A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering

Prologue

This is the part where I explain how I ended up here. It’s also the point – I think this is right – where I explain how terribly sorry I am about all the poor decisions that landed me here in the first place.

I’m not very remorseful, to be honest, although I hope that fact doesn’t come out at trial.

I’m rather embarrassed to be here, especially given how many lovely homes I’ve been in over the years, but self-pity is a terrible look, and I had a pretty good run until all this.

And as for poor decisions … I think I would have ended up here anyway sooner or later. I just came by the scenic route.

Incidentally, you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to get access to a computer in here, provided you aren’t too fussy about things like ‘the internet’.

I’ve signed up for a course in IT Literacy, meaning I get an hour a day on a whacking great Dell in the badly named Information Suite (it’s less a suite than a cupboard, and most people come out of it worse informed than they went in).

Not many people want to use the Suite. The PCs in it were forged around the Late Cretaceous, meaning they are a) the size of a room and b) almost completely useless.

Also, I guess a lot of my colleagues here were arrested by a PC, so the term has bad associations.

I love a prison opening to a story, by the way.

Sorry. That’s another distraction, because you’re already champing at the bit to get on and find out how I – a bright young man with marketable skills and good prospects – managed to end up in more trouble than anyone else in almost the entire cell block, piss off both the law and the criminals, and nearly get himself killed about six times along the way.

But I do love a prison opening. You can’t beat them.

Just watch Kind Hearts and Coronets, or read the one about that girl who literally murdered all her relatives and still managed to make herself seem like the wronged party.

A prison opening tells you this is going to be fun.

It also gives away that I live to tell the tale, although to preserve a bit of mystery I won’t tell you what sort of state I’m in right now.

I’ll tell you this for free: my skincare routine has seen better months.

Anyway. My current circumstances are south London and medium security.

They don’t tie you down at night, which is how you can tell it from a maximum security place, but they do check the locks on the doors every few days, which is how you can differentiate it from minimum security.

I argued that maybe I should be in solitary for my own protection, but they laughed and told me not to be a drama queen.

I think solitary must cost them a lot more.

Although I’m actually in the Info Suite right now, typing this up under Gertrude’s lazy eye, imagine me sitting in the Visitors’ Room.

This isn’t one of those fancy American set-ups, with the little phone and the wipe-clean screens.

No, this is a proper British public-sector environment, which means durable carpet tiles and plastic-coated single-seat armchairs.

They have uncomfortably high arms, so it’s hard to get at your pockets, and they’re positioned nice and far from each other, to make it that little bit harder to hand over any contraband that avoided the friskings.

Right now, I’m waiting for a friend (lawyer) to turn up and tell me how the rest of my story is falling out.

My trial is considered much lower priority than the others, but there’s also nowhere to bail me to.

Not only that, nobody had any inclination to pay my bail, so I’m just waiting around.

It’s probably the best place to be; the story I set in motion is prompting quite the kerfuffle out there.

I’m not surprised, really. Any story featuring luxury property, big-money fraud, international espionage and high treason will snag the attention of even the thickest newspaper editor.

So those are my circumstances. A bit under-vegetabled, a bit short on vitamin D, some split ends (do men get split ends?), but alive, and typing with all the fingers that still work.

As for how it all started … God. That’s harder.

I have considered the various points where it ‘began’.

There’s the moment we heard the shot, of course, although that’s too neat.

Then there was the bit where I met Em and her friends for the first time, although if she and I hadn’t already been in the same line of work, we’d never have teamed up.

In fact, I know where it started: 14 Cadbury Lane.

My last solo job. If that had gone well – all right, if I hadn’t screwed it up so badly – I’d still be a free man now.

I wouldn’t have encountered Davy, or Mr Bowling Ball, and I wouldn’t have found out about the yacht’s-worth of money that got me into this whole mess.

I wouldn’t have met Em, Elle or Jonny, and I wouldn’t have become the primary focus of at least three law enforcement agencies and eight criminal gangs.

I wouldn’t have got someone else shot, or myself banged up.

But much like the Crown Prosecution Service, these things are sent to try us.

Here’s how it began.