The shelves run back forty feet and I know what is on all of them. That is not a boast. Most of it is umbrellas, and an umbrella is not a thing you know, it is a thing you count.

The rule is ninety days. After ninety days an object goes into a grey crate with a lot number stencilled on the end, the crate goes to the auction house on Vestry Street, and after that it belongs to somebody in a different building. I have worked this counter twenty-six years. I could not tell you how many coats I have sent into those crates and felt nothing about. A coat is a coat.

There is one case I have not sent.

It came in on a Tuesday. Green, hard-sided, cabin size, the sort with two brass catches that want a thumb on each at the same moment or they will not give. A porter found it standing upright on platform six with nobody inside thirty feet of it, which in those days meant a form and in these days means the station shuts for two hours. My own tag is still looped through the handle. My own writing, from when my writing was better.

I did not keep it back on purpose, not at first. It went into the ninety-day system like everything else. On day ninety-one it appeared on the disposal list and I took it off the list. I have taken it off the list eleven times. There is a column on the form headed Reason, and eleven times I have written pending further enquiry in it, and in eleven years nobody has once asked me what enquiry.

He came in on a Thursday in February, about four, when the light outside has already gone and the lamps in here make everybody look unwell. Seventy, perhaps. A good coat and bad shoes, which is a combination I see often and have never worked out.

"I want to ask about a case," he said.

They all say that. What they mean, nine times in ten, is that they left something on the 17:42 an hour ago and would like me to produce it, warm, with an apology. I have a voice for it.

"Describe it for me, please," I said. "Don't let me describe it to you."

That is not rudeness. It is the entire procedure. A man who wants a bicycle will agree to any bicycle I put in front of him, and agree sincerely, because by then he can see it. So I make them build it in the air first, with nothing of mine to lean on.

"Green," he said. "Hard sides, not cloth. Two catches, brass, and they're stiff — you have to do both together or it won't open."

I did not say anything.

"There's a scuff on the bottom corner. The left one, if it's facing you. That happened on a set of steps at Whitcombe. It got away from her."

I have had that case in my hands more times than I would put in writing, and I could not have told you which corner. I went and looked afterwards. Bottom left, facing you.

"Contents," I said. "Three items, please. I can't prompt you."

He took his hands out of his pockets and put them on the counter, which people do when they are about to concentrate.

"Two cardigans. One grey. The other one has no buttons on it — she'd cut them off to sew better ones on and she never got round to the second half of that job." He paused. "A tin of boiled sweets with a rubber band round the lid, because the lid had gone loose and she wouldn't throw the tin out. And a hairbrush, wooden back, with more of her hair in it than she'd have liked a stranger to see."

Four items. He did not stop at three.

I have a small ritual for this part. I say wait there and I go into the back, and I take longer than the walking requires, because a man who has just described his wife's hairbrush to a civil servant needs a minute alone at a counter. I stood among the shelves and I looked at the green case and I thought, well. Eleven years and a column on a form, and it turns out the enquiry was pending on him.

I brought out the claim book instead of the case. That is also procedure, and I was glad of it.

"One more," I said. "Name one more thing and I'll sign it over."

And he said, "A photograph."

There is no photograph in that case.

I want to be exact, because being exact is what I am for. I have opened it. I opened it at day ninety-one, with a witness, as the rule requires, and I have opened it since, alone, more times than the rule imagines. Two cardigans, a tin, a brush, a folded mackintosh, a pair of reading glasses in a soft case, and a paperback with a bus ticket in it at page one hundred and nine. No photograph. Not loose, not in the lining, not in the pocket in the lid.

I put the pen down.

"There's no photograph in it," I said.

He nodded. He did not argue, and he did not look surprised, and it took me a moment to understand that the nod had come too quickly.

"No," he said. "I know."

I waited.

"I've known eleven years." He straightened the cuff of the good coat. "I've been in here before. Not to this counter — the one at Harrow, and the one at the terminus at Leith, and two or three others. I describe the case and they go and look and they come back and tell me what's in it, and there's never a photograph in it, and then I go home."

"Then why do it?"

He thought about that. He did me the courtesy of actually thinking about it, instead of having the answer ready, which is how I knew it was true.

"Because this is the only sort of place left where you can ask where something is," he said, "and somebody whose job it is will go and look."

I went and looked.

I did not need to. I took him through the hatch, which I am not supposed to do, and I stood him at the end of the shelf and I put the case flat and I did both catches with both thumbs and I went through it in front of him, garment by garment, the lining, the pocket in the lid, the paperback shaken by its spine. It took perhaps four minutes. He watched my hands the whole time and never once reached in.

There was no photograph.

"No," he said. "Thank you."

Then he closed it himself, both catches, and picked it up, and it was his, and I signed the book afterwards rather than before, which I will answer for if anyone ever reads it.

He did not open it again at the counter. He carried it out through the barriers and under the board, and he had the walk of a man carrying something the right weight, and that was the last of it.

In the Reason column I wrote claimed, for the first time, and the pen was fine about it.

The shelf has a gap in it where the case stood. I have not put anything there. There is no rule that prevents me, and no rule that requires it, and I have thirty-one umbrellas that need somewhere to be.