Tim was right of course but breaking into people’s houses, even though I’d done it before, all in a good cause, you understand, wasn’t a task I relished.
‘I’ll come with you if you like,’ Annis offered. ‘As long as we don’t have to climb up ladders or go up drainpipes.’ Annis was fearless at sea level but couldn’t stand heights.
‘No, there’s no point. The fewer bodies on this journey the better.’ Especially with someone as accident prone as me at the helm. ‘I’ll do it by myself and I’ll do it tonight.’
Chapter Fourteen
The feeble beam of the Norton’s headlamp was half drowned by the downpour and illuminated nothing but ten yards of rain bouncing hard off the slickened tarmac on the nightblack lane. I approached the house from the other side, that way I could avoid going through Monkton Farleigh; the otherworldly exhaust note of the machine might stick in the minds of light sleepers in the village. Despite having pored over a map earlier I had no exact idea how far away from Restharrow I was, but when at last I spotted a passing place in the lane that wasn’t filled with several inches of water I gratefully parked the bike, stuffed my gloves into the helmet and hung it on the handlebars. The rain had returned at midnight and had fallen relentlessly out of black skies since then, yet I had eschewed Annis’s offer of the Landy. It was much easier to find a place for stashing the bike than a bulky Land Rover. The drawbacks of using two wheels however became quickly obvious: I was wet, very, very wet. I shivered inside my rain-heavy, sodden gear and set off. My left boot had sprung a leak and before long I had managed to step into a good-sized puddle with it and was miserably squelching along in near total darkness. I had hoped to negotiate my way to the house by starlight but with a hundred per cent cloud cover and pouring rain I was soon forced to use the Mini Maglite I had brought. After five minutes of trudging along the undulating lane I realized I had parked too far from the house. A couple of minutes later I was wondering whether to go back and move the Norton when Restharrow appeared as if out of nowhere, looming darker in the darkness on my right. I killed the light and stood in the big, cold, wet darkness for a while. It yielded nothing. No light was showing at the house. In fact there was no light anywhere and I couldn’t hear a thing beyond the relentless rain. I wondered how weather affected the burglary figures but not for long because this burglary couldn’t wait for a balmy summer’s evening. The only good thing about the heavy rain was that it might help to mask little sounds, like me squelching off the road and walking painfully into a fence I hadn’t seen. I clicked the torch on at short intervals to get my bearings then tried to battle on without it but the darkness out here seemed complete. After slipping and falling once, bumping my knee against the stone wall twice and repeatedly getting my jacket caught on invisible snags I’d had enough and turned on the torch for good. I was bound to make less noise that way.
I managed to scramble over the wall — a child would have done it in half the time — towards the back of the garden and dropped into a muddy flowerbed on the other side. Something hard and thorny travelled up my trouser leg as I did and sliced my calf open as I came down. Before I could stop myself I had informed the darkness in pithy, monosyllabic words of what I thought about this development.
Well, Rufus Connabear was either still asleep or he wasn’t. If he was awake and looking out of his windows then he’d be calling the police about now, if not then I had the smallest chance of getting away with this lunatic effort. I had to keep the torch on all the time now just to avoid big pots full of dead-looking plants everywhere and some concrete bunny rabbits with scary, knowing smiles. At last I got to the back of the cottage and the dense evergreen shrubs that obscured the window I had unlocked on my previous visit. I had to crouch low and come up close to the wall to get through there at all. The windows opened outwards. I put the Maglite in my mouth and got my fingernails under the frame and pulled. Nothing. I pulled harder. More nothing. I got out my keys and used one as a lever. It bent. I trained the torch beam higher to where the latch was. It looked open. Of course when I’d unfastened the latch earlier I hadn’t had time to try whether the window actually opened. For all I knew it had been painted shut three generations ago. I fought my way out of the wet and scratchy shrub and decided I was already thoroughly cheesed off with the way my night was panning out. Having squeezed under the tiny ornamental porch of the back door for some shelter I fumbled with muddy hands for a cigarette that was already drooping with dampness when I prized it out of the packet. Miraculously I got it lit. For a brief moment I stood there, pressed against the kitchen door, and enjoyed the illusion of warmth my smoke provided until a large and well-aimed drop of rain extinguished the glow with a hiss. Disgusted, I flicked the wet thing into the darkness; one for the forensic boys.
Plan B: I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and tried the door handle. The door was locked, but it was always worth a try.
Plan C then: I shone my torch through the little glass pane closest to the lock. Sure enough, the key was in the door. I got the glass cutters out and one of those hooks with suction nipples we used for hanging tea towels from. I stuck the nipple on to the pane, gave it a tug to test it was on, then cut a triangle out of the glass. Holding on to the hook with one hand I gave it a tap with the cutter’s handle and it snapped loose. I eased it out and let it fall into the nearest flowerpot. Through the resulting hole I could now easily reach the key. I turned it very slowly, then tried the door handle again. The lock was disengaged but the door still didn’t want to open. There had to be a bolt somewhere. At the top? At the bottom? Both? The bottom one would hold me up for at least five minutes but most people stopped bothering with it after a while because it meant bending down, so made do with the one at the top. Or they installed a cat flap, which rendered the bolt meaningless, as anyone could simply reach through.
I engaged the cutter again at the top pane of glass and it snapped out as easily as the first. Reaching through I found the bolt and wriggled it back, a fraction of an inch at a time, until the door eased open. I looked down. Sure enough, there was an identical bolt at the bottom which had not been engaged. I slipped inside and gently clicked the door shut behind me. The noise of the rain fell away. Standing still in the kitchen I listened: water dripping off me on to the floor; a fridge-freezer humming near the door. The workings of the grandfather clock in the hall seemed monstrously loud. I crept forward and was appalled at the squelching sound my left boot produced. Putting weight only on to the heel stopped the noise but didn’t exactly make me feel sure-footed. First I investigated the sitting room. I had a strong feeling the stamp collection would be upstairs but would feel like an idiot if I had braved the stairs and the whole of the first floor with Connabear asleep only to later find what I was looking for downstairs. Some of the bookshelves had drawers at the bottom. At first I thought I’d hit pay dirt when I found fat albums wedged into one but they turned out to be full of deckle-edged black and white prints of people taking cycling holidays. I closed the heavy drawer carefully, straightened up, turned and swept an ornament off the shelf with the little black rucksack I’d forgotten I was carrying. It hit the thick carpet with a horribly loud thump but didn’t break. I put it back where I thought it had been. It was another bunny rabbit and seemed to have the same evil smile as its larger cousins in the garden. After having managed to squeeze around the sofas, armchairs, tables and plant stands without knocking anything else over I started on the dreaded stairs. I just knew they would creak at some point, no matter how lightly I trod, and sure enough, the last but one groaned loudly as I stood on it. I froze. My breath seemed so loud I was sure it could be heard for miles around. I waited, ready for flight should I hear the slightest sound, but nothing happened. Eventually I gathered the nerve to take the last two steps. I stood in the thickly carpeted upstairs corridor, carefully playing the torch beam about. There were five doors, all of them closed apart from the one at the end. From there vitreous china sparkled in the torch beam, which made it a safe bet for being a bathroom. This still left a bewildering choice of doors. At all times while thinking about the break-in I had firmly held in my mind an image of one closed door — with Connabear comfortably and noisily snoring behind it — and the others open for me to wander in and out of until I’d located the Penny Black.