Rule 11:Daylight is better for getting in.You’d be amazed how conspicuous you feel at night. It’s bad for your nerves. Actually, you justareconspicuous – it’s much harder to see what you’re doing, you might need a light, and the element of plausible deniability when you are found skulking around a basement window at 3 a.m. is almost nil, compared with you getting into the same predicament at 3 p.m. You’re practically asking to be caught. No thank you. Let sunshine win the day.
Rule 17:Approach on foot.Cars are so easily scanned these days. None of the houses I go for have cameras on – for obvious reasons – but if it comes to the worst and there’s a camera nearby, it’ll have your plates, and if something goes wrong and the tapes are investigated, you’re stuffed. Leave the car nearby and arrive on foot. It all counts towards your 10,000 steps.
Rule 21:No suitcases.They drag, they make a hell of a racket on almost any surface, and they catch the eye. ‘I didn’t know there was someone visiting number 17, dear,’ the neighbours will say as they peep out. ‘Hang on, aren’t they away? And this boy doesn’t look like the rightful owner!’ Ugh. Instead, go for a casual weekend bag over one shoulder, and slip into the place unnoticed. Many of my interloping rules, incidentally, are subdivisions of Rule 3:Make yourself as forgettable as possible.
The Lethbridge gates open at the touch of a button. This isn’t surprising: almost all gates open during daylight hours if you press 0. People are far more concerned about the chance of missing a package than they are about someone getting into their home, which is fair enough, because everyone gets deliveries all the time these days, while the odds of me turning up at your house are slim.
What have we got? The house is low, two storeys, and comfortably double-fronted. There will be a few rustic-chic outbuildings round the back, no doubt, via the gate – damn, thelockedgate – leading to the rear. No keys to be found on an initial sweep of the front, neither beneath the rather bedraggled pots (good, there’s clearly no gardener) nor under the doormat (Welcome to Sin City!A post-divorce present from a mate, I bet). And, crucially, no alarm. You wouldn’t believe how few places actually have alarms, and although there are ways to get around them, there’s something much more relaxing about the whole experience when there’s no need to fiddle about with wires or override codes.
I give it twenty minutes before I’m in.
I leave my shoulder bag in the front, discreetly hidden behind a huge terracotta urn that’s about as authentic as Mr Lethbridge’s sparkling front teeth, and after a bit of undignified crawling and wriggling over the side gate, I’m in the back garden. No cat flap; no unlocked doors anywhere. I grudgingly upgrade the owner to a Category 2, or NTC (Not Totally Clueless). But there is a shed, and where there are sheds there are ladders. And ladders are a perfect mechanism for accessing all the roof windows and skylights that nobody ever checks, because what sort of nutter would try to get in via the roof?
Halfway to the shed, I look around. The house is shielded from its neighbours even this far into the garden. This is the back street of the village. At the far end, the garden dips away into a beautiful strip of woodland. I know from Google Maps that there’s a golf course beyond the woods, and I’m pleased to report the trees are far too thick to be seen through. It’s perfect. God bless you, Mr Lethbridge.
10.38 a.m.Mr L is out of the car. He’s paid Dev (£56 one way: Mr L considers this cheeky considering it was only £48 last time, and tips four quid on top of the fee, which expressed as a percentage makes him sound like a stingy bastard but really was just a convenient way of rounding up to £60, and nobody can blame him for that). He retrieves his enormous case and moves onto the travelator towards Departures.
10.42 a.m.This is tougher than I thought it would be.
There wasn’t a ladder in the shed. I looked everywhere. The garden is lovely, although it’s a bit neglected; Mr L is not anoutdoorsy type. Through the windows of one of the side rooms, I can see a gym that is worryingly well equipped for a man living alone. I might have twenty years on him, but I wouldn’t like to come up against Mr L in a fight.
Fortunately, what the place lacks in ladders it makes up for in trellises. The trellis leads – with a minimum of breakage and zero footprints in the flower bed – to the first floor, the roof of which slopes up to a lovely slanting skylight. It’s been left closed, of course, but these things always have a release catch somewhere. I pull out a few of my favourite tools and get to work.
10.43 a.m.At Gatwick Departures, the automatic check-in is broken – a cyberattack, according to a little paper sign that has been printed on the last working printer in the terminal – and so Mr L joins the queue. It moves briskly enough, and when he gets to the front of it, he announces his name. The girl behind the desk asks him for another key bit of information.
He pats his coat pockets. Then he pats his trouser pockets, followed by his coat pockets again, and frowns.
10.47 a.m.Exactly as Mr L is searching his clothes for the third time, I’m dropping the twelve-ish feet from the skylight window onto the floor of the orangery. (You wouldn’t believe how many houses in my line of work come with an orangery. I’ve never seen one containing so much as a single orange.) Twelve feet is not afundistance to drop, but it’s onto a rug thick enough to lose a cat in, and I’m not yet thirty. Despite that, I fumble the landing. As I’m swivelling with feline grace to hit the ground, bend,rolland recover, I realise I haven’tturned quite far enough. I crash clumsily onto my ankle, and Christ it hurts.Find icegoes onto the crowded to-do list. You clown, Al.
Never mind that for the moment, because I’m in. This is the golden half-hour.
I check my watch. I gave myself twenty minutes to get in; it actually took me forty-five. How discomfiting. Three years ago it would have taken me ten. This is the third job in a row where I’ve taken longer than I predicted. I’m either getting too careful, too careless (as my swelling ankle suggests) or too old. None of these options is comforting.
Never mind that right now. Golden half-hour.
11.14 a.m.Phew. Task list completed, comfortably inside the Golden H-H. That means I’ve done the following:
One.Spottedthe exits. In this house there’s the big beech front door, which is definitely not the best option. There’s also a door out the back of the kitchen, which is a safe bet, some French doors at the back of the living room that I’ve taken the precaution of unlocking, and a big window in the back wall of the orangery which also looks out over the garden, so I’ve slipped the catch of that one, just in case. That window is actually my best option, rather than the French doors in the living room, because it leads directly onto the flagstone path running down the middle of the garden towards the woodland gate.
Two.Sortedany damage I caused getting in. No problem here. The orangery skylight is sealed again. I’ve checked therug for anything I might have dropped, and the room looks as good as it did before I fell through the top of it. Easy.
Three.Snappedthe arrangement of the key rooms, bedside tables, etc. It might seem like overkill to you, but when you are plotting an orderly departure – in other words, when an interlope has gone according to plan – it really makes a difference to have pictures, so you can get everything back in its rightful place. If anything goes wrong, of course, you’ll have more to worry about than whether the alarm clock on the bedside table was facing left or right. As you’re about to see.
Four.Secureda spare set of keys. No need to explain why these will come in handy. Mr L keeps his in a little leather posing-pouch in the hall table.
Five.Stashedmy bag by the nearest exit, the orangery window. I know, it seems excessive – the man is going to be a thousand miles away for the best part of a month – but keeping your kit near your chief exit is a useful habit. After all, we’re still in the stage of the job when things are likeliest to go wrong. I’ll check the flight gets off OK, and once 24 hours have elapsed, I’ll unpack a bit.
Six.Putthe kettle on. The houses I break into – no, that Imake my wayinto; ‘breaking’ only happens one time in three, and I always make good – might all have hi-tech kettles, but the problem is that they almost never have milk. So I’ve brought a pint with me. Easy.
The interior is lovely. A bit much stripped wood for my liking, but I can see what they were going for. It’s the kind ofhouse a banker might have bought in the nineties, if you know what I mean. I can see from the wall chart – God bless you for making my life easy, Mr L – that there’s a cleaner coming on Thursday, who I’ll have to watch out for. I might just pop out for the morning, give her lots of time. You have to do a double clear-out when the cleaners come – no sense in filling the bins up and creating difficult questions – but that’s a small price to pay, because if they do their job right they destroy a lot of evidence that you were ever there.
11.26 a.m.This, in case you were wondering when we’d get to it, is the part where I made my big mistake. We haven’t heard from Mr L for a while, have we?
I’m on the corner sofa, which runs to about two acres of plush dark green velvet. I’ve got my tea made: optimisticWORLD’S BEST DADDYmug, clearly being kept as proof. I’ve popped some frozen peas on my ankle. I’ve even – and this is one of the small touches on which I pride myself – got a coaster out from the central stack.Lighthouses of the Northis the theme. I know he’s technically one of my ‘victims’ (hate that word), but I’m beginning to like Mr L.
The sofa I’m in faces away from the window. I’m not going to sit in the uncomfortable chair opposite me just to keep eyes on the front of the property. That decision will prove to have been a bit stupid.
And then, I hear it. The faint noise of an engine in the lane outside. The problem is, the windows are triple-glazed, so it’s extremely quiet, and honestly, I’ve had a busy few days scoping this place out, getting out of my last place, and itsimply doesn’t occur to me that anything untoward could have happened.
