3
I waited for the full fifteen, but by the end of it Charlie had defeated the bottom lock. Still on all fours, he packed the picks and wrenches away before easing the door open a few inches, so it didn’t creak or bang tight against a security chain. He waited a moment to see if any alarms kicked off, then poked his head through the gap to have a quick look and a listen.
It was time for me to get my boots off, ready to do my bit. The ski mask was clammy round my mouth, the back of my neck was soaked with sweat, and the rest of me didn’t feel much tastier, but f*ck it, we’d be done with this by first light, and knocking back a couple of beers on the plane by midday.
I shoved my boots down the front of my bomber jacket and zipped them in, then liberated my Maglite and the CO2 canister.
Charlie crawled back to where I’d been sitting. He’d get his own boots off, prepare the camcorder and wipe the porch dry with one of the towels I’d nicked from the hotel. When Baz got home, there mustn’t be the slightest trace of our visit. The subconscious takes in everything; when the mat isn’t at exactly the same angle, when the dust on the table has been inexplicably disturbed, little alarm bells start to ring. Most of us don’t hear them because we’re not smart enough to listen to all the things our brains are trying to tell us. But some people do, and Baz might just be one of them.
I peered round the door. The place reeked like every auntie’s house I’d ever gone into as a kid, of over-stewed tea, old newspapers and stale margarine.
I held my breath, opened my mouth, and cocked my ear. The only sound was the gentle ticking of a clock, off to my right. The opening of a door at night changes the atmospheric pressure in a house ever so slightly, but sometimes just enough for even a sleeping person’s senses to pick up.
I let go of the door and, keeping control of it with my left shoulder, stepped inside. I hooded the lens of the Maglite with my fingers, leaving just enough light to see there was a staircase rising steeply along the external wall to my left and a longish hallway dead ahead with two doors on either side of it.
A strip of flowery carpet ran down the centre of what looked like a parquet floor. The parquet was the first piece of good news I’d had since we made it through the front gate; it wouldn’t creak. The walls were bare, apart from a couple of framed pictures above a wooden chair with some coats thrown over it.
Baz didn’t seem like much of a homemaker, at first glance, but he was certainly keen on security. As I flicked the Maglite to my right, a floor-to-ceiling, steel-barred gate glinted in the beam, hinged to swing across the main entrance but opened flush against the wall. There were two receptors each side of the door and flat bars lying on the floor with a pair of padlocks.
I checked Baby-G. It was 2.28. We still had to find the safe, let alone defeat it. At this rate, we might be here for hours – and we only had about four and a bit left until first light.
Charlie made only the faintest of sounds as he shouldered the satchel and came in behind me. I was going to be in charge of the next phase, the room clearing; he would keep control of the noisemaker, the bag.
I covered the torch lens with a finger so that just enough light came out for us to move, leaned back and spoke softly into his ear. ‘Let’s just check for another exit. We need to concentrate on finding the safe.’
Charlie thought for a second, glanced at his watch, then nodded. I moved off, keeping to the nine-inch-wide strip of parquet at the right-hand edge of the carpet, so as not to disturb the pile, and trying to avoid rubbing against the walls.
I took two paces and stopped to give Charlie room to come in. He was already taking IR film with the camcorder, but handed me two rubber doorstops as he went past. Thank f*ck his brain hadn’t been in ‘Oh I forgot’ mode when he wrote down his kit list.
I closed the door softly behind me, and shoved one immediately below each of the two lever locks. If Baz came back unexpectedly, they would buy us a bit of time to play burglar. If he was already upstairs asleep and tried to do a runner, they would help make sure he didn’t get outside in a hurry, and start shouting for help.
Charlie switched the camcorder to standby. The plan was to record the layout of the place wherever we went, then check it on the way out to make sure we’d left everything exactly as we’d found it.
The doors off the corridor were all open, and I headed for the first one on my right. It was a living room, and by the look of it, Baz’s answer to Mrs Mop hadn’t been too energetic with her feather duster recently, though she had remembered to wind the grandfather clock. The dark wooden furniture and faded wallpaper somehow matched the smell.
Black-and-white pictures of a couple on the mantelpiece. His parents, maybe. Pictures of him as a little lad. Magazines littered across the floor, some quite recent ones in Russian, some in Paperclip.
The first phase of a house search is always a quick once-over. It would be pointless doing a detailed inspection of every room in sequence, only to find what you’re looking for smack in the middle of the very last room, three hours later. It’s on phase two that you start moving sofas, lifting carpets, looking up the chimney.
The two picture frames in the hallway held large, sepia photographs of the house during happier times. There were no bars on the windows, no other buildings in sight, and no wall, just a three-foot-high fence to keep the horses from munching the grass that had predated the courtyard.
We reached the door at the far end. It was hinged inwards on the left and open about an inch. I shone the torch round the frame to check for telltales. I couldn’t see anything. I signalled to Charlie and he filmed the gap.
I nudged it open with the end of the canister. It didn’t take long to realize this was the kitchen. The smell of margarine and old papers was so strong here it nearly made me gag, even through the ski mask. More old furniture; a wooden table and a couple of chairs. The cooker looked like Stalin might have done his baked beans on it. Had Whitewall pointed us at the wrong place?
I opened the door fully and found myself facing the external wall. Set into it, directly ahead of me, was what would have been the back door – if it hadn’t been covered completely by a large steel plate, bolted firmly into place.
I turned to Charlie and nodded. We were in the right house.