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.

I checked the dashcam. It records on ignition; there was no new file. I checked my own phone location history, half suspecting myself of some sleepwalking episode: my phone spent the whole night on the nightstand, and I do not sleepwalk, but I wanted the data to say so.

The insurance company had no category for it. The locksmith found no tool marks. My mechanic just said the odometer does not lie about total kilometres, and the total agreed with the trip meter down to the decimal.

Someone, somewhere, drove thirty-one kilometres that night and politely returned everything except the direction my car faces. I park nose-in now. It feels like leaving a note that says: I noticed.