Chapter 5
‘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. A tipsy gunman. 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.
‘Slow down. 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, inexperienced gunman. 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 found another thing 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 the package 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, please calm 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.’
I glance sideways. Em’s hand is inching towards her pocket.
She doesn’t need to type a message – if she can just dial Elle’s number, Elle will hear conversation, and …
I have no idea. Act appropriately. Even the police would be fine.
I’d rather be in a cell than under three feet of this guy’s back garden.
‘I’m serious,’ I say. ‘We are squatters, quite specialised ones, and we picked your house because it looked nice and we thought you were in Dubai. We don’t want any trouble and it looks like you don’t either. So we can just—’
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ This is to Em, whose hand freezes halfway into her pocket. ‘Give me that. Slowly.’
She hands her phone over. For a second it looks like he’s considering shooting it, but then realises how insane that would look and settles for dropping it on the desk, hoisting a brass paperweight in his free hand, and hammering it until the screen smashes.
‘No fucking calls. You’re staying in this room until I’ve worked out what to do with you. ’
He’s clearly appreciating the difficulty of his situation.
If all three of us acted at once, we could probably overpower him, but there’s no way for us to coordinate when we should go for it.
On top of that, we’re sitting and he’s standing.
If we all ran, he’d definitely shoot at least one of us, maybe two.
One of us might get away, but there’s no telling which one.
Oh, God, am I going to have to do something?
Jonny is clearly thinking the same thing.
He’s the tallest of us, even taller than our new friend, and squashed next to him on the sofa I can tell his entire body is tense.
Oh, boy. I don’t want Jonny to get himself shot, but I really don’t want to do anything myself.
Why can’t I think of the words that will persuade this guy to let us go?
‘What’s your name?’ I ask.
He scowls at me. ‘Piss off. Either your story is true, in which case I’m not telling you, or it’s not, in which case you already know.’
Jonny is about to move. I can feel it. He’s inching his body into a better position. I have to stop him. How? If I move, the man will shoot me. If I don’t, he’ll shoot Jonny. And even though I hardly know Em and Jonny, I don’t want either of them shot. For one thing, the man might miss and hit me.
I speak, aiming my words half at Jonny. I try to sound a bit more RP, too. This character of mine is one I’ve nicknamed Baffled Man Honestly Wronged. ‘I think we should all stay calm. I’m sure there’s some way we can prove to you that we are who we say, and we can let you go back to your—’
Just then, there’s a loud knock at the front door of the house.
Sausage Fingers hears the knock, and it’s his turn to freeze. ‘Christ. How many of you are there?’
‘That’s our friend. My sister,’ Em says. ‘She left her coat at the pub, we told her to come along when she’d got it. She’s one of us, she’s just another squatter. You’ll see, she looks like me.’
Sausage Fingers edges towards the door of the study, still covering us, and opens it. The knock comes again.
As he looks around, two thoughts occur to me.
The first is: Hang on, Em told Elle to phone when she got here.
The second is: Elle wouldn’t knock like that. That was an authoritative knock, as if whoever’s outside knows the place well. Elle seems more the sort to call – or ideally text – from the doorstep.
Unfortunately, because I have both of these thoughts at the same time, I’m only halfway through each of them when the man makes up his mind. He goes to the closed curtains, nudges one aside to make sure the window is locked, and looks at us again.
‘You might be telling the truth. You might not. You’re in the shit either way, I assure you. Don’t. Fucking. Move.’
He leaves the study.
We hear his footsteps cross the hall, we hear the door to the outer hall open, we hear a key turn in a deadlock, and we hear a click as the main door to the house opens.
Then we hear a thunderous, booming report, which – I’m no expert – can only have been made by a gun going off at close range.