The meter in unit 2 clocks 40 litres every Tuesday

My name is Bruno Salcedo, I read meters for the water company and I have had the same round for nine years. I am writing this because incident 4.112 says «probable leak» and there is no leak at all.

The meter for unit 2 at number 14 clocks forty litres every Tuesday. Forty exactly, always between five and six in the morning. That unit was the Loarte haberdashery and it closed in 2021: shutter down, window covered with newspaper, nothing inside. I reported it in January and reported it again four months later. Both times they told me to check the mains connection.

Last Tuesday I waited in the doorway from a quarter to five.

At twenty past five the shutter went up and in walked Herminia Loarte, sixty-seven, a retired haberdasher and the owner of the place. She filled eight five-litre containers at the tap in the back room, loaded them onto a shopping trolley and went out to work her way through the fourteen planters on Calle Olmo, one by one, starting with the one on the corner.

I told her the water was billed in her name and that the council has a contractor for the watering.

«I pay for that water myself,» she answered, without letting go of the trolley. «What I will not pay for is watching the street go dry.»