"No, I never saw him. That's the first thing you should know."
Dennis says this before I've asked a single question, before I've even got my coffee off the counter at the Wetherspoons near Preston bus station. He's seventy-one, retired security, hands like they've spent forty years gripping cold metal railings. He agreed to talk because his nephew works with my cousin, and because, he tells me, nobody else will listen to the whole thing anymore.
He worked nights at Fenwick Self-Storage for six years. Or five, he corrects himself a moment later, it might have been five, the last year blurs. It's the kind of place with three hundred identical roller doors and a portacabin office that smelled of instant coffee and diesel. Part of the job was the visitor log. Anyone on site after 10pm signed in, name, unit number, time. Most nights nobody came at all. There was a kettle in the corner that took eleven minutes to boil because the element was going, and he says he used to time himself walking the yard against it, out and back before it clicked off.
Then, starting in the March of his second year, someone did come. Every night. 11:47pm, near enough exact, sometimes a minute either side. The name in the book was always the same: R. Aldous, Unit 214. Dennis never once saw him arrive. He'd hear the gate buzzer, go to the window, and see the pen on the counter still rocking slightly from being set down. The entry would already be written, in a hand he never watched move.
"I told myself I'd just missed him," he says, turning his glass a quarter turn on the beer mat, not drinking from it. "Told myself that for about four months."
The cameras showed the gate opening. They showed the pen shift a centimetre across the counter. They never showed a body doing it. Dennis pulled the footage three times, once with his supervisor sitting next to him, and the supervisor watched the pen move on its own and said, flatly, that the camera must be faulty. He wrote up a maintenance request. It never got actioned, because nothing else about the camera was wrong, and nobody could say what exactly needed fixing.
Unit 214 belonged, on paper, to a man who'd stopped paying rent eleven months before Dennis started the job. Head office said the account was closed. Nobody had cleared it out. Company policy, apparently, meant it just sat there behind a roller door with a padlock nobody had cut, accruing arrears nobody chased.
Dennis opened it. Once. August, height of summer, the corridor between the units baking even at midnight, the tarmac still giving off heat through his boots. He used the bolt cutters from the maintenance shed. Inside there was a mattress on its side, a stack of magazines gone soft with damp, and a chair facing the door. Like whoever sat in it wanted to watch someone come in.
He locked it back up. Didn't write it in any log. Handed in his notice six weeks later and told them it was his knees.
"I still don't know what I saw," he says. "I want to be clear about that. I saw a pen move and a chair facing a door. That's it. That's all I'm telling you I saw."
He finishes his pint, stands, buttons his coat with fingers that take longer than they should over each button. At the door he stops. He doesn't turn round.
"They still send the entry the same time every night. Someone at head office showed me, before I left. Eleven forty-seven. R. Aldous. Unit two-one-four."
He leaves his glass on the table, the last inch of beer still moving in it, and a single biro, uncapped, rolling very slowly toward the edge.