Locked Garage, Reversed Car

My garage is a single-car concrete box with one roller door and one pedestrian door, both keyed to me. My wife's key ring has no garage key; that detail gets checked every time I tell this, so I am putting it first.

I always reverse in. Fifteen years of habit from delivery work: back in, mirrors out, seat where my long legs need it. On a Friday night in March I backed in as always, locked both doors, and went to bed.

Saturday morning the car was facing the door. Nose out. In a garage with barely sixty centimetres of clearance on each side, where turning a car around is physically impossible without removing a wall. Both doors still locked, no marks on the concrete, nothing missing.

Inside the car it got worse. The mirrors were folded in — I never fold them. The seat was pulled forward the way a much shorter driver would set it. And the trip meter, which I had zeroed at the petrol station on my way home, showed thirty-one kilometres. The bonnet was cold, the engine bone dry cold, at eight in the morning.