogether means to set them down, and to set them down means, sooner or later, no longer finding them.

On the pavement, on the other side of the street, there was a car standing that was not from the neighbourhood.

It was not from the neighbourhood; neither had the one on the twenty-first of June of two thousand and twenty-five been from the neighbourhood, although that day he had not even been on duty, being there to cover for a colleague, and let this be the first point he has never told anyone: that at that hour, a quarter to seven, there were already four of them in front of the landlord's gate, and that they stayed four until six in the evening, that is, almost the whole day, standing, doing nothing (toward noon the oldest had gone to fetch tea at the kiosk on the corner, had come back with four paper cups pushed one inside the other, had handed them round, and for a quarter of an hour there was on the pavement the sound of four men drinking on their feet), which is a thing he, in thirty years of shifts, had seen done only by those who are waiting for someone who "knows he has to wait".

The man they were after did not arrive. At six in the evening they forced the service door with the crowbar, went up, came down after forty minutes with two boxes, a bag, and one of them, the youngest, put into his hand a sheet folded in two, telling him it was "the copy for the owner"; and he said yes because the owner was not there, because when someone puts a sheet into your hand saying a word with the definite article, "the" copy, not "a" copy, you take that sheet.

On the sheet were the entries, in a column: a laptop computer, two telephones, three external drives, a box of documents. The signature of whoever had filled it in was a set of initials (two letters and a dash).

Fifteen months later, on the twenty-second of September, the newspaper wrote that the judge had established the illegality of that search, that five rights had been violated, listed one by one, that the head of the directorate of criminal investigations and the inspector general of police were to pay five million shillings jointly and severally, that the prosecution could no longer proceed on the basis of those investigations; in the whole article, which was long, the word "caretaker" did not appear.

On the twenty-fourth of September, at two in the afternoon, the company supervisor arrived with the shift sheet already redone, showed it to him holding it by the corner, and said to him only: "From Monday you start at fourteen hundred."

The night, for a man who does the gate, is not a harder shift: it is the shift in which one speaks to no one; taking it from him after eight years without saying why was the way the supervisor had chosen to say why, and he had understood it while the other was still holding the sheet by the corner, or rather he had understood it before, when he had seen the car standing on the other side of the street, inside it a man with a briefcase on his knees who was not getting out; now the man had got out, he was on the pavement two steps away with the briefcase under his arm, waiting for the supervisor to finish.

The supervisor did not finish. He was folding the shift sheet in three, carefully, looking at the lawyer.

Then he opened his regulation jacket, which is of heavy canvas, with the lining unstitched under the right armpit from before his time, and inside the lining, between the canvas and the cloth, where the paper can be felt with the elbow when you lean, where in fifteen months it had folded itself along the old creases, there was the sheet, and he drew it out holding it by the long edge, because paper folded in four for fifteen months tears along the crease if you take it by the corner.

He opened it. He looked at the column of entries, once, from top to bottom, without stopping at any line, and put his thumb back on the crease.

Then he put it into the lawyer's hand, on the pavement, outside the gate.

He said: "They were already there at a quarter to seven."

The supervisor waited for the lawyer to put the sheet into the briefcase and for the briefcase to close, and meanwhile he looked at neither of the two, but at the gate, and at the part of the gate where the paint is worn away by the hand, at the height of the lock.

Then he held out his hand, palm up, at waist height, and did not say the word jacket, because the word was not needed.

He slipped it off. First the right sleeve, which is the one with the unstitched lining, then the left. He looked in the pocket for his badge, took it out, and placed the badge on top of the folded jacket, on the outstretched palm, the way one hands over a thing in two pieces when one wants it to be seen that they are two.

It is six twelve tomorrow morning that he will not be there. The bolt will be thrown by another, and he will throw it once only.

On the pavement, in a T-shirt, the street glasses on his nose and the reading glasses on his forehead, he felt with his right elbow for the paper inside the lining.

The lining was no longer there.