Set in Stone

by Catherine Dunne

  Bingo! At ten-fifteen, finally, there is movement. He watches closely. Four figures leave the kitchen. Time to go time. Quickly, now, he stuffs his camcorder into the rucksack and hurries down the slope. If he’s fast enough, he might just see them drive away. This has to be done, over with, even more quickly than he has planned. This Friday is unusual, and unusual makes him uncomfortable.

  The watcher’s nervousness increases. He still doesn’t like going round to the front of the house, no matter how good the story. He has his trusty postman’s bag, full of flyers, begging for help in Somalia, this time, and he is wearing his innocent grey anorak. Funny how people don’t rate men in anoraks. Trainspotters, potting-shed merchants, dry old sticks: that’s how the world sees them. He allows himself a small smile. Bertie certainly bucked that trend. But only after he got rid of the anorak.

  The watcher trudges around the corner, making sure to insert his red and black flyers into every letterbox along the street. Easy does it. Whatever you do, don’t break the pattern. He spots the Jeep in the distance, making its way down the hill towards the roundabout. He quickens his step. A woman washing windows doesn’t even register his presence. Kids kicking a ball flow round him, like a river around stone. The invisible man.

  He reaches number nineteen. He bends just a little and pushes the flyer through to make sure it lands in the hallway, that it doesn’t get caught in the flap. He notices that the letter box is broken. He takes a quick look over his shoulder. The street is pretty much empty. Window woman has gone inside. Kids are all looking the other way. The watcher walks around to the side gate, his step surprisingly light. His heart begins to speed up. He’s forgotten how much he still misses this bit: the pure adrenaline rush of it. Almost better than sex.

  He drops his bag of flyers just below the deck. He reaches in and pulls out his rucksack, slings it over one shoulder. Then he steps up onto the wooden surface. He moves stealthily, fast for one of his size. He takes his wire-cutters out of his inside pocket and gets ready. He breaks the window of the downstairs bathroom, the window closest to Ken and Iris’s house. He uses a hammer wrapped in cloth to muffle the crash. At once, the alarm begins to scream. The sound is deafening, piercing his eyes and ears, making his blood sing. He reaches inside and cuts the wire to the sensor. The screaming stops at once. The abruptness of the silence is almost painful.

  He waits for a moment, but nobody comes. Typical. Chances are, even if he’d left the alarm sounding off, still nobody would have come. But he can’t afford to draw attention to himself. He eases open the bathroom window which gives without complaint. And then he is inside.

  He tiptoes into the kitchen and wipes his feet with systematic thoroughness on the mat just inside the door. Heels, toes, sides, just as he has always done: like a surgeon washing his hands. And he is here, after all, to perform an operation of sorts.

  The kitchen is even nicer than it looks from the top of the garden wall. Things are orderly here, neat. The air is warm, as though the central heating has only just clicked off. A slow cooker on the counter breathes chilli into the air. The watcher feels immediately hungry. He hasn’t been able to have breakfast today, not with all this looming. Food slows you down. You need to shed as much as possible, to prepare for flight. That’s why fear makes people sweat, piss, shit themselves. You’ve got to be unburdened. A physiological manifestation, they’d called it, back in the days of training courses. The physical results of a psychological state.

  He moves into what Wide Boy has called the studio. Over by the huge picture window, there is a wooden desk with a kind of sloping surface. He’s seen one like it before, in the office of an architect he’d once gone to arrest. Your man had been on the take. Thousands of pounds must have passed across that desk in brown envelopes. The watcher is still amused that most people haven’t got a clue about white-collar crime. That arrest was back in the good old days when planning corruption was only beginning to hit the headlines. Thing is, they’re just more careful nowadays not to get caught, that’s what he figures.

  Mrs Lynda’s studio desk is littered with drawings. And paintings, too, dozens of them. Small, delicate pieces of work. The sort of stuff Amy would like. Kind of oriental looking. Poppies, freesias, the branch of an orchid, a spray of apple blossom. But all single flowers, no bunches, and nothing in vases. He’s tempted to slip a few of these small pictures into his anorak pocket. They’d make a nice gift; get Amy to smile at him again. He sees then that these are maybe like sketches, rehearsals for the real thing. And the real thing looks like painted silk – long, narrow wall-hangings, dozens of them, all around the studio. Nice. They’re real eye-catchers.

  But he resists the temptation. That’s how people trip themselves up. It’s greed, just as often as carelessness. He learned that lesson a long time back: it only took the once. He prides himself on never again making the mistakes that’ll get him caught. And so he moves away from the desk and heads for the wall furthest from the patio doors.

  He pulls a Stanley knife out of his rucksack and gets to work. ‘All of them,’ Wide Boy has said. ‘Leave nothing intact. Nothing.’ He does the wall-hangings first, slicing from bottom to top, the blade moving along the silk cleanly, as though through water. When he’s finished, they look like some sort of weird ribbon-art. Maybe it’ll start some sort of arty craze. He might have done Mrs Lynda a favour.

  Then he turns his attention back to the paintings. They’re done on some sort of stiff paper, full of small lumps and bumps. As though the paper has been made by hand, not straightened and smoothed into sameness by a machine. They tear easily enough, though. He scatters the bits all over the desk, all over the floor. They look quite pretty, really, like large splotches of confetti.

  There are several jars on the flat portion of the desk. Half-filled with murky water, they hold dozens of paintbrushes, all of varying sizes. It’s easy to tip them over. He watches as the water rushes across the large sheets of paper, and then slows down, soaking bluely into their surface. He shuffles the pages a bit, making sure the water reaches all of them. They look like the architect’s drawings, actually, from what he can remember – except these ones seem to be of gardens, not buildings. He pulls out the digital camera and takes a couple of shots of his handiwork. They look clearer, starker than the reality. The light seems harsh. He has a moment of uncertainty. A slithery feeling of guilt that snakes around the back of his neck. Not his business, this. Just acting on behalf of another. Nevertheless, the feeling lingers. He’d prefer to be out of here.

  He checks his watch now and goes back through the kitchen. He drops his rucksack just outside the door. He doesn’t need anything from it upstairs. Keeping low, he makes his way down the hall and up the stairs. He moves quickly between each of the bedrooms. ‘All of them,’ Wide Boy has insisted. ‘Don’t leave anything untouched.’ He does the usual stuff: a bit of slashing here, a bit of a mess there. Mattresses upended, drawers turned over, surfaces swept clean. He takes another few photos as proof of the pudding.

  He pauses in what is obviously a girl’s room. Teddies, dolls, stuffed toys litter every surface. For some reason, they remind him of Amy and he baulks. He can’t damage these. What would be the point? Harmless bits of fur and fabric. He puts the Stanley away. Wide Boy will never know.

  He leaves and hurries downstairs again. He picks up his rucksack and enters the room that gives out onto the front garden. He doesn’t like this exposure, either – the curtains are open. So he works fast.

  He takes the files out of the filing cabinet, strews their contents all over the floor. He takes books off the shelves and leaves some where they fall. Others he kicks under the desk, or stuffs behind the radiators.

  Now for the most important bit. He checks his watch again. Twenty-seven more minutes and he’s gone. Wide Boy has told him how important this office bit is. He wants the laptop, or the desktop, or whatever is there, to be destroyed. ‘I want no possibility of any files being retrieved,’ he says. ‘You know compute
rs, don’t you?’

  And the watcher says yes, he knows about computers. He likes the question. It means that Wide Boy knows fuck all, and that makes his job easier. But he plays along for now, boasts about how he can get into Robert’s system without even knowing the password, that kind of thing.

  Wide Boy’s eyes light up at that. ‘Really?’ he says. ‘How do you do that?’

  But the watcher says not to worry, he’ll look after it. ‘We call it a worm,’ he says, ‘and it burrows into files, corrupting them.’ He waits, figuring that Wide Boy will be impressed. The watcher thinks that he might even have a bit of fun with this, at WB’s expense.

  ‘A worm,’ says Wide Boy. And starts to laugh. ‘You mean, like a worm in the garden? I like that. Burrowing away into the darkness. A nice bit of symmetry.’ He grinds the cigarette butt under his heel. That annoys the watcher. The pub has supplied an ashtray outside, a big one. Why does he have to litter the place like that? The watcher has a bizarre instinct to arrest this man for littering. In his head, he laughs at himself for that.

  ‘Or,’ he goes on, ‘I could always format the hard drive. That means that everything is wiped. Clean slate.’

  Wide Boy looks at him. ‘Which is better?’

  The watcher shrugs. ‘Depends on what you want. Formatting the hard drive is a once-off. The worm causes trouble that lasts longer. Prolongs the pain. It’s up to you.’

  ‘I’m tempted by the worm,’ says Wide Boy. The watcher sees him consider it. ‘But nah. I’ll go for the instant fix – the hard drive thing. More dependable. Takes away the chance of repairing it. Am I right?’

  The watcher is tired of this conversation. He already knows what he’s going to do, so the discussion is pointless. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘you’re right. Formatting the hard drive is the way to go.’

  Wide Boy nods. ‘Do it.’ He looks at his watch. ‘Gotta go. I have another appointment. We done here?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says the watcher. ‘We’re done here.’

  ‘Okay,’ Wide Boy says. ‘I need to consult one other person about this hard drive thing. Just to be sure it’s what I want. Can you meet me in O’Brien’s tomorrow night, just for ten minutes?’

  The watcher shrugs, annoyed despite himself. ‘Sure. What time?’

  ‘Let’s say eight. It won’t take long.’

  When he leaves, the watcher wonders who the ‘one other person’ is. He doesn’t like this, doesn’t like the fact that these games are spreading beyond the boundaries of the two of them. Once you move outside a tight unit, it’s all so much harder to control. He’ll listen tonight, sure, but this time, he’s going to do his own thing.

  It’s one of those little ironies that the most important thing the force ever did for him was to help him get to grips with technology. Before they let him go, they sent him on courses for all the latest and greatest. Made him employable, at least in their eyes. They didn’t want to consign a forty-five-year-old man to uselessness. He supposes they’d expect him to be grateful for that. Anyhow, he’s kept up the skills, over the years, although things change so fast these days, he finally feels he’s being left behind.

  Inside Robert’s office now, the only thing that worries him is having to stand still for longer than he likes. He moves to the other side of the desk, away from the window. He decides to start with the laptop. That’s where most people keep the up-to-date stuff. He wonders why Robert doesn’t have it with him.

  Fuck it. Just do it.

  He pulls on a fresh pair of surgical gloves, stuffing the used ones into the pocket of his anorak. He retrieves the set of Philips screwdrivers from the front pocket of his rucksack. Then he draws the laptop towards him, across the desk, and turns it over. He disconnects the power cable, to give him more ease of movement. Quickly now, he removes the four screws that keep the casing in place. He lifts off the cover and places it to his left on the floor beside him. The hard drive releases easily. He pulls it from its slot and places it on the desk to his left. Then he glances at his watch. He can feel the perspiration across his forehead. Get a move on. Time is running out.

  He turns to the desktop now. Lifting the box onto its side, he unscrews the casing and pulls out the drive. This one is a bit more tricky, a bit less accessible. Plastic clips can be a bugger. But he’s there. He places this one on the desk to his right. Twenty-two minutes to spare. This is cutting it tighter than he likes.

  Right, he thinks. Movin’ on. He pulls the two replacement hard drives from the main section of his rucksack and places them on the floor to his right. Wide Boy has supplied him with these, pulling them triumphantly out of a briefcase last night, as they sat, briefly, in a quiet corner of O’Brien’s pub, said he thought replacing the hard drives would be even better than formatting the old ones. The watcher has asked no questions. WB has taken great trouble to assure him that the specifications are all correct. Count on it, he says, with that self-satisfied smirk that has begun to grate on the watcher’s nerves.

  Just in case the drives don’t fit though, the watcher has brought a selection of magnets with him. If Wide Boy has got it wrong, he has no intention of ever coming back to this house again. When this morning’s over, it’s over. If the hard drives don’t do the business, the magnets will. More and more, the watcher wants this to be done, finished with. Wide Boy is a creep, and hanging around him is making the watcher feel edgy. It feels as though his strings are being pulled, and he doesn’t like it. Back in the day, he was the one in control. He doesn’t like handing that power over to anybody. Ever.

  Working fast now, he inserts one of the drives into the slot of the laptop, the other into the desktop. He can feel his shoulders relax as both drives slide into place without any difficulty. Thank Christ for that. He replaces the casing of each machine now, screwing them both securely into place. Then he puts the small screwdrivers into their case and stows them again in the front pocket of his rucksack.

  He reaches for the original hard drives and throws these, too, into the open mouth of the rucksack, securing the flap with its belt and buckle. He remembers drilling a hard drive open years back, out of curiosity. Inside, it looked like a three-dimensional map of some sort of surreal city – highways, bridges, the flat metallic roofs of buildings. It had a strange kind of beauty, he thought at the time.

  Thirteen minutes. Go.

  He leaves the downstairs office and crosses the studio, being careful to stay away from the window. He walks through the kitchen and pulls the patio doors closed behind him. Mrs L should be more careful about leaving keys in locks . . . Once outside on the deck, he pauses and pulls a woolly hat out of his anorak pocket, shoving it down on his forehead so that it covers his eyebrows. Then he picks up his bag of flyers, making sure to conceal the rucksack that hangs over one shoulder. He hunches forward and walks through the side gate, pulling it to behind him.

  Out on the street again, he turns quickly into number twenty and resumes his flyer routine. Another dozen or so houses and that should be enough. It’s the recycling collection day, so, after a bit, he’ll dump his bag at random into a wheelie bin. Preferably one clustered with a few others on a corner somewhere, so that ownership might not be obvious should any nosey parker be looking.

  Then, around the corner, he’ll take off his hat and stand up straight. Crossing the next street, he’ll shrug himself out of his anorak. Once he reaches the Dart station, he’ll put it on again, this time with the green inside, rather than the grey outside, showing. A great boon, the old reversible jacket.

  He grins to himself as he imagines Robert’s face. Both machines intact. Laptop – miraculously – not stolen. Then, he’ll switch on and wait, anxiously, for his system to reboot. Instead, he’ll watch over and over again as colourful images continue to gyrate on both screens. A repeating image, one that never changes. No matter what he does, that’s all there is to see. He can access nothing else, because there’s nothing else to access.

  The watcher figures that he’ll be home by lunchtime
. Then, this evening, he’ll head out for a casual pint, meet Wide Boy and finish the business. He’s decided to bring Amy out for an Indian tonight. He feels exhilarated. Another job done. Another successful outcome. All that early stuff to do with the garden felt dull, low-level. But today has been exciting, satisfying. It’s interesting, how close he feels to the people whose house he’s just left. Intimate, almost. As though he knows their most secret secrets.

  He reaches the Dart station with five minutes to spare. Just enough time for a cigarette. And the prospect of three and a half grand in cash tonight, into his hand. He feels lucky: a chance encounter with a random stranger and he’s five grand better off.

  It doesn’t come much easier than that.

  Danny is pleased. His boy has done well. The outcome is even better than he could have hoped. Now Danny sits in the corner of the pub, getting ready for the final act. He sips at his pint and orders a second one just as the watcher comes through the door.

  ‘Good timing,’ he says, indicating the seat across from him. ‘Another one for my friend, here,’ he calls to the barman. The watcher is always punctual. The barman delivers the pints and Danny pays him for both, waving away the watcher’s protests. The watcher is on edge. Danny can taste his anxiety. He knows how much the man wants his money. He can see it in his eyes. The man wants to be paid so that he can go home. Home to his wife, his comfortable little nest. Well, not so fast, Danny thinks. I’m not finished with you yet, boy, not by a long shot.

  The watcher nods his head in thanks, lifts his glass in salute. He takes one sip of his Guinness and sits back, expectant.

  ‘Well, Mr Phelan,’ says Danny. He watches the watcher, enjoys the way one eyelid flickers in surprise. No names, no pack drill. That has always been their agreement.

  ‘Mr Thomas Phelan,’ he says. He’s enjoying this. Nothing like the element of surprise to keep your enemy off balance. He knows what’s coming next. He’s always been good at being one step ahead.