Брендан Дюбуа - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2006

“What this is,” said the man with the gun, “is a robbery.”

Gerald stepped in front of Cassie.

“I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed,” he said. “I never keep large sums of money at home. There’s a bit in my wallet, and I’m sure the others could chip in; but as these things go, I’m afraid you’ve drawn a bit of a blank.”

The man simply stood there and let him run on.

Then he said, “You could end up irritating me, you could. When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you. There’s nothing here, we know that. It’s the shop that interests me.”

The shop. I could see the shock suddenly appear on Cassie’s face and on Paula’s. Shock and a little relief too, I thought. What my face was showing, I had no idea.

Gerald’s face dropped. “The shop?” he said a little stupidly.

“That’s right,” the man said. “The shop.” He said it in a good imitation of Gerald’s rather idiotic tone. “And this is the way we’re going to do it. You two are going to come with me down to the shop. In the meantime, my friend here will stay here with the others. As insurance. When we get back, we’ll go and you can ring the law. As soon as you can get free, that is. You’d want to give us a bit of a head start, I know.”

He looked round us all. “Now, is that clear enough for you? Nothing too difficult? Any questions?”

Nobody spoke.

He looked at the Claverhouses. “You two can go home. We don’t need you.”

They stared at him.

“Go home?” Ernest said as though the words had been spoken in Urdu. The man nodded.

“Go home. But don’t get any ideas. My partner here will be staying behind, and he’s an edgy type. If he sees so much as a Boy Scout uniform or a baker’s van, I won’t be able to answer for him. I just don’t know what he’d do in a situation like that. What would you do, as a matter of interest?” he asked the second man.

The other spoke for the first time since they had entered the house. “Something violent and over the top. I dunno. Kill both the women, I s’pose. I dunno. Depends.”

“So,” said the man with the gun to the Claverhouses, who were both strangely leaning forward a little as though they were straining to hear him, “don’t do anything clever. Don’t ring anybody. Don’t do anything. The best thing you can do is go straight to bed, and when you wake up in the morning, it’ll all be over. No fuss. No problems. No sieges. No blood. Just a quiet, civilized, little jewel-shop robbery. Now, off you go.”

The Claverhouses looked round at the rest of us, their heads rotating almost in unison. I wondered vaguely and irrelevantly if they did everything like that. Ernest Claverhouse seemed to want to say something, something reassuring, something brave, but he couldn’t find anything.

“Well,” he said, “we’ll be off, then.” Even he seemed to find the words ridiculous.

“Safe home,” I said. “Don’t worry. I think everything will be all right. Just do what he says.”

They both nodded quickly at me, glad to have something to do. They left the lounge, and I could hear them whispering together in the hall as they put on their coats.

“Keep it down out there,” called the big man. “Can’t hear ourselves think in here.” The whispering stopped immediately. Then we heard the door open and close. The big man looked round at the rest of us, and then looked at his watch.

“Right,” he said. “You two,” he pointed at Cassie and then at Paula, “sit down there.” And he pointed at the white leather sofa. Cassie and Paula looked at each other quickly, and rather appraisingly it seemed to me, then they sat, Cassie quickly, Paula with rather an insolent and deliberate slowness. She flicked her black hair back over her shoulder as she did so and looked the big man straight in the eyes. He returned her look.

“Watch this one,” he said to the other man. “She’s the one. Show her your gun.”

The second man took his hand out of his overcoat pocket. He was clutching a large automatic.

“Right,” the big man said to the women. “Just so’s you know. Shoot something,” he said to the other man. The second man aimed negligently at the sideboard and fired the pistol. There was a flat bang and the porcelain vase that up to then had been holding some flowers disintegrated. A piece of the vase landed next to my foot.

Cassie looked at the man. “You utter pig,” she said. “There was no need for that.”

“Yes there was,” he said. “Just so that you know. Get your coats,” he said, with no change of tone or movement, so that it took a moment for Gerald and me to realize he was speaking to us. Gerald lumbered toward me, his face red and his eyes bright with — what? Rage, fear — I couldn’t tell.

We went into the hall. Gerald handed me my overcoat. I fully expected him to hold it so that I could put my arms in the sleeves, but he simply half handed, half threw it at me. We put our coats on in silence. There was a murmur of voices from the lounge. Then the big man came out.

“We’ll take your car,” he said to Gerald, and opened the door.

We climbed into the BMW, me in the back, Gerald at the wheel, and the man next to him. Gerald started the motor and rolled down the drive. Before we had reached the road, the big man clawed the ski mask off his head. He had a hard angular face, and his hair was cut so short he looked almost bald.

“Bloody hell, these things make me itch,” he said, and then he looked at Gerald. “What’s all this nonsense with the neighbors?” he said. “You never told me there’d be neighbors.”

Gerald turned to me and said, “This is Carl.”

Like most ideas of Gerald’s, it was simple, yet with an enormous potential for disaster. Like his other idea, when I was made redundant by the electronics company where I was marketing director. They decided, one fine day, quite simply to delocalize to Peshawar, where the manufacturing costs were a minute fraction of those in the U.K.

Gerald had come up with the idea that I invest my redundancy payment, which was not unsubstantial, in his family jewelry business, which he had taken over after his father had suffered the fourth and fatal coronary.

Gerald’s business was in the center of town in the huge Benfield shopping precinct — a prime position, it seemed to Paula and me, a good solid enterprise with a good solid clientele. I knew nothing about jewelry, we acknowledged to each other, but I knew about marketing. I was a good salesman, which is what Gerald said he needed. A front man, he said, a smooth someone to front the business. He had showed me the books, and based on my admittedly scanty knowledge of bookkeeping, the figures looked healthy enough. So, I plunged. And once the money was in the bank, Gerald showed me the other books, the real books, the books that showed the debt that my money was, even at that moment, helping to pay off.

“But,” said Gerald the day I found out the belated truth, “with you to help, we can really make this business take off.”

No, we couldn’t. In fact, no one could have. Not with the inroads Gerald was making into the treasury to pay for his house and the trinkets that, she had made plain, Cassie had to have if Gerald was to keep her. And not with the two, count them, two cut-price shops that opened up within half a mile of us. The Rhinestone Cowboys, Gerald called them, or The Zircons, when he was in his Captain Kirk mode. Cut-price everything: an engagement ring for two quid, a tiara for a fiver. I exaggerate, but not much. And a year after I had done the deed, it was clear that we were in the messiest of messes.

I told Paula some of this, but not all, because she had not really recovered from my being made redundant, which she took not only as a personal slight, but also as a sort of social cataclysm. Before we had held the occasional dinner party; now we entertained as though it were going to be outlawed tomorrow. Before she had dressed well but reasonably, going on a big bender every spring and autumn; now she became what I can only describe as a Serial Shopper.