Chapter 1
When it comes to breaking into someone else’s house, there are rules.
The rules aren’t to protect the house, of course.
The rules are to protect you. Although confusingly, looking after the place is one of the rules.
If you’re going to be an interloper, which is my term for my highly specific profession, you have to treat the property as if it’s your own.
If you manage that, more often than not the few people you encounter will genuinely believe you own it, provided they didn’t see the rightful owner there last week.
The rules will always guide and defend you.
Case in point: here I am, outside one of the nicest houses in the whole of this little Sussex village, about to break in. I should be very tense indeed. But I’m perfectly calm, because I have the rules on my side.
I don’t want to make my work as an interloper sound twee, incidentally. I’m not a fucking Borrower. My job is glamorous, enjoyable and yields big rewards, but it does come with risks attached. And one of those risks, not that I know it yet, is about to bite me right on the arse.
Here’s how this whole mess started.
10.03 a.m. Paul Lethbridge – prosperous and fifty-something – is leaving for the airport.
‘Prosperous’ is my polite way of saying he’s let himself go a bit in his middle years.
But he does look wealthy. He’s got a kind of base suntan that you can tell he’s proud of, and that he doesn’t let get below a certain level even in midwinter.
If he has to go to Antigua in January to top it up, then off to Antigua he will go.
Even the band where his wedding ring used to lie is now the same uniform honey colour as the rest of his finger.
Paul’s not a bad guy, probably. He’s a bit short with people, a bit too confident in his own abilities, he’s got a high-pressure job, and he’s also been a bit too solitary for a few too many years to be considered truly ‘socialised’ any more.
But I could say the same of myself. And I’m certainly not a bad guy.
Mr Lethbridge isn’t going to Antigua today.
He’s setting off on a three-week trip to the Middle East to conduct some of the legal work that has paid for so much over the years: this house, mainly, and the primary residence in the city.
His work even manages to pay all the maintenance fees now required of him, more or less on time.
He’s leaving his car at home (a nice, newish proper Porsche; he’s sure all this electric nonsense will blow over in a few years) and cabbing to Gatwick.
Dev, the minicab driver, has been waiting twenty minutes already, but he doesn’t mind.
Mr Lethbridge is a reliable customer in an Uber-stricken industry.
Dev’s freshly vacuumed Toyota is waiting on the drive, inside the slightly overwrought-iron gates.
Out of the front door comes Mr L, frowning a bit when he sees the car and the tracks in his nice clean gravel; he wishes they’d wait on the road like he requested on the phone.
He locks the door, checks it, waits while young whatever-his-name-is loads his enormous case into the boot, conscious that it would be improper to offer any assistance, checks the door again for good measure.
Then he crunches across the drive and clambers into the back seat.
The gate swings ponderously open, and the car – a little lower on its wheel arches thanks to Mr L and his luggage – moves out onto the one-lane road and away.
10.04 a.m. Quiet descends once again on this little back road of this posh little village.
In the car, Mr L asks Dev to turn off Magic FM immediately, and checks his phone to see he’s booked into the right first-class lounge at the airport.
He doesn’t even glance at the rear-view mirror. Neither does Dev.
10.05 a.m. Back at the house, I emerge from the nearby lane, and start my day’s work.
I hope Mr L has a wonderful time in Jordan, but I’m glad he’s gone. He and I would make terrible housemates. And for the next three weeks, his house – gorgeous, Georgian from the look of it, tastelessly modernised but still with some wonderful original features – is mine.
I don’t look like much, incidentally. I’ve got a shirt and jacket on, a Covid mask (the greatest innovation of the last decade as far as my line of work is concerned), and dark blue jeans, tucked into some bog-standard old Dr Martens.
I could be literally any member of the gig economy right now, and I’m about as memorable.
Consider the last person who delivered a package to your place. Do you remember what they looked like?
Thought not.
Right now, I’m keeping as many of the rules as possible active in my head.
You know how most plane crashes happen on take-off and landing?
Interloping is just the same. Get in and get out OK, and the time in between practically takes care of itself.
Here are just a few of the rules I’m obeying already:
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 just are conspicuous – 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, the locked gate – 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 an outdoorsy 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.