by Ken Follett
Harry turned around, his tension drawing tighter. He saw a man of about his own age step into the corridor and look curiously at him.
As always, the right words came to him when he needed them. “Ah, is it in there?” he said.
“What?”
“Is that the lav?”
The young man’s face cleared. “Oh, I see. You want the green door at the other end of the corridor.”
“Thanks awfully.”
“Not at all.”
Harry went along the corridor. “Lovely house,” he remarked.
“Isn’t it?” The man descended the staircase and disappeared.
Harry allowed himself a pleased grin. People could be so gullible.
He retraced his steps and went into the pink bedroom. As usual, there was a suite of rooms. The color scheme indicated that this was Lady Monkford’s room. A rapid survey revealed a small dressing room off to one side, also decorated in pink; an adjoining, smaller bedroom, with green leather chairs and striped wallpaper; and a gentleman’s dressing room off that. Upper-class couples often slept separately, Harry had learned. He had not yet decided whether that was because they were less randy than the working class, or because they felt obliged to make use of all the many rooms in their vast houses.
Sir Simon’s dressing room was furnished with a heavy mahogany wardrobe and matching chest. Harry opened the top drawer of the chest. There, inside a small leather jewel box, was an assortment of studs, collar stiffeners and cuff links, not neatly arranged but tumbled about haphazardly. Most of them were rather ordinary, but Harry’s discriminating eye lit on a charming pair of gold cuff links with small rubies inset. He put them in his pocket. Next to the jewel box was a soft leather wallet containing about fifty pounds in five-pound notes. Harry took twenty pounds and felt pleased with himself. Easy, he thought. It would take most people two months’ hard work in a dirty factory to earn twenty pounds.
He never stole everything. Taking just a few items created a doubt. People thought they might have mislaid the jewelry or made a mistake about how much was in the wallet, so they hesitated to report the theft.
He closed the drawer and moved into Lady Monkford’s bedroom. He was tempted to get out now with the useful haul he had already made, but he decided to risk a few minutes more. Women generally had better jewelry than their husbands. Lady Monkford might have sapphires. Harry loved sapphires.
It was a fine evening, and a window was open wide. Harry glanced through it and saw a small balcony with a wrought-iron balustrade. He went quickly into the dressing room and sat at the dressing table. He opened all the drawers and found several boxes and trays of jewelry. He began to go through them rapidly, listening warily for the sound of the door opening.
Lady Monkford did not have good taste. She was a pretty woman who had struck Harry as rather ineffectual, and she—or her husband—chose showy, rather cheap jewelry. Her pearls were ill-matched, her brooches big and ugly, her earrings clumsy and her bracelets flashy. He was disappointed.
He was hesitating over an almost attractive pendant when he heard the bedroom door open.
He froze, stomach in a knot, thinking fast.
The only door out of the dressing room led to the bedroom.
There was a small window, but it was firmly closed and he probably could not open it quickly or silently enough. He wondered if he had time to hide in the wardrobe.
From where he stood, he could not quite see the bedroom door. He heard it close again; then there were a feminine cough and light footsteps on the carpet. He leaned toward the mirror and found he could see into the bedroom. Lady Monkford had come in, and she was heading for the dressing room. There was not even time to close the drawers.
His breath came fast. He was taut with fear, but he had been in spots like this before. He paused for one more moment, forcing himself to breathe evenly, calming his mind. Then he moved.
He stood up, stepped quickly through the door into the bedroom, and said: “I say!”
Lady Monkford was brought up short in the middle of the room. She put her hand to her mouth and let out a tiny scream.
A flowered curtain flapped in the breeze from the open window, and Harry was inspired.
“I say,” he repeated, deliberately sounding a bit stupefied. “I’ve just seen someone jump out of your window.”
She found her voice. “What on earth do you mean?” she said. “And what are you doing in my bedroom?”
Acting the part, Harry strode to the window and looked out. “Gone already!” he said.
“Please explain yourself!”
Harry took a deep breath, as if marshaling his thoughts. Lady Monkford was about forty, a fluttery woman in a green silk dress. If he kept his nerve, he could deal with her. He smiled winningly, assumed the persona of a hearty, rugby-playing, overgrown schoolboy—a type that must be familiar to her—and began to pull the wool over her eyes.
“It’s the oddest thing I ever saw,” he said. “I was in the corridor when a strange-looking cove peeped out of this room. He caught my eye and ducked back in again. I knew it was your bedroom, because I had looked in here myself when I was hunting for the bathroom. I wondered what the chap was up to—he didn’t look like one of your servants and he certainly wasn’t a guest. So I came along to ask him. When I opened the door he jumped out of the window.” Then, to account for the still-open drawers of the dressing table, he added: “I’ve just looked into your dressing room, and I’m afraid there’s no doubt he was after your jewelry.”
That was brilliant, he said admiringly to himself. I should be on the bleedin’ wireless.
She put her hand to her forehead. “Oh, what a dreadful thing,” she said weakly.
“You’d better sit down,” Harry said solicitously. He helped her to a small pink chair.
“To think!” she said. “If you hadn’t chased him off, he would have been here when I walked in! I’m afraid I shall faint.” She grasped Harry’s hand and held it tightly. “I’m so grateful to you.”
Harry smothered a grin. He had got away with it again.
He thought ahead for a moment. He did not want her to make too much fuss. Ideally he would like her to keep the whole thing to herself. “Look, don’t tell Rebecca what’s happened, will you?” he said as a first step. “She’s got a nervous disposition and something like this could lay her low for weeks.”
“Me, too,” said Lady Monkford. “Weeks!” She was too upset to reflect that the muscular, hearty Rebecca was hardly the type to have a nervous disposition.
“You’ll probably have to call the police, and so on, but it will spoil the party,” he went on.
“Oh, dear—that would be too dreadful. Do we have to call them?”
“Well ...” Harry concealed his satisfaction. “It rather depends on what the blighter stole. Why don’t you have a quick look?”
“Oh, goodness, yes, I’d better.”
Harry squeezed her hand for encouragement, then helped her up. They went into the dressing room. She gasped when she saw all the drawers open. Harry handed her to her chair. She sat down and started looking through her jewelry. After a moment she said: “I don’t think he can have taken much.”
“Perhaps I surprised him before he got started,” Harry said.
She continued sorting through the necklaces, bracelets and brooches. “I think you must have,” she said. “How wonderful you are.”
“If you haven’t lost anything, you don’t really have to tell anyone.”
“Except Sir Simon, of course,” she said.
“Of course,” Harry said, although he had hoped otherwise. “You could tell him after the party’s over. That way at least you won’t spoil his evening.”
“What a good idea,” she said gratefully.
This was very satisfactory. Harry was immensely relieved. He decided to quit while he was so far ahead. “I’d better go down,” he said. “I’ll leave you to catch your breath.” He bent swiftly and kissed her cheek. She was ta
ken by surprise, and she blushed. He whispered in her ear: “I think you’re terribly brave.” With that, he went out.
Middle-aged women were even easier than their daughters, he thought. In the empty corridor he caught sight of himself in a mirror. He stopped to adjust his bow tie and grinned triumphantly at his reflection. “You are a devil, Harold,” he murmured.
The party was coming to an end. When Harry reentered the drawing room, Rebecca said irritably: “Where have you been?”
“Talking to our hostess,” he replied. “Sorry. Shall we take our leave?”
He walked out of the house with his host’s cuff links and twenty pounds in his pocket.
They got a cab in Belgrave Square and rode to a restaurant in Piccadilly. Harry loved good restaurants: he got a deep sense of well-being from the crisp napkins, the polished glasses, the menus in French and the deferential waiters. His father had never seen the inside of such a place. His mother might have, if she had come in to clean it. He ordered a bottle of champagne, consulting the list carefully and choosing a vintage he knew to be good but not rare, so that the price was not too high.
When he first started taking girls to restaurants, he had made a few mistakes; but he was a quick learner. One useful trick had been to leave the menu unopened, and say: “I’d like a sole. Have you got any?” The waiter would open the menu and show him where it said Sole meuniere, Les goujons de sole avec sauce tartare, and Sole grillée, and then, seeing him hesitate, would probably say: “The goujons are very nice, sir.” Harry soon learned the French for all the basic dishes. He also noticed that people who frequently ate in such places quite often asked the waiter what a particular dish was: wealthy English people did not necessarily understand French. Thereafter he made a point of asking for the translation of one dish every time he ate in a fancy restaurant; and now he could read a menu better than most rich boys of his age. Wine was no problem, either. Sommeliers were normally pleased to be asked for a recommendation, and they did not expect a young man to be familiar with all the chateaus and communes and the different vintages. The trick, in restaurants as in life, was to appear at ease, especially when you were not.
The champagne he chose was good, but there was something wrong with his mood tonight, and he soon figured out that the problem was Rebecca. He kept thinking how delightful it would be to bring a pretty girl to a place like this. He always went out with unattractive girls: plain girls, fat girls, spotty girls, silly girls. They were easy to get acquainted with; and then, once they had fallen for him, they were eager to take him at face value, reluctant to question him in case they should lose him. As a strategy for getting inside wealthy homes it was matchless. The snag was that he spent all his time with girls he did not like. One day, perhaps ...
Rebecca was sullen tonight. She was discontented about something. Perhaps after seeing Harry regularly for three weeks, she was wondering why he still had not attempted to “go too far,” by which she would mean touching her breasts. The truth was he could not pretend to lust after her. He could charm her, romance her, make her laugh, and make her love him; but he could not desire her. On one excruciating occasion, he had found himself in a hayloft with a skinny, depressed girl set on losing her virginity, and he had tried to force himself; but his body had refused to cooperate, and he still squirmed with embarrassment every time he thought of it.
His sexual experience, such as it was, was mostly with girls of his own class, and none of those relationships had lasted. He had had just one deeply satisfying love affair. At the age of eighteen he had been shamelessly picked up in Bond Street by an older woman, the bored wife of a busy solicitor, and they had been lovers for two years. He had learned a lot from her—about making love, which she taught him enthusiastically; about upper-class manners, which he picked up surreptitiously; and about poetry, which they read and discussed in bed together. Harry had been deeply fond of her. She ended the affair instantly and brutally when her husband found out that she had a lover (he never knew who). Since then, Harry had seen them both several times: the woman always looked at him as if he were not there. Harry found this cruel. She had meant a lot to him, and she had seemed to care for him. Was she strong-willed, or just heartless? He would probably never know.
The champagne and the good food were not lifting Harry’s spirits or Rebecca’s. He began to feel restless. He had been planning to drop her gently after tonight, but suddenly he could not bear the thought of spending even the rest of this evening with her. He wished he had not wasted money on dinner for her. He looked at her grumpy face, bare of makeup and squashed beneath a silly little hat with a feather, and he began to hate her.
When they had finished dessert, he ordered coffee and went to the bathroom. The cloakroom was right next to the men’s room, near the exit door, and not visible from their table. Harry was seized by an irresistible impulse. He got his hat, tipped the cloakroom attendant, and slipped out of the restaurant.
It was a mild night. The blackout made it very dark, but Harry knew the West End well, and there were traffic lights to navigate by, plus the sparing glow of car side lights. He felt as if he had been let out of school. He had got rid of Rebecca, saved himself seven or eight pounds and given himself a night off, all in one inspired stroke.
The theaters, cinemas and dance halls had been closed by the government, “until the scale of the German attack upon Britain has been judged,” they said. But nightclubs always operated on the fringe of the law and there were still plenty open if you knew where to look. Soon Harry was making himself comfortable at a table in a cellar in Soho, sipping whiskey and listening to a first-rate American jazz band and toying with the idea of making a play for the cigarette girl.
He was still thinking about it when Rebecca’s brother came in.
The following morning he sat in a cell in the basement underneath the courthouse, depressed and remorseful, waiting to be taken before the magistrates. He was in deep trouble.
Walking out of the restaurant like that had been bloody silly. Rebecca was not the type to swallow her pride and pay the bill quietly. She had made a fuss, the manager had called the police, her family had been dragged in.... It was just the kind of furor Harry was normally very careful to avoid. Even so, he would have got away with it, had it not been for the incredible bad luck of running into Rebecca’s brother a couple of hours later.
He was in a large cell with fifteen or twenty other prisoners, who would be brought before the Bench this morning. There were no windows, and the room was full of cigarette smoke. Harry would not be tried today: this would be a preliminary hearing.
He would eventually be convicted, of course. The evidence against him was indisputable. The headwaiter would corroborate Rebecca’s complaint, and Sir Simon Monkford would identify the cuff links as his.
But it was worse than that. Harry had been interviewed by an inspector from the Criminal Intelligence Department. The man had been wearing the detective’s uniform of serviceable serge suit, plain white shirt and black tie, waistcoat with no watch chain, and highly polished, well-worn boots; and he was an experienced policeman with a sharp mind and a wary manner. He had said: “For the last two or three years we’ve been getting odd reports, from wealthy houses, of lost jewelry. Not stolen, of course. Just missing. Bracelets, earrings, pendants, shirt studs ... The losers are quite sure the stuff can’t have been stolen, because the only people who had the opportunity to take it would have been their guests. The only reason they report it is that they want to claim it if it turns up somewhere.”
Harry had kept his mouth shut tight throughout the entire interview, but inside he was feeling sick. He had been sure that his career had gone entirely unnoticed until now. He was shocked to learn the opposite: they had been on to him for some time.
The detective opened a fat file. “The Earl of Dorset, a Georgian silver bonbonnière and a lacquered snuffbox, also Georgian. Mrs. Harry Jaspers, a pearl bracelet with ruby clasp by Tiffany’s. The Contessa di Malvoli, an Art D
eco diamond pendant on a silver chain. This man has good taste.” The detective looked pointedly at the diamond studs in Harry’s dress shirt.
Harry realized the file must contain details of dozens of crimes committed by him. He knew also that he would eventually be convicted of at least some of those crimes. This shrewd detective had put together all the basic facts: he could easily gather witnesses to say that Harry had been at each location at the time of the theft. Sooner or later they would search his lodgings and his mother’s house. Most of the jewelry had been fenced, but he had kept a few pieces: the shirt studs the detective had noticed had been taken from a sleeping drunk at a ball in Grosvenor Square, and his mother had a brooch he had deftly plucked from the bosom of a countess at a wedding reception in a Surrey garden. And then how would he answer when they asked him what he lived on?
He was headed for a long stretch in jail. And when he got out, he would be conscripted into the army, which was more or less the same thing. The thought made his blood run cold.
He steadfastly refused to say a word, even when the detective took him by the lapels of his dinner jacket and slammed him against the wall; but silence would not save him. The law had time on its side.
Harry had only one chance of freedom. He would have to persuade the magistrates to give him bail, then disappear. Suddenly he yearned for freedom as if he had been in jail for years instead of hours.
Disappearing would not be simple, but the alternative made him shiver.
In robbing the rich, he had grown accustomed to their style of living. He got up late, drank coffee from a china cup, wore beautiful clothes and ate in expensive restaurants. He still enjoyed returning to his roots, drinking in the pub with old mates or taking his ma to the Odeon. But the thought of prison was unbearable: the dirty clothes, the horrible food, the total lack of privacy and, worst of all, the grinding boredom of a totally pointless existence.