‘Don’t move,’ he says. This is superfluous. I’m so surprised I couldn’t move if he set my jeans on fire.
It’s harder than you think to recognise a gun when you’re looking directly at it. There’s almost nothing to see. It’s only when he moves his hand a fraction that I think to myself:Al, you’re now standing at gunpoint.Weird word,gunpoint. If it ever applies to you, you’re not the one doing the pointing. Oh my God, Al. Concentrate, will you?
The man gets to his feet, rather unsteadily. He’s one of those men who seems a normal height in a chair, only for you to reconsider as he keeps on unfolding upwards. Keeps his height in his legs. The side table has a bottle of wine on it, down to the last inch. Atipsygunman. Today keeps improving.
‘Move across there and sit.’
Rule 7 is one of the most important in the entire interloper’s bible:Talk. When you’re talking, you can shape the conversation, and if you can do that, you can usually buy yourself the time you need to improve your situation. When I met Mr Lethbridge yesterday – God, yesterday? – I said so much and so fast that he was putty in my hands. If you keep speaking, people don’t notice the cracks in the last sentence you said, because you’ve just given them a new one to absorb.
But I’m so mesmerised by the pistol’s pert little mouth as it follows me that I fail to say a single word, and instead move to the overstuffed sofa he bids me towards. It’s one of those really comfortable ones you can fall into if you’re not careful, meaning you’ll take about thirty seconds to get out of it.
The other thought I have is:Three. Three jobs in a row have gone wrong now. The Lethbridge place, Balfour Villas, and now this. The last job that went wrong before these was a year ago, when I was masquerading as an equine physiotherapist and someone asked me a difficult question about horse musculature. What is going on? Maybe I’m cursed. Maybe this is my life now.
The big guy speaks. ‘What’s that?’
‘Just my camera.’ My hand goes to my side.
‘Slowdown. Don’t get it out. Just unclip it, drop it, and sit.’
I do as he says, and perch on the sofa’s edge.
I notice, as I move, that the man’s gun hand isn’t terribly steady. I’m no marksman, but I can tell when someone is capable at whatever they’re doing, and I’d be surprised if this guy had ever held a gun before, from the way he’s clutching it.Half his hand is gripping too tight, and his massive fingers are all squished up in the wrong parts. A tipsy,inexperiencedgunman. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
Still covering me with a wobbling barrel, he moves across the room and opens the door. ‘Call your friends down here. Don’t mention me.’
‘OK. No problem, man.’ Man? What a weird label to affix to someone who might kill me at any moment. An old joke occurs to me.What do you call a three-hundred-pound gorilla armed with a shotgun? Sir.God, is that going to be the last dad joke I ever think of? I raise my voice. ‘Guys? Can you come here a second?’
Jonny arrives first. He has the same reaction to the gun that I did, and at our new friend’s urgent gesture, he sits beside me.
Em arrives last. She’s already talking as she comes in: ‘What is it, have you foundanotherthing you think you can do better than …’ She tails off.
‘Get over there.’
I see her considering making a move, then thinking better of it. At the same moment, her hand goes to her jeans pocket, and I’m pretty sure we’re having the same thought.Elle. If we get a message to her, she can … call the police? Something cleverer than that?
It’s getting quite cosy on the sofa.
‘All right. Who sent you?’
He’s big in every way, this guy. Huge hands – real sausage fingers – and a muffin-top neck mushrooming out of his collar. His shirt buttons are doing the Lord’s work keeping thepackage together. The visible bits of skin above his no-longer-a-neckline have the kind of overboiled redness that you only get with a rigorous regimen of putting away a bottle of wine or two each day for a couple of decades. His accent is Essex, I think, and his short grey hair is incongruously spiked all over.Maybe he used to be a punk.God, the irrelevant thoughts you have when someone might be about to shoot you.
I find my voice first. ‘Sent? Nobody sent us. We’re sorry, we—’
‘Don’t talk shit. One of the Balham lot? The cops?’
‘Sir, we really don’t know what you mean.’ Jonny is going for the ‘sir’ option, and good for him. ‘We’re just squatters.’
‘High-end ones,’ I’m compelled to add. It’s genuinely possible I’m going to get myself shot because I needed to clarify that I’m a cut above your standard home invader. ‘We saw your house online. We thought it was empty.’
‘Yeah, yeah, and I’m Princess Michael of Kent,’ the man says. ‘Where’s your gun? Or was it going to be some other way? You look like the one who’d do it,’ he says, pointing to Jonny.
‘Do what?’
‘If you guys don’t tell me who sent you, I’ll start shooting the sofa, and I’m a very bad shot.’ He raises his pistol; I raise my hands in the universal gesture for ‘please,pleasecalm down’.
‘Look, we don’t know who you are. We don’t know anything about this house except that we thought it was empty. We don’t know your name, we know nothing about you. If you want us to, we can just go now.’
He laughs. ‘Oh, yeah. I see. You guys break in to find out if I’m here, is that it? And someone’s waiting at the gate to do me as I leave? No thank you.’
