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

“He’s as competent as he needs to be. Don’t you worry about him. You just worry about us and what we’re doing.”

“I just want to be certain he won’t do anything — well, anything stupid.”

“Anything stupid? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Gerald lifted one hand from the wheel and made a peculiar little gesture.

“He’s alone with two defenseless women.”

Carl looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, “You’re conning the insurance for a small fortune, committing God knows how many different crimes, and you’re worried about Georgie. You want your head examined, you do. You’d do better to worry about me and what you’d do if I decided to take everything and not just the small stuff.”

I could see Gerald’s smirk in the rearview mirror, and I knew what was amusing him. There was nothing but the small stuff at the shop. Gerald had taken all the good expensive items home in his case that afternoon.

That was the part that had given us the most trouble. For Gerald’s plan to work, we were depending on the cameras in the shop. But for Gerald’s plan to work, he needed to get the valuable stock out of the strong room before the robbery.

“Why?” I had said to him. “Why doesn’t your man take the lot and then we divide it up in the car, or in a bus shelter or whatever?”

Gerald had a problem with explaining. And out of all his half-baked stammering came the clear idea that he was afraid — certain — that his man, this man he trusted, faced with a heap of very expensive and fenceable jewelry, would suddenly change his mind about the fake robbery and turn it into a real one.

So given that the cameras turned all the time, how was Gerald going to get the jewelry out of the strong room once it had been put away for the night? He couldn’t be thinking about a fortuitous power cut. That would look slightly odd, to say the least.

“How are you going to manage it?” I had asked him. “You’ll be on camera, don’t forget. That’s going to be a bit suspicious to say the least when you show your holiday video to the police, if you and Sheila put the stock away, and then five minutes after the staff have left you go back into the strong room and come out with your hands full.”

He didn’t like that. He didn’t like to think that there was something he hadn’t planned for. But he came up with the answer, I’ll give him that. He came into the office with his coat on and said, “How’s this?”

“How’s what?” I said.

“Notice anything?”

No I hadn’t, I said. He took his coat off, unbuttoned everything, down to and including his shorts, and there was this sack thing hanging down over his stomach. He’d bought a sort of backpack made of light material. Not the sort of thing you go up Everest with, more your tourist’s bag for carrying light personal things. And he was wearing it backwards, or rather frontwards.

“That should do it. I’ll put my coat on, I often do that; Sheila and I will put the stock away, then I’ll stay in there for five minutes tops and Bob’s your uncle. I come out with nothing in my hands, lock the strong room, and off I go. Ingenious, or what?”

Well, it seemed as ingenious as anything else in this whole rickety business. And the feeling got stronger and stronger that Gerald was making it up as he went along, adding a little tweak here, ironing out a little wrinkle there.

So why didn’t I get out? Because in spite of everything, I was convinced it was going to work, and the thought of my investment going down the toilet as the only alternative didn’t please me. And truth to tell, secretly, I really didn’t believe we were going to go through with it. I thought it was another Gerald scheme, wild and surreal, but ultimately unrealizable.

But here we were, in the car, heading for town and the shop, with Gerald trying his best to explain the Claverhouses to a man who didn’t appear in the best of moods.

Gerald said, “I thought it would be more convincing to have some independent witnesses. I mean, how much weight would they give if it was just our wives. They could easily be in on it. At least, that’s how I’d think if I was a loss adjuster.”

Carl grunted, unconvinced, looking out of the window at the passing town. He seemed to have lost interest.

“Just don’t give me any more surprises,” he said, “they make me nervous. And when I’m nervous, I get naughty.”

“No more surprises,” said Gerald, clearly getting a little of his confidence back. “It’s just as we said from now on.”

Carl grunted again.

Gerald parked the car near the pedestrian precinct, not too near and not too far. We all got out. It was raining slightly, a chilly rain with a little wind behind it. It was miserable, but the good thing was that it seemed to be keeping people off the streets. There were no strollers, no window shoppers.

Gerald locked up and we set off into the pedestrian precinct, with our heads down against the rain, Gerald and I in front, Carl a pace behind us. I looked back and saw that he had pulled on his ski mask again and that he was carrying a bag, a large leather affair. He kept the other hand in his pocket. He obviously didn’t mind what people thought, if there were people around to think anything. And anyway, a man in a ski mask on a night like this might seem odd, eccentric, but not immediately suspicious. But we met no one.

When we arrived at the shop, Gerald already had the keys out and ready. He unlocked the door and we went in. The alarm went off, as usual. Gerald went to the little cupboard on the right and silenced it. Then he switched on the main lighting panel, which also switched on the cameras and the recorders. He hesitated then, looked around as if he were uncertain. Carl gave him a sharp prod with the hand in his pocket. A little bit of business for the camera. I had a hard job not to look at it, squatting there high up near the ceiling with its blank, incurious eye.

We threaded our way through the empty display cases to the back of the shop and the corridor, which led to the workrooms and the offices. We went through, Carl immediately behind us. We stopped in front of the strong room, under the eye of the second camera, and Gerald selected the keys. He swung open the heavy steel door, and stepped back to let Carl go in.

Then we just stood about, trying to look helpless, which wasn’t hard. Then Gerald stepped into the strong room.

“Everything there’s yours for the taking,” I heard him say.

Then I heard Carl say, “Not a lot here. This is rubbish, this is.”

Gerald said, “The envelope there on the shelf. That’s for you.”

I could hear even outside in the corridor that Carl was riffling the notes in the envelope.

Then Gerald said, “All right?” and got a grunt for an answer. He seemed to like grunting, did Carl.

Finally, after letting enough time pass for him to have taken everything from the trays, Carl came out, carrying his bag in front of him, well in view. Gerald locked up, and we filed down the corridor, back through the shop where Gerald set the alarm again. I wondered why he bothered, seeing that we had just been cleaned out, but I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t said anything since we left the house, it occurred to me.

We walked through the precinct to the car. Carl took off his ski mask.

“Right,” he said. “Sweet as a nut.”

Gerald nodded, and we got into the car. We didn’t speak on the way back to the house. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. I was picturing the interviews with the police and the insurance people and trying to decide what face I ought to pull when talking about a robbery that had cleaned us out of hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of jewels.

Gerald turned into the drive. The lights were still on in the lounge. I don’t know why I was surprised. I had unconsciously expected everyone to have gone to bed. But of course not. Georgie was keeping everyone up.