Chapter 3
‘All right. Who the fuck are you?’
The one thing that’s stayed the same is the main feature – a gorgeous old box chair.
It’s the kind that used to be used for sedans – it still has the iron brackets on the side for the poles.
Whenever I come here, I like to spend half an hour sitting in the thing, imagining the total privacy it would have given you.
Must have been rare even two hundred years ago.
But that’s the rich all over, I guess. The whole aim is to shield yourself from the world.
Decor aside, I have to concede I’ve lost a bit of authority here, given that the girl currently slamming me against the wall is about four inches shorter than I am and slightly built to boot.
I break her hold by the undignified ‘thrash around’ method until she lets go of my shirt, but she keeps her face right up to mine.
‘Who are you?’ I glance down, because something is pricking my ribs.
She’s holding a brass blade – how did she get hold of that?
– which I dimly recognise as the old-fashioned letter-opener I admired but didn’t steal the last time I was staying here.
Honestly, you try to have principles about personal property, and this is how the world rewards you.
‘Come on. Name? Tell me or you get this.’ The letter-opener is pretty blunt, but I don’t really fancy learning the hard way whether it can break human skin.
‘You won’t be able to stab me with that,’ I say. ‘It struggles with thick card.’
She twists her head and bellows, ‘Guys! Intruder!’
Footsteps; then two people enter the scene, respectively stage left and balcony.
The newcomer at stage left is another young woman.
There’s no polite way of saying it, but she looks like a photocopy of the woman currently waving the letter-opener at me.
Her hair is longer and tied up in a bun, and she’s slightly shorter, but all the same features are there in different proportions.
She’s also wearing jeans and a jumper, whereas the one threatening to slit me for my contents is a bit more glammed up.
Maybe it’s because she’s not waving a weapon in my face, but I instantly warm to the second woman more than the one in front of me.
I’m prone to that sort of snap judgement.
Up on the first floor – looking over the balustrade – is a tall black guy, broad too. On his top half he’s wearing a hoodie that says MACRO DATA REFINEMENT (no idea). He’s holding an open laptop plus an extra power pack wedged into his left hand, and two phones in his right.
Both the newcomers converge on centre stage. The tall guy pockets his phones and carefully deposits the laptop on a side table – it’s running about eighteen programs, I can see from here – before returning to where the rest of us are standing.
‘Em, what is this?’
Em (Letter-Opener) stands back now her friends are here. Unhelpfully, she’s still between me and the door. If she wasn’t, I’d bolt in a second.
‘He tried to trick me into admitting I was the homeowner, and then he told me he knew it wasn’t my name. I think he’s a cop.’
The air thickens to the point that you could cut it even with a blunt letter-opener. I’m looking at three distinctly angry faces.
The photocopy asks: ‘What do we do with him?’
Letter-Opener has a bright idea. ‘Knock him out then drive him up to Hampstead Heath and leave him there. By the time he wakes up we’ll be gone. We were about to shift to the new gaff anyway.’
The guy speaks. ‘I’m not knocking anyone out, Em.’
Photocopy adds, ‘Also, if we knock him out we’ll need a bigger car. We won’t all fit in the Mini with one of us unconscious.’
‘We can’t just let him go, guys. We don’t know what he wants from us. And Jonny, in life sometimes you have to knock people out.’
‘I’m just saying, acts of violence are nothing but moments of short-term moral failure, which only ever breed new cycles of pain. I read that in my course.’
‘Jonny, please shut up about your course.’
Photocopy says, ‘We could go through his pockets. Or just keep asking him. Legally, I think they have to tell you if you ask three times.’
‘I don’t think the Met operate under that sort of honour system, El.’
At the risk of making things worse, I raise a hand.
‘Hello? Can I contribute here?’
All three of them are looking at me. It’s time to do what I do best: talk my way out.
‘I think I’ve picked up that there’s something going on here.
I just want to reassure you that if you think I’m in the police, I’m not.
I also won’t go to the police. You … uh, Em, was it?
’ – Letter-Opener scowls assent – ‘it sounds like you’re worried about me talking to anyone about this.
Rest assured I just want to get out of this house conscious and with all my organs in the same place. We can leave it at that.’
The tension in the room slackens a bit. Then Em says, ‘Bullshit,’ and it tightens again. I try hard not to sigh too obviously.
‘Right. Well, if you don’t believe me, let’s just remember that I’m also clearly not a vicar, as you’ve worked out. I …’
What am I, actually? I didn’t have a secondary cover set up after the vicar.
Dammit. This place was meant to be empty; why would I need a primary story, let alone a secondary one?
Faced with Em’s eyebrow, I completely fall apart, and for the first time in a while, I give someone an approximation of the truth.
‘… I thought this place was empty and that I might be able to stay here for a few nights. Clearly it’s not empty, and you were here first, so I can just—’
Photocopy interrupts me. ‘Sorry? Are you saying that you do this too?’
Half an hour has passed.
We’re in the principal drawing room (baby grand piano, gold brocade curtains with foot-long tassels, tatty Louis Quatorze sofas left by previous owner).
We’ve all got a cuppa, in this arrangement: Al – builder’s tea, two sugars; Em – some disgustingly sharp gunpowder concoction; Elle – Sleepytime herbal mix; Jonny – isotonic rehydration drink in ancient Sports Direct mug.
Things are much jollier than before, even if Em still has the letter-opener within shanking distance.
‘How long did you say you’ve been doing this?’ I ask.
‘Six months. We’re pretty pleased with how it’s been going so far.’ That’s Elle, who turns out to be – knew it – Em’s younger sister.
‘And you call it …’
‘Piscining.’
‘Why was that again?’
Em sighs. ‘Because El and I found out about it in France last year. Millions of places in France have their own swimming pools, way more than here. But there’s almost no way of enforcing the security of your own pool.
Owners keep getting home to find strangers have been enjoying their pools all day.
The police can’t do anything about it. We started doing that and just, you know, worked our way up to the homes themselves. ’
‘Via the pool house?’ I must have let a bit of scorn into my tone because Em bristles as she answers.
‘A lot of pool houses have bedrooms, bathrooms and food supplies. So yes, since you ask, we started in the pool houses before trading up. What about you?’
There’s no way I’m going to tell them anything more about myself than I already have.
Frankly, I don’t even like them knowing my fake name, never mind my real one.
Questions about people always deflect their attention back onto themselves, where they feel it naturally belongs, so I turn my focus: ‘And, sorry, how did you enter the scene, Jonny?’
‘We met online.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I met the girls when they needed something done. Security on a bigger place they wanted to get into. They were after a bit of technical support, and they found me via a little Discord server I was running.’
I have no idea what Discord is, but I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of asking. ‘So you managed to disable the security … remotely, did you say?’ He nods. ‘And then you just decided to throw in your lot with them.’
Another nod. ‘I was suffering some vexed matters of accommodation at that precise time.’ Jonny speaks like this a lot. ‘And it transpired that our talents are mutually complementary.’
Em hasn’t fallen for my new line of enquiry, or taken her eyes off me. ‘Anyway. What about you?’
I’ll have to tell them something, I suppose. ‘I’ve been interloping’ – slight emphasis there to show them it’s a) a proprietary term and b) the right one – ‘for about eight years now. And I’ve focused on one country. I’m pretty good at it.’
‘Hence you turning up and just knocking on the door tonight? That your standard modus operandi?’
‘There are plenty of good reasons to do that. Firstly, this place should have been empty …’
‘Which it wasn’t.’
‘… meaning it was important to ascertain what was going on.’
‘And you picked “trendy vicar” as your cover? Jesus.’
‘Nothing wrong with that.’ I stand by this. Ideally you want to be someone who most people would chew their thumbs off to avoid talking to, and an earnest vicar fundraising for a new pipe is the sweet spot. I’ve done a lot of Jehovah’s Witnessing in my time too.
‘How sweet. Guys, it feels like we’ve met the last of the old-time craftsmen in this business.’
Now it’s my turn to bristle. ‘For your information, what I do is very precise, it’s delicate.’
Em snorts.
‘I haven’t seen you guys get into a place, but I can guarantee my methods would be an improvement.’
Elle squeaks at that, and claps. ‘Well why don’t you come along with us tomorrow?’
Em and Jonny’s heads both snap round to her. ‘Sorry?’
‘Yeah, Elle, what the fuck?’
‘He wants to see how we work. We should show him. It’s not like he’s a threat, we know that now. It’s only an hour’s drive.’
All three of the rest of us have our hands up.
‘Excuse me, but I’m not your apprentice …’
‘No way are we letting this random creep come along …’
‘My systems are calibrated for the three of us, no more …’
‘Sorry, did you say “creep”? Because …’
‘I’d say it again in a heartbeat, you little weirdo …’