Elizabeth George: With No One As Witness

In this case, the lights meant nothing. The uncurtained dark windows along with the “To Let” sign told him that no one resided in the house to his right, while the house to his left had no windows on this side of it and no dog to set up a spate of barking in the nighttime cold. He was, as far as he could tell, in the clear.

French windows opened onto the patio, and Kimmo made for these. There, a quick tap with his emergency hammer-suitable in a crisis for breaking a car window-was quite sufficient to gain him access to the handle on the door. He opened this and stepped inside. The burglar alarm hooted like an air-raid siren.

The sound was earsplitting, but Kimmo ignored it. He had five minutes-perhaps more-till the phone would ring, with the security company on the line, hoping to discover that the alarm had been tripped accidentally. When they went unsatisfied, they would phone the contact numbers they’d been given. When that didn’t suffice to bring an end to the incessant screeching of the siren, they might phone the police, who in turn might or might not show up to check matters out. But in any case, that eventuality was a good twenty minutes away, which in itself was ten minutes longer than Kimmo needed to score what he was looking for in the building.

He was a specialist in this particular field. Leave to others the computers, the laptops, the CD and DVD players, the televisions, the jewellery, the digital cameras, the Palm Pilots, and the video players. He was looking for only one kind of item in the houses he visited, and the benefit of this item he sought was that it would always be in plain sight and generally in the public rooms of a house.

Kimmo shone his pocket torch round. He was in a dining room, and there was nothing here to take. But in the sitting room, he could already see four prizes glittering on the top of a piano. He went to fetch them: silver frames that he divested of their photographs-one always wanted to be thoughtful about some things-before depositing them carefully in his pillowcase. He found another on one of the side tables, and he scored this as well before moving to the front of the house where, near the door, a half-moon table with a mirror above it displayed two others along with a porcelain box and a flower arrangement, both of which he left where they were.

Experience told him that chances were good he’d find the rest of what he wanted in the master bedroom, so he quickly mounted the stairs as the burglar alarm continued to blare against his eardrums. The room he sought was on the top floor, in the back, overlooking the garden, and he’d just clicked on his torch to check out its contents when the shrieking of the alarm ceased abruptly just as the telephone started to ring.

Kimmo stopped short, one hand on his torch and the other halfway to a picture frame in which a couple in wedding gear kissed beneath a bough of flowers. In a moment, the phone stopped just as abruptly as the alarm, and from below a light went on and someone said, “Hullo?,” and then, “No. We’ve only just walked in…Yes. Yes. It was going off, but I haven’t had a chance to-Jesus Christ! Gail, get away from that glass.”

That was enough to tell Kimmo that matters had taken an unexpected turn. He didn’t pause to wonder what the hell the family were doing home when they were still supposed to be at Gran’s at church at yoga at counseling or wherever the hell they went when they went. Instead, he dived for the window to the left of the bed as below, a woman cried, “Ronald, someone’s in the house!”

Kimmo didn’t need to hear Ronald come tearing up the stairs or Gail shouting, “No! Stop!” to understand that he had to be out of there pronto. He fumbled with the lock on the window, threw up the sash, and heaved himself and his pillowcase out just as Ronald barreled into the room armed with what looked like a fork for turning meat on a barbecue.

Kimmo dropped with an enormous thump and a gasp onto the overhang some eight feet below, cursing the fact that there had been no convenient wisteria vine down which he could Tarzan his way to freedom. He heard Gail shouting, “He’s here! He’s here!,” and Ronald cursing from the window above. Just before he scarpered for the rear wall of the property, he turned back to the house, giving a grin and a saucy salute to the woman who stood in the dining room with an awestruck sleepy child in her arms and another hanging on to her trousers.

Then he was off, the pillowcase bouncing against his back and laughter bubbling up inside him, only sorry he hadn’t been able to leave behind the rose. As he reached the wall, he heard Ronald come roaring out of the dining-room door, but by the time the poor bloke reached the first of the trees, Kimmo was up, over, and heading across the wasteland. When the cops finally arrived-which could be anywhere from an hour to midday tomorrow-he’d be long gone, a faint memory in the mind of the missus: a painted face beneath a sweatshirt hood.

God, this was living! This was the best! If the haul proved to be sterling stuff, he’d be a few hundred quid richer come Friday morning. Did it get better than this? Did it? Kimmo didn’t think so. So what that he’d said he’d go straight for a while. He couldn’t throw away the time he’d already spent putting this job together. He’d be thick to do that, and the one thing Kimmo Thorne was not was thick. Not a bit of that. No way, Hoe-say.

He was pedaling along perhaps a mile from his break-in when he became aware of being followed. There was other traffic about on the streets-when wasn’t there traffic in London?-and several cars had honked as they’d passed him. He first thought they were honking at him the way vehicles do to a cyclist they wish to get out of their way, but he soon came to realise that they were honking at a slow-moving vehicle close behind him, one that refused to pass him by.

He felt a little unnerved by this, wondering if Ronald had somehow managed to get it together and track him down. He turned down a side street to make sure he wasn’t mistaken in his belief in being tailed, and sure enough, the headlights directly behind him turned as well. He was about to shoot off in a fury of pedaling when he heard the rumble of an engine coming up next to him and then his name spoken in a friendly voice.

“Kimmo? That you? What’re you doing in this part of town?”

Kimmo coasted. He slowed. He turned to see who was speaking to him. He smiled when he realised who the driver was, and he said, “Never mind me. What’re you doing here?”

The other smiled back. “Looks like I’m cruising round for you. Need a lift somewhere?”

It would be convenient, Kimmo thought, if Ronald had seen him take off on the bike and if the cops were quicker to respond than they normally were. He didn’t really want to be out on the street. He still had a couple more miles to go, and it was cold as Antarctica, anyway. He said, “I got the bike with me, though.”

The other chuckled. “Well, that’s no problem if you don’t want it to be.”

DETECTIVE CONSTABLE BARBARA HAVERS CONSIDERED herself one lucky bird: The drive was empty. She’d elected to do her weekly shop by car rather than on foot, and this was always a risky business in an area of town where anyone fortunate enough to find a parking space near their home clung to it with the devotion of the newly redeemed to the source of his redemption. But knowing she had much to purchase and shuddering at the thought of trudging in the cold back from the local grocery, she’d opted for transport and hoped for the best. So when she pulled up in front of the yellow Edwardian house behind which her tiny bungalow stood, she took the space in the drive without compunction. She listened to the coughing and gagging of her Mini’s engine as she turned it off, and she made her fifteenth mental note of the month to have the car looked at by a mechanic who-one prayed-would not ask an arm, a leg, and one’s firstborn child to repair whatever was causing it to belch like a dyspeptic pensioner.