I stood up.
His bookshelf was beside his bed, the water glass from three nights ago still sitting on it, the mark of his lips on the rim, but I toughened my heart, pushed the glass aside, and began looking through the books, my head to one side as I read the titles on the spines. A Confederacy of Dunces, nope. Fermat’s Last Theorem, nope. The Cement Garden. Empire of Pain. The Music of the Primes. Nope, nope, and nope.
I scanned the shelves, growing frustrated now, looking at the familiar, Gabe-ish mix of literary novels and sciencey nonfiction. Our tastes had never converged that much—I leaned more towards Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robin Hobb—your basic sci-fi/fantasy nerd. Which made it all the harder to recall the title that Gabe had mentioned. Still, it was none of the ones here, I was ready to swear to that.
And then I saw it. Not upright on the shelf but lying crossways, wedged into the gap between the books and the shelf above. Old and battered, the schlocky 1960s jacket peeling and a little torn.
The Glass Key, by Dashiell Hammett.
I heard Gabe’s deep, amused voice rumble in my ears. A key for a key, get it?
I pulled it out, carefully, because the paper was old and brittle and I could feel the glue on the spine was ready to crack, and opened it up.
Inside the front cover were three long codes, carefully written out in pencil, each over twenty characters long, and a mix of numerals and letters.
One of those entries—and I had no idea which one—represented somewhere north of twenty thousand pounds, although the amount fluctuated so much that it was impossible to know on any given day how much was in there. And all I needed to access it were these numbers.
There was no time to write out the full strings, and I certainly couldn’t memorize them, so I picked up the book and stuffed it in the top of the rucksack. As I did so, a noise from outside made my pulse jump.
It was a noise I knew well, one I’d made myself just a few nights ago, in fact. It was someone kicking over the milk bottles on the front step.
“Balls,” I heard from the front garden. “Sorry, just tripped over the milk bottles.”
There was the crackle of a radio, inaudible words blaring out under a blast of static, and when I peered cautiously through the bedroom curtains, I saw a police officer standing in front of my door, holding a mobile phone.
I hadn’t thought it would be possible for my heart to beat any faster, but now it sped up.
“Yeah,” I heard. “Yeah, gotcha. Heading in now, but I’m pretty sure she won’t be here. I’ve not seen anyone except the postman. Hang on. Key’s a bit stiff.”
Shit. Shit. I had to get out of here.
Shouldering the bag, I ran as swiftly and quietly as I could down the corridor, but I had barely made it halfway to the top of the stairs when I heard the second key turn in the front door. For a moment I froze, looking longingly at the bathroom door—but it was in sight of the front door, which was about to open at any second. Instead I turned around and bolted back into our bedroom, pulling the door closed behind me.
Inside I stood with my eyes shut and my ear pressed to the door, the better to hear what was going on downstairs. There was a metallic bang as the front door flung open and the latch banged against the hallway wall (my paintwork!) and then the heavy tread of a police officer stepping inside my house.
I held my breath, listening, wondering what I should do.
“I’m inside,” I heard, faintly, from downstairs. “Can’t see anything amiss. Let me just have a recce.”
There was an answering crackle from the radio, and I heard the officer’s feet on the hallway floor, and the screech of the squeaky board as he stepped into the living room.
Thanking God for old Victorian houses, I carefully turned the handle of the bedroom door and put one foot out onto the landing—only to bolt back inside as I heard the crackle of the radio and the officer’s footsteps in the hall again.
“Nothing down here. I’ll just take a look upstairs.”
Shit. Now I was really trapped. There was no way I could leave with him coming up the stairs, and no way he wouldn’t come into the bedroom. Would he search the wardrobes? Under the bed?
For a moment I stood frozen in indecision, and then, at the sound of a creaking tread on the bottom-most stair, I shook myself out of it. What I had told myself back at Arden Alliance was just as true now as it had been then: In this job, doing nothing was a risk in itself. Sometimes you just had to go on your gut.
I ran across the bedroom, avoiding the loose floorboard under the window, wrenched open the wardrobe door, and leapt inside, yanking the door shut behind me.
Just in time.
The clothes were still swinging on their hangers when I heard the bedroom door creak open and the sound of the officer’s boots on the rug. My heart was thumping in my ears and I clasped the bag hard to my chest as though it could muffle the sound. Through the crack of the wardrobe door I could see his shape, dark against the window, and I watched, breath bated as he bent and looked under the bed, then straightened. Even through the door, I could hear the heavy sound of his breathing. He sounded like he had a cold, or perhaps was asthmatic. Could police officers have asthma? If he wasn’t very fit then I might be able to outrun him. I just hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
I closed my eyes, willing myself not to make a single sound, even though the wardrobe was painfully cramped, and the faux fur stole I had bought for Hel’s wedding was tickling my nose. Please, please, I begged him telepathically. Please get the fuck out of here…
And then, almost as if I’d willed him into it, he turned and I saw him walk back towards the door.
I let out a silent, shuddering breath of relief.
And then I sneezed.
For a second, stupidly, I almost thought I’d got away with it—that the officer had put it down to a noise from outside.
And then he turned on his heel and came back into the room and I knew I was sunk. There was only one thing in my favor now, and that was the element of surprise.
With a wild yell, I crashed out of the wardrobe, sending the doors flying open and the officer tripping backwards in shock. He recovered and came for me, round the end of the big bed, and I dodged right, not left, as he had apparently been expecting, leaping over the mattress and using its spring to catapult myself towards the bedroom door.
“Stop!” I heard him yell from behind me. “Stop! Police!”
But I didn’t. I wasn’t stupid enough for that. Instead I pounded down the corridor and then paused with a split second of indecision at the landing. Downstairs and onto the street, or out the back the way I had come?
Both had risks; in front of the house was the police car and the very real possibility of another officer inside it, warned by the commotion inside the house.
But going out the back meant if they closed off the alleyway, I would be trapped.
There was no time to weigh up the options. Barely pausing, I slammed into the bathroom, yanked open the sash window, and threw myself out onto the icy roof, rolling across the graveled surface with the puddle ice crackling at my back.
There was no time for the careful, controlled descent I had planned. Instead I almost launched myself off the other side of the roof, into my neighbor’s garden—his fence would make one more obstacle for the police if they were coming out of my back door.
“Stop!” I could hear from behind me, and the sound of heavy, panting breaths. “I am ordering you—”
I landed with a thump, the shock radiating up through my knees, caught sight of my elderly neighbor’s startled face, gazing out of his kitchen window, then straightened painfully and made for the gate into the alleyway. I had to get out before the officer called for backup and the alley became a dead-end trap.
The gate was padlocked, and there was no time for picks, even assuming the rusted mechanism worked. Instead I threw the go bag over into the passage, backed up, and took a short run up to the wall. I dug my fingers into the crumbling mortar at the top, ignoring the screeching protest of my nails as they cracked and splintered, scrabbled until my foot found a convenient loose brick, and then pulled myself up to flop chest-down on top of the wall.
I felt it as soon as I landed, a stabbing pain in my side, just below my ribs. Glass? A knotty bit of clematis? There was no time to pause and check. From up here, I could see the police officer levering himself painfully out of the bathroom window, his radio to his mouth, and I could hear his wheezing breaths and the crackle of response codes.