Another short story. Made up, like the others.

The rule at the ferry terminal was ninety days. After ninety days an unclaimed item went into a cage at the back, and twice a year a man from a firm in the city came with a van and took the cage away. Dermot didn’t know what happened to things after that. He’d never asked. It had never seemed like his business.

The suitcase came in on a Tuesday at the start of March, a brown one with a strap round it because the catch had gone. The woman who left it paid for a week. She was about seventy, in a good coat, and she asked him twice whether it would be safe. He said it would. She said she’d be back on the Monday.

She wasn’t back on the Monday. He charged the extra days to the ticket, the way you were supposed to, and when it passed a month he moved the case from the front shelves to the long-stay racks, the way you were supposed to. There was nothing unusual about that. People missed boats. People changed plans, or forgot, or had their reasons. Half the long-stay racks were things people had decided, without ever quite saying so, that they didn’t need.

He wasn’t sure why this one bothered him. Possibly the strap. Someone had taken the trouble.

At sixty days he looked the ticket number up in the book. There was only a surname and an initial, no address. The terminal had stopped taking addresses years ago. At seventy days he rang the hospital in town. He felt foolish doing it, and they told him, kindly enough, that they couldn’t tell him anything. At eighty days he told Anita on the evening shift about it, and she said, “Dermot, you’re not to open it,” which he hadn’t been going to do until she said it, and then didn’t do anyway.

On the ninetieth day he didn’t move it to the cage. He told himself it was because the van wasn’t due until the end of June, so there was no point. On the ninety-fifth day he wrote query — hold on a label and stuck it on the handle, which meant nothing, because there was no such category. But it looked official, and nobody on the other shifts questioned a label.

It stayed there through the rest of June. On the last Thursday of the month the van came. Dermot was on that morning. He loaded the cage himself and watched it go and felt, walking back, as if he’d got away with something, though he couldn’t have said what, or from whom.

In August a woman came to the counter with the ticket. She was about forty, and she had the same way of standing as the first one, as if she were waiting for something heavy to be handed to her. She said the ticket had been in her mother’s coat. She said she’d only found it last week. She’d had no idea what it was for until she saw the terminal’s name printed on the back, and she was sorry, she knew it had been ages, she understood if it was gone.

He said it wasn’t gone. He went and got it.

She didn’t open it at the counter. He’d half thought she would, and half hoped, and was glad when she didn’t. She just stood holding the handle with the strap round it, and she said, “She packed for a week,” not really to him. Then she said, “What do I owe you?”

He looked at the ticket. Five months of long-stay was a real sum. He thought about the book, and about Anita, and about the man with the van, who would never know.

“It’s paid,” he said. “She paid it when she left it.”

That wasn’t true. It was near enough, he decided later, to count.