She’d fought them on it; insisted that, like Sita, she didn’t do physical, when it came to the job. That she was a talker, not a cat-burglar; a grifter, not a thief. And that this position on larceny, on straightforward theft with no element of the con involved - it wasn’t one she’d reached of her own volition, through any soul-searching or ethical objection. She just didn’t have the chops.
And yet, here she was.
In the dark, under cover of one of the many elaborate topiary flamingos that littered the grounds of Lambswool Hall, she watched Rose scramble - quickly, deftly, almost exactly like a cat-burglar - up the exterior side wall of the boxy Neo-Renaissance manor house that Gary Hartwood called home.
She was heading, El knew, for one of the property’s three guest bathrooms - the one furthest from the master bedroom in which, Karen’s earlier surveillance had told them, Hartwood typically slept, often drunk and almost always alone.
It was skilfully executed, the scrambling; anyone would have conceded as much. El had known, long before agreeing to the job, that Rose was a competent free-climber: that she’d been raised by a steeplejack with a side-line in breaking and entering who’d taught her much of what he’d learned before he died; that when she took a holiday, she was more likely to be found on the Potrero Chico or the Niagara Escarpment than sunbathing in Rio or shopping in Manhattan. But seeing it, seeing her scale the wall with a fluidity and confidence borne of thirty years’ experience and nothing keeping her there but the spikes in her shoes and the tensile strength of her hands on the bricks… that was a different story. And El was surprised, and immediately thereafter embarrassed, to find it not just objectively impressive - a virtuoso display, akin to hearing a jazz trumpeter improvise a solo - but profoundly attractive, too.
Fucking Ruby, she thought - the idea that she and Sita might have been right, might have finally made an accurate prediction about El’s romantic destiny sticking in her throat like a hairball. Fucking, fucking Ruby.
“You say something?” Karen whispered from an adjoining section of avian shrubbery.
El shook her head.
Just below the bathroom window, Rose paused; reached for the outside ledge with one set of fingers, then the other, and hauled herself upwards, bringing one foot and then another to rest on the thin sliver of granite until she was balanced, with feline precision, on the balls of both, her palms pressed against the brickwork on either side of the window.
“Amazing,” said Karen, under her breath. “She’s like a fucking gecko.”
There was an automatic centre punch in Rose’s backpack, El knew; steel-tipped and no bigger than a pen. A centre punch and a towel, thick and soft enough to muffle the sound of breaking glass, should any glass need to be broken.
But neither tool was necessary. Hartwood, as Karen had hoped, had left the window open on the latch - no more than a few inches, to let the warm night air circulate around the house, but giving Rose enough room to fold herself inside, head and shoulders first.
“And there are definitely no alarms up there?” El asked, suddenly anxious as Rose’s legs and ankles disappeared through the frosted glass.
“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer,” Karen said.
“The most obvious point of ingress is here, by the front gate,” Karen had told her in the basement, as they’d bent over the map of the Lambswool Hall grounds. “But the gate’s electric, connected to the guard hut - we’d need somebody inside to physically push a button to let us in. I can disable it, but it’d take a bit of time, and I expect Hartwood’s got a camera there too, which’d give us another set of problems.”
“Where did you get this?” El had asked.
“A friend,” Karen had replied vaguely, before pressing on. “Now, I happen to know - and don’t ask me how, I ain’t gonna tell you - that Hartwood’s got two other static cameras on the go inside: one by the front door of his house, and the other mounted outside the warehouse where he keeps his cars. Just here, look.”
She’d pointed at a large, square shape in the centre of the map, marked “garage” in bold, even capitals.
“Once we’re in, I can cut the feed to the one by the warehouse, no trouble. We’ll have to sort that one. And we shouldn’t have to worry about the one by the house if we’re going in ‘round the side. But I don’t see why we’d wanna give ourselves more headaches than we need to actually getting in, do you? So I suggest we go in this way instead.”
This time she’d indicated a wide, empty space in the right hand corner of the paper.
“What am I seeing?” El said.
“It’s a field. Well, more of a wood, really, but whoever planted it weren’t that generous when they scattered the seeds, so it’s mostly grass. Common land - nobody owns it. Or everyone does, depending on how you look at it. But wouldn’t you know it? It backs right on to Hartwood’s estate. And for reasons best known to him, but in my professional opinion because the bloke’s a fucking muppet, the most hardcore security he’s put up at that end is a big fuck-off fence. A wooden fence, if you can believe it. Sort that gets knocked down whenever there’s a storm. Should take us all of about 30 seconds to dismantle, and we can just drive through.”
“I assume the house is alarmed?”
“Yeah. And a little bird tells me there’s motion sensors all over downstairs. Good news is, they’re not upstairs. So as long as we keep up there, we’re sorted.”
The same little bird who got you those plans? El had wondered.
“You said there was a guard hut,” she said.
“And two guards - one inside the hut watching the security feeds, another walking ‘round the place with a torch. A night watchman, basically. The one in the hut never goes out of it, so he’s not a factor. Probably half asleep most of the time anyway, I know I would be. But the watchman might be one to think about. If Hartwood’s half as protective of his car collection as it sounds, then I’d put money on him making sure there’s someone keeping an eye on it day and night. Not sure how we’ll deal with that one.”
She’s her father’s daughter, El had thought - remembering what she’d heard about Leon Baxter, the robber king of ‘70s London, who’d walk away from a job before he used a weapon or his fists.
“There’ll be a way around it,” she’d said, not sure herself what that way might be. “There always is.”
Rose was in the house perhaps two minutes before the bathroom window opened fully and a pair of nylon ropes fell from it, slapping lightly against the wall as they descended to the ground - the other ends of both, El assumed, anchored to one of the bathroom’s sturdier fittings.
“You good?” Karen asked.
“Should be,” El said. It was a lie, but she hoped it might prove prophetic.
Karen took to the rope like a pro, shimmying up the brickwork with the practised ease of a circus acrobat. El was slower and more lumbering, the knots biting into her palms through her gloves as she dragged her body towards the second floor. At the ledge, she stopped to control her breath before pulling herself through the window frame - not, she told herself, because it mattered whether or not Rose might judge her, might think her incapable or out of shape, but because keeping quiet was one of the non-negotiables of housebreaking, and if something was going to give them away, it wasn’t going to be her wheezing.
It was only this focus on her breathing that stopped her laughing out loud when she saw the room they’d landed in.
To say it had a theme would be, she thought, to do it a grave disservice. It was a theme, from the floor to the ceiling, and that theme was: race-car.
Through the faint yellow light streaming in from the hallway, she saw chessboard wallpaper the black and white of a chequered flag; a high-backed, low-slung toilet designed to mimic the layout of a Formula 1 cockpit; a pull cord weighted down by a miniature tyre. Best of all was the bathtub: a four-castered, red and white striped, aerodynamically shaped oval with a set of pedals and a full-size steering wheel built around the ta
ps.
“I imagine it’s even better in daylight,” Rose said with a smile, when she caught El staring.
Karen touched a finger to her lips, and they fell silent, falling in line behind her as she walked out of the bathroom and down the hallway to Hartwood’s more conservatively decorated bedroom.
He was asleep - flat on his stomach on top of the covers of his enormous bed, bare chested in boxer shorts, his arms and legs spread wide in a starfish configuration. The smell of sour whiskey and cigars hung over him; from his position, El guessed that he’d passed out rather than dozed off.
Rose reached around, and into her backpack. After a second or two of fumbling, she drew out a gun - a short-barrelled semi-automatic, the kind El thought Hartwood might recognise from American cop shows.
She passed it to Karen, who took it and, grinning, twirled it around her index finger like an Old West marksman.
“Here we go,” she whispered.
She took three long steps forward and, when she was close enough, pressed the muzzle of the pistol against the base of Hartwood’s skull.
“Up!” she roared into his ear, the ferocity in her voice taking even El aback. “Out of that fucking bed, now, before I blow your head off!”
Chapter 7
Saffron Walden, Essex
July 1997
Hartwood’s whole body twitched - so quickly and so violently it might have seemed to the casual observer as if Karen had shot him already.
“You fucking deaf?” she shouted, bellowing the words into his ear canal and thrusting the pistol harder into the back of his head. “Get up! Now!”
He flopped around onto his back, exposing the paunch of his furry white belly and the half-open fly of his boxers. A small, circular pattern of urine was forming around the button.
The terror already taking hold of the nerves and muscles of his face intensified when he saw who was holding the gun that was now at his temple - and who was standing behind her, arms folded.
“Hello, Mr Hartwood,” El said, slipping into Angela Di Salvo like a pair of comfortable shoes. “Bet you weren’t expecting to see me so soon, were you?”
“What are you doing here?” he said, half-whispering. “What do you want?”
“I want to cut off your bollocks and feed them to you,” she answered. “But I’m not sure Jax here’d go for it.”
“I might,” growled Karen, curling her finger more tightly around the trigger of the gun.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he said - whimpering now. “Please, I haven’t done nothing.”
“Up,” Karen told him. “Out of that bed and on the floor, before I lose my patience.”
She pulled the pistol back an inch and he struggled out of the bed, almost rolling off the mattress in his haste to comply. He hit the carpet and pulled himself to his knees, his hands clasped together in supplication.
“Don’t hurt me,” he said again - more quietly, choking back tears.
El stepped into his space, forcing him to crane his neck to look up at her as she spoke.
“I can do what I like, Mr Hartwood,” she said softly. “Exactly what I like.”
“And before you say anything stupid, like how you’ll scream and someone’ll come running,” Karen said, moving behind him and returning the gun to the back of his head, “keep in mind: we know for a fact there’s no-one else in the house here with you. You might have your cleaner and your housekeeper and whoever else knocking around in the day, but they go home at night, don’t they? Go home, and don’t come back ’til the morning. So scream, if you have to. But all the screaming in the world,” she lowered her voice and bent her head closer to his, until he was shaking and the hairs on his neck prickled out at horizontal angles, “won’t do nothing but piss me off.”
She shook the gun, very lightly, for emphasis. He froze; clamped his lips together with the fervour of an amateur ventriloquist.
El walked across to the side of bed closest to where he was kneeling and lowered herself onto the edge, studiously avoiding the wet patch in the centre of the sheets.
“Turn around,” she told him. “Turn around and look at me.”
He twisted his head, very slowly, towards her until their eyes met - the gun keeping constant contact with his scalp.
“Let’s talk about that Jag you just sold me,” she said. “And about my brief - the one who looks after my money. I think you know him? Bloke named Redfearn. Dexter Redfearn.”
Outside, El knew, Ruby would be sizing up the hangar; thinking through the best way of forcing the locking mechanism on the roller shutters, when the time came.
“The lock’ll be a piece of piss,” Ruby had told them at the outset. “They always are. It’s what comes before that’s trickier.”
What comes before, as El had understood it, looked something like this:
At 2.03am, exactly three minutes after El and Karen had followed Rose up the ropes and into Hartwood’s bathroom, an old woman would clamber - very carefully, with the caution befitting her arthritic hips - over the apparently blown-down fence separating the grounds of Lambswool Hall from the adjacent field.
She’d be grey-haired, ruddy-cheeked; decked out top to toe in the Gore-Tex jacket, walking boots and waterproof trousers of the dedicated hiker. A sixty five litre rucksack, almost as large as her, would be slung over her stooped shoulders and secured across her chest and stomach; a Nordic pole would dangle from one fist, a Maglite torch from the other.
Once on the property, she’d make her way past the manor house - checking her ordnance survey map with the torch as she passed, and temporarily blinding the house’s security camera with its beam in the process - and onto the warehouse that, though she of course couldn’t know it, contained tens of millions of pounds’ worth of vintage vehicle.
Somewhere in the vicinity of this warehouse, the old woman would be stopped by a security guard - a man, El knew, only a few years younger than the woman, and close to retirement himself.
The man would ask her - in severe tones that would leave the woman in no doubt that he was prepared to escalate things to the police if he didn’t like her answer - who exactly she was, and what the hell she thought she was doing trespassing on someone else’s property.
“Night rambling, old chap,” the woman would reply, with all the gin-soaked confidence of the rural rich. “Can’t beat it. Gets the circulation going, you know. And so wonderfully peaceful - none of your oiks raring around the place on their motorbikes and what have you. ‘Fraid I might have taken a wrong turning somewhere. Ended up in yonder paddock.”
Here she’d cast a finger backwards, towards the field whence she came.
“How did you get in?” the guard would say, suspiciously. “There’s gates all ‘round that grass.”
The old woman’s brows would crease, confused.
“Gates?” she’d say, shaking her head. “No, don’t think so. No gates there. There was a bit of fencing, blown down by the look of it. But certainly no gate.”
The guard would mutter something under his breath; curse the boss too cheap to upgrade to even a bit of reinforced steel.
“You know,” the old woman would add, as if imparting great wisdom, “you might want to consider having that seen to. Wouldn’t want intruders getting in, what?”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the guard would say, his irritation with the mad posh woman growing.
“And go where, old chap?” she’d ask. “Could scarcely tell you where I was before I got here. Shouldn’t have plodded off the beaten track, really, but the mind wanders in the dark, does it not?”
“You can’t stay here,” he’d tell her, more firmly. “This is private land. There’s no public right of way.”
The old woman would scratch her cheek, pondering the quandary in which she found herself.
“I don’t suppose you might see your way to giving me a lift?” she’d say. “Not home,” she’d add before he could protest. “Heavens no, that would be far too far. Bu
t perhaps into the village? I can make my own way from there.”
He’d be forced to refuse; to tell her he couldn’t leave his post, not even to run up to the village and back.
The woman’s face would fall; she’d look, suddenly, ten years older, and a little frightened.
“Please,” she’d say, a small tremor entering her voice. “One doesn’t like to ask for help - it’s terribly embarrassing, even at this time of life. But the thing is, you see… I’m not certain I’m able to make it back without assistance. The memory, you know… it isn’t what it was.”
The guard, whose own faculties weren’t as acute as they’d once been, would feel a pang of guilt, then a bolt of sympathy for the old bird.
It was only half a mile, he’d reason. He could be there and back in half an hour, and no-one would be any the wiser.
“Alright,” he’d concede. “I’ll take you. But just to the village, mind. No further.”
“Of course, of course,” the old woman would agree, clutching at the handle of the walking pole that would very soon leave debilitating punctures in three out of four of the guard’s tyres.
And the two of them would make their way to his car, and then on to the village, where the old woman’s son would be waiting to collect her and take her back to Lambswool Hall in his brand new Range Rover.
“Redfearn’s your lawyer?” Hartwood said, disbelieving.
El smiled.
“You seem surprised, Mr Hartwood,” she told him.
He swallowed, the action causing his Adam’s Apple to throb in his throat like a pulse.
“I didn’t know...,” he began.
“Course you didn’t. Why would you? But it’s a funny thing, coincidence. Always coming ‘round to bite someone on the arse.”
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 6