by Simon Okotie
Which musings neatly brought him back to – indeed demonstrated the validity of – his first thought: that at a dinner party, or at any other sort of party where food was served or not, then one could simply up and leave if one wanted to, a possibility that would not, at that moment, be available to Isobel Absalon, in the case of her incarceration within that townhouse.
19
A key without a key ring could not be fished out of a trouser pocket, he thought, as he finally made contact with the key in his left-hand trouser pocket – a key that he now urgently needed to fish out of that pocket to enable his ingress into and/or Isobel Absalon’s egress from the townhouse in question. The reason a key without a key ring could not be fished out of a trouser pocket was, he thought, that, in fishing a key or keys out of one’s pocket, one of one’s fingers needed to hook the key ring, in a similar way to that in which an actual fish was hooked, using an actual hook, to fish it out of the drink, as it’s known. One could, of course, simply grip one of the keys, or part thereof, or more than one key, or parts of more than one (etc) if there were more than one, between one’s index finger and thumb, say, as a means of pulling the keys out of one’s pocket, but this would not qualify as fishing them out, to his mind, since the resemblance between the index or other finger and the fishing hook would be absent. The action, in that case, would more resemble the mechanical grab, he thought, than the angler’s hook, and it was for this reason that he had concluded, at the moment that he’d finally made contact with the key in his left-hand trouser pocket, that a single key, sans key ring, could not be fished out of one’s pocket in the manner described.
A single key could, of course, be with or without a key ring in as much as it did not need a key ring to keep it together, as it were, whereas a bunch, so-called, of keys did need a key ring or other device to keep it together, and he was not aware of any device more useful than the traditional key ring for keeping a bunch of keys together in this way. This did not rule out the possibility that a single key would necessarily in fact be without a key ring of course; it was just to say that a key ring would not be required for a single key for the reason that a bunch of keys would need, as it were, a key ring, or other, inferior device, to keep them together. And the reason, note, that a bunch of keys needed, often, to be kept together was that they belonged to a particular person and were used by that person and occasionally, granted, by others, to unlock doors and other things such as safety deposit boxes or chastity belts12 and not just any doors (etc) but the doors (etc) that specifically related to that person (etc). They were, then, the doors, boxes and belts through and into which that person regularly needed to gain access whilst preventing most others from doing so and, in the case of the chastity belt and perhaps in other cases, preventing all others from gaining access. That was why they were collected together, those keys, generally in the recommended way, which is to say using a key ring.
In his own situation approaching the front door he found that the key in his left-hand trouser pocket was indeed attached to a key ring; furthermore, this key ring contained other keys; more specifically, it contained keys that he thought would allow him to gain access to the house that he continued steadily to approach in his on-going investigation into the disappearance of his colleague, Marguerite, who was last seen in pursuit of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor. The forefinger of his left hand now found that key ring and ‘hooked’ it, which is to say that it inserted itself, or rather he inserted it, into the key ring i.e. into the area bounded by the circumference of the key ring. He then proceeded to bend that forefinger in the easiest way that he could given its anatomical constraints, which is to say that he bent it towards the thumb of the same hand, and it was this action, he knew, that had spawned, as it were, at least in part, the term fishing a set of keys out of one’s pocket or fishing something out of anywhere except, perhaps, the fishing of a fish out of a pool or other body of water since that would be tautological. Of course, in the case of the fish the hole would not have existed before the insertion of the hook into the fish’s mouth, unlike the ‘hole’, if we can call it that, formed by the key ring, which is to say the two-dimensional area bounded by the inside of the key ring, an area that is circular, or near circular, in most cases. Clearly fishing a set of keys out of one’s pocket, as he now began to do, in that his finger touched the thumb and he began to withdraw the hand again from the pocket dragging the keys as it went, was a much more humane act than fishing; at least it was a much more humane act than fishing using hooks, as is traditional, to pierce the top palate of a fish as a means of hauling that fish out of the drink during the act of fishing. Regardless of this, he was convinced that the bent finger accounted in large part for the origins of the term ‘fishing out’, due to its perceived similarity to the shape of the angler’s hook (and he preferred ‘angler’ to the gender-specific term ‘fisherman’ so as to ensure that the rare instances of female anglers were not excluded from within its compass).
He tugged on the key ring as a means of completely removing it and all of the keys attached to it from his pocket as he continued to move across the area in front of the townhouse towards the front door. Only once he had fully removed the keys and the key ring from his pocket in this way would he be satisfied that he had fished out the bunch of keys rather than still being in the process of fishing them out. The image of the poor fish flapping from side to side just above the surface, water dripping from its body back into the drink, came to his mind then. It made him feel sad.
20
Notice that he was not panicking, despite the fact that Harold Absalon13 was, as far as he could tell, closing in on him, as it’s known, and he had still not traversed the area in front of the townhouse in question. It was with increased urgency, though, that he tugged on the key ring through which his left forefinger was now hooked, an urgency that finally yielded an object that was attached to that key ring, an object, moreover, that had been impeding the passage and ultimate release of the keys from his pocket.
He did not look down at the object as he continued towards the townhouse, and the fact of his not looking down meant that the object – a description thereof – did not enter his mind at that moment and so is not, as yet, available to us. This was not, of course, to say that, in liberating the object attached to the key ring, he had not gleaned further clues as to the nature of that object. Not all evidence is collected through the visual sense, in short. He had, then, gleaned some evidence about the item attached to the key ring in question but this evidence was, for now, purely in the non-visual domain. It could reasonably be asserted that the evidence that he had gleaned about the relative dimensions – relative, say, to most keys – of the object that had now emerged from his pocket was gleaned through the sense of touch. It could not, for instance, have been gleaned very easily by the sense of smell, since this sense did not lend itself to ascertaining the dimensions of things: the sniffer dog locates the narcotics regardless of the dimensions of the haul, as the text book might express it. And similarly the oral sense – that is to say the sense of taste – could not be employed in this instance given the anatomical limitations: the object had been within his pocket whereas his mouth, which is to say the seat of his taste faculty, remained, as always, within the lower part of his head, and the distance between them could not be negotiated in the time available without doing severe damage to his person. Granted, if he had had more time available to him – and his time was constrained, remember, by the presence of Harold Absalon who was, he thought, rapidly bearing down upon him,14 as it were – then he could simply have removed his trousers in the usual way and could have put the pocket into his mouth; rather he could have put that part of the trouser pocket containing the item under investigation into his mouth as a means of sensing the dimensions of that object. This would still not, though, be using the taste faculty to assess dimension; he would no doubt taste something in putting that part of that trouser pocket into his mouth,
and he anticipated that the taste would be both savoury and pleasant, given what he knew about that particular area of his trousers, with its food remains and nasal deposits. No, it would still be the faculty of touch that would offer up the dimensional clues, albeit a sense of touch from inside his body and accompanied by a panoply, perhaps, of tastes and possibly even smells, given the proximity of nose to trouser at that moment. Nor could the aural sense lend anything of itself to assessing the dimensions of the object in this instance. The sense of hearing, to express it somewhat differently, could be used to assess distance, as in the case of echo location or sonar, faculties or skills that he did, in fact, have in his armoury, should situations emerge requiring their use: his entry, for instance, into a warehouse in pursuit of a suspect intent on eluding him and, as a means of doing so, trying to remain outside of his field of vision whilst being unable to remain completely silent when moving around that warehouse or whilst trying to remain stationary within it. He was a master of detection in that situation, as in so many others, in that he could finely tune his hearing so as to use it as an instrument for locating the suspect and judging his distance from her, in the case where the suspect was female or in the case where the suspect was at least strongly suspected of being female alongside other suspicions of a criminal nature, there being no offence attached, of course, with simply being female15 or even of simply being suspected of being female.
This having exhausted the possibilities in relation to the sense faculties at his or indeed anyone’s disposal as a means of judging the dimensions of an object or more specifically of the object that had hitherto been inside the left-hand pocket of his trousers but which had just emerged from that pocket, satisfied with the further evidence that had been forthcoming from this exercise and clear, in his mind, about how this evidence fitted into his investigation into the disappearance of his colleague, Marguerite, who was last seen in pursuit of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor, he simply glanced down at the object in question, as he continued to pull the key ring with his left hand or, more specifically, as before, using his left index finger as a hook through the key ring as a means of extracting the keys themselves, keys which remained, still, partially within the left-hand pocket of his trousers despite the emergence of the key ring and the object attached thereto. He glanced down, then, simply as a means of confirming what he already knew: that the object attached to the key ring was an electronic key, an electronic key, moreover, as well as the vehicle that it would open, that he suspected belonged to Richard Knox, the colleague of Harold Absalon.
21
What sort of vehicle did the electronic key as it were belong to, he wondered, as the keys – both conventional and electronic – emerged fully from the left-hand pocket of his trousers. What, moreover, was the nature of the central locking system within that vehicle, given the vehicle-specific characteristics of such systems? In the case of the black cabs that, as it were, ferried passengers around the city that he was then inhabiting, for instance, the rear doors were locked when the vehicle was moving and unlocked when it was stationary. This was for safety reasons – for the passenger(s) themselves rather than for the safety of the public at large; the latter would be the case, it could be argued, for the centrally locked rear doors of a police car, although in the case where the police car’s non-police occupant(s) was or were, in fact, innocent (in an actual rather than purely legal ‘until proven guilty’ sense) then it would be for the safety of those occupants in the same way as with the taxi case. In fact, even if the non-police occupants of the police car were actually guilty, the rear central locking would still serve the function of helping to ensure their own safety but with the added function of protecting the public at large by helping to ensure that the guilty party or parties did not escape from the vehicle, which would give them the opportunity of continuing the crime spree that they had perhaps been engaged in perpetrating until the moment of their apprehension. But in what sense could both cases be categorised as instances of central locking, he now wondered, as he inspected the electronic key dangling from the key ring? What, more importantly, were the similarities, if any, between these forms of central locking and that employed in other modes, such as over- or underground trains and trams/coaches/buses?
It was the driver, in all cases, who controlled the central locking, although in the case of the high-speed, long-distance train it was the conductor, who controlled when the doors opened; and of course there was no conductor in cars, which is to say that it was not a role ordinarily found in private road vehicles. This was not to say that conductors didn’t travel by car. They had just as much right to do so as the rest of us. It was just to say that when they were travelling by car they were generally off-duty; and if they were on-duty then they were doing that part of their job that didn’t require them to be actually conducting per se – perhaps doing an errand, obtaining some more blank tickets on paper or card to feed through their ticket machines, say, or going off to buy some lunch. There were any number of things they could be doing for heaven’s sake – let’s not go into that now.
The driver or conductor, then, would control the centrally locked doors of a bus, tram, coach, underground or long distance train; the driver would control the centrally locked (and unlocked) doors of the saloon, estate or other modern car – at least that subset of modern cars that actually had central locking. The two cases were, then, broadly similar to that extent, he felt almost compelled to say.
However – to move on to the key difference, to his mind – with the centrally locked train, tube, tram, bus and coach, the main issue was to control people getting off rather than getting on – just as in the case of the centrally locked police car – whereas with the centrally locked private car, lorry and van the main issue was to control people getting on rather than getting off – in other words to prevent people from absconding with the vehicle. Reasonably pleased with this, despite its evident flaws, he moved onto a much deeper question, one which he feared he would have insufficient time to fully explore: in what sense was this type of locking central? Where, in other words, was the centre precisely? This profound question had emerged, he thought, due to the idea of just having centrally locked rear doors, if, in fact, this was the situation in taxis and police cars. Would the centre in that case be located between the two rear doors or in the centre of the vehicle as a whole? Or did ‘the centre’ simply refer, rather vaguely, to the vehicle as a whole, or even to the key that transmitted the message to the vehicle, saying either ‘lock up!’ or ‘unlock!’ It couldn’t possibly be the latter he thought, because what about the situation when you pushed down one of the ‘knobs’, in a private road vehicle and all the other knobs went down at the same time – wasn’t that central locking but sans key? (He didn’t know the French word for key.) And what about the equivalent situation in the bus, tram, coach or underground or long distance train? Did one simply take the geometric centre of the three-dimensional space bounded by the exterior of the train or vehicle, or was it preferable to use the centre of gravity, as it is known?
