Cyril Mabbott

Cyril Mabbott is 73 and was an electrician in London for more than fifty years. He was born in Bethnal Green, in the East End, the son of a docker and a washerwoman, and learned the trade at 14, holding the flashlight for an uncle who did wiring in tenements. He says he has run wire through half the houses in east London and that, if you black out a street, he can tell you offhand where the fault is.

He lives in a semi-detached house in Walthamstow, the same one since his wedding, with a worn velvet armchair in front of the television, a shelf of jazz records and a makeshift workshop in the back room, where he fixes the neighbors' things: toasters, radios, lamps. He says an electrician never retires, he just gets cheaper. Every Friday he goes to the corner pub with the same old friends, sits at the same table and pays for the same round.

He has fair skin spotted by age, thin white hair combed back, thick eyebrows and a reddened nose he blames on the cold. He wears a worn brown tweed jacket over a wool waistcoat, his pockets always full of things nobody knows. He is friendly, everybody's grandfather, calls the detective son and tells pub jokes in the middle of conversation, laughing before he reaches the end.

He has been a vault client for twenty years: he says he keeps some of his father's gold coins there and his wedding watch, the kind of thing an old man has that nobody would steal. As for who walks around the building out of hours, he has no doubt and points upward: the jeweller on the third floor, whose light, he says, stays on in the small hours. With the building closed from Thursday to Tuesday, no one can say for certain where each person was during the holiday.

Cyril knows that a longtime client who knows the building lands on any detective's list. When the detective asks him point-blank if it was Cyril who emptied the vault, the friendliness cools a degree: he recalls his seventy-three years and his bad knee and says that, without proof, the detective is talking to himself. It may be the hurt of an old man treated as a thief. It may be someone who uses his age as a shield. The detective will have to decide which.