Unless...
I did another quick tour of the house and couldn’t find anything else missing. My iPad and iLaptop were all where they should be, along with my near-worthless television and DVD player. So was my other jewellery, the stuff I didn’t store in the bread bin. I even dug out my under-used cheque book from the bedside drawer and established no cheques were missing from the middle (a cunning ruse I’d read about in some magazine or other – steal a few from the middle, rather than the whole book, and nobody notices they’re gone until it’s too late). I’m not sure even thieves use cheques much any more, though, and apart from a few objects of purely sentimental value, there was nothing else worth nicking in the entire house. And none of it had been nicked anyway.
But someone still shouldn’t have come into my place, even if their only score was a piece of jewellery I’d effectively offered to them.
I grabbed my phone and went back into the kitchen to retrieve the note from the counter, ready to have it to hand when the police arrived. Did one dial 999 in these non-urgent circumstances, or were you supposed to look up the number of the local station? I had no idea.
I hesitated, and put the phone down.
* * *
The next day at work was hectic and slightly bizarre, as the woman who shares my office appeared to undergo a teeny tiny mental breakdown in the late morning, and stormed out, never to return. I’d always thought she was a bit bonkers and so I wasn’t totally surprised, though I was impressed by how much chaos she left in her wake.
My boss took the event admirably in his stride. He looked dispiritedly at the mess she’d made, told me to leave it for now, but asked if I’d mind answering her calls until she either came back or he could hire a replacement. This meant I was busy as hell all afternoon, but I prefer it that way. The working day slips by far more quickly when you don’t have time to think, and I’d already spent more than enough time arseing about on the Internet during the morning.
I had time to think on the tube journey home, and of course what I mainly thought about was what had happened the night before.
I hadn’t called the police, in the end. It was late and I was tired, and although the event had freaked me out a little, I couldn’t face dealing with them.
Also... I just thought Well, that’s the end of it. The police wouldn’t be able to find the thief (who wasn’t even technically a thief, of course; I suppose “intruder” is all I could legitimately say he’d been), and so it’d end up in a dusty log in the local police station and they’d give me a crime number which I could use in dealing with the insurance company if I chose to try to claim something back for the piece of jewellery.
Before I’d gone to sleep I’d tidied the event away in my mind, electing not to think any more about it, and I reinforced this on the tube and throughout the five-minute walk in the freezing rain from the station – during which, wanton hedonist that I am, I also stopped at the corner store to buy a frozen ready-meal to zap in the microwave for my tea. Plus a small tub of ice cream. And some biscuits. All in all, my evening was shaping up very well.
This time, however, it was obvious that something was wrong the minute I stepped through the door.
One of the advantages of living by yourself is that you get to be in sole charge of certain decisions. The central heating, for example. My father is a total miser when it comes to gas bills, and my parents’ house is so cold in winter that it’s just as well my mother does have an Aga, so she and I can go huddle around it when Dad’s not looking. Living by myself means no man gets a say in how warmly I spend my evenings. I have the heating set to come on mid-afternoon, so the place is nice and toasty when I get home. As soon as you close the door behind you, you’re enveloped.
Not tonight, however. The heating was on, as I could tell from touching my hand against the radiator in the hallway, but the house was chilly.
I went into the living room. The windows were all shut. Through one of them, I could see why the house wasn’t as warm as it should be.
The back door was wide open.
It had been both closed and locked when I left for work that morning.
I thought so, anyway. I knew it had been closed, at least, but I hadn’t actually checked that it had been locked. Hadn’t even checked the key was in its normal place, stuck there in its lock.
I remembered my thought of the day before, that an intruder would be likely to leave a means of escape open if he was on the premises, and found my eyes drifting warily upward, to the living room ceiling and the floors beyond.
What if he was still here this time?
I got out my phone. I dialled 999, but did not press the call button.
“Is somebody here?” I called up the stairs, backing into the hallway and toward the front door. “If so, you should know that I’m calling the police. Right now.”
There was no sound from above. I knew that if there was someone in the house and he chose to get violent, I could be a bloody and broken mess in the corner of the living room before the local cops got halfway here through the traffic on Kentish Town Road.
I opened the front door a little, and walked back to the bottom of the stairs. “The front door’s open,” I said. “I’m going to get out of your way. I’ll... go in the kitchen, so I won’t see you.”
Was this a good idea? Or a really stupid one?
Stupid, I decided.
“Or,” I said, “here’s another plan. I’m going to leave. I’m going to go back out of the house and stand around the corner. I won’t look this way. Shut the door to let me know you’ve gone.”
And that’s what I did. I went out of the front door, closing it behind me, my finger still hovering over the call button on my phone. I walked quickly to the corner.
I waited ten minutes. I didn’t see anybody come out of the house. The front, anyway.
I walked back. I let myself back in, cautiously.
The back door was now closed.
I ran quickly up to the next floor, making as much noise as possible, and found it empty. Then I went right to the top, including poking my head into the tiny attic room. Nobody anywhere. No sign of anything disturbed.
When I made it back down to the kitchen, I realised the back door wasn’t actually shut. The intruder had pulled it to when he left, but hadn’t closed it properly.
I pushed it open and stepped out into the garden, on impulse, even though I knew he could still be out there.
To the side of my kitchen there’s a tiny concrete patio. Beyond that, my “lawn” – a scrappy patch of grass that would be about ten feet square if it was actually a square. In fact it’s a kind of parallelogram, barely six feet wide at the far end. Because of the high hedges that surround it, the grass rarely gets much light even in summer, and it’s ragged and muddy in the winter.
Soggy enough this evening, I thought, that you should be able to see the foot marks of a departing intruder, indents from shoes or boots.
There were none.
Something else caught my eye, though, and I stepped gingerly onto the grass to have a closer look.
The garden gets its shape from the fact the left-hand wall slopes radically toward the back, and it’s this that’s made of stone and features the faded old plaque. The plaque’s low down, as if to be at child-height, not very large and made of the same basic stone as the rest of the wall. I’d been in the house for nine months before I’d ever realised it was there. All it says is—