He scratched at his fate line, as though committing her suggestions to memory.
‘You need to know about the stores? For confirmation?’
Dana nodded and opened a fresh sheet in her pad. ‘I have to, yes. If you could confirm what’s in the journal for the tape. To wrap up some things. Then we don’t have to speak about that again.’
She stopped and glanced at the mirror, her heart yelping. She shouldn’t say this – had no obligation to do so, and every reason not to…
‘I should tell you at this point that you don’t currently have a lawyer, but you have a right to one. Mr Whittler, I… I, uh… strongly suggest you get one before we go further.’
She could feel the heat from her face. She waited for the rap of knuckle on glass from a colleague: perhaps the double-double-tap that was Bill’s. She’d be prepared to ride the inevitable argument. When the sound didn’t come, she looked back at Nathan.
‘Mr Whittler, you need someone in here who has your best interests at heart.’
Nathan turned slowly. ‘But I’m certain that you… thank you. I know what I’ve done in those stores. And really, you have the journal. There’s little point arguing about it.’
There was a short screech as he turned the chair back again. The room was exactly how it had been before.
‘Will we find evidence of you gaining entry?’
‘I doubt it. I was pretty careful. I’d seen enough television before I left to know how to avoid fingerprints, footprints.’
He sat back a little, hands cradled in his lap and eyes fixed on the table’s edge.
‘When I worked at Pringle’s I used to build cabinets and armoires. They were a big seller. Everyone was building modern homes and they wanted something in it that looked old, established.
‘Anyway, Mr Pringle taught me about the locks we used on the armoire doors. I’d worked with wood, mostly, so I had to play with the locks to understand the device. Most locks are basically the same, Detective. You can tamper with them in a way that means when you turn the key you hear a noise and feel a click, but the mechanism hasn’t locked. It’s tumbled around itself and gone nowhere. The thing isn’t locked.’
Dana made a quick note to ensure the window lock at Jensen’s was forensically examined. She wrote it in Pitman so all Nathan could see were squiggles.
‘The shorthand,’ he observed. ‘For security?’
‘For speed, Mr Whittler. So I don’t interrupt your flow. The locks?’
‘I doctored particular window locks and door locks the first time I entered an establishment. Always more than one, in case one of them was discovered. Unless the person actually tried to open what they thought they’d just locked, they’d never catch on. If they did, they’d assume the lock was faulty, not rigged. It was pretty rare to return to a place and find they’d caught up. People are lazy, Detective Russo: especially when they only work there.’
‘So when they locked up they’d hear the lock click and think it was secure, but you could open it up from the outside?’
He took a swig of water from the mug. There were beads of sweat on his upper lip.
‘Exactly. They weren’t really high-security places, were they? Most had no cameras, except perhaps by the cash machine or the checkout, and I never went near money. And they’d never notice anything was missing.’
He put the mug back on the table and touched the cap on the water bottle. The outside of the bottle was covered in condensation. Dana continued in Pitman and passed a tissue to him without looking. He wiped the bottle fastidiously, then folded the tissue four times and palmed it.
‘Yes, Mr Whittler, I was particularly intrigued by that. I doubt anyone will turn out to have reported the stock loss.’
‘Oh, there’s an art to it, Detective. Firstly, people neither notice nor care if certain things go missing. They aren’t expecting someone to take cans of peaches but leave the cash. So you’re taking things that wouldn’t be spotted immediately, if at all. Just like, if someone entered your home but only took a pencil, and some kitchen roll from under the sink, would you even recognise they’d been there? I doubt it.
‘Secondly, you take from the back of the display or the shelf; only with things where there’s plenty there already. Say there’s fifty cans of beans, with a row of five at the front. You carefully take five from the back, leave the rest of the display untouched. You need to be careful of stains, markings in the dust, and so on. No one will ever spot it. By the time they’ve sold forty of them the cans have been replenished, moved around so the older cans are at the front, and so on. There’s nothing for anyone to notice. Often, the items are displayed in a way that makes it easier – they’re thrown into a wire basket or heaped up in a corner. You make a mental note of how the display looked and, as long as it looks like that when you’re done, the shop won’t realise.’
‘Computerised stock control, bar codes?’
‘Bar codes are usually only to get the correct price when you sell. Computerised stock control? Never saw any such systems out the back: I don’t think many places had anything like that. If they did, they’d count them when they first unpacked them, I suppose. And they’d count each one when they sold it, I guess. But in between, there’s a whole lot of nothing. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.’
Dana tried to think the process through from Nathan’s viewpoint; sneaking around a store in the darkness with a mental shopping list. ‘But sometimes you’d need something that was right by the checkout, or there were only two on display. Surely?’
‘Yes, occasionally. I tried to keep well stocked so I was only ever topping up. That meant I could afford to go without on one trip or another. Batteries, for example.’
He bit his lip before carrying on, as though betraying a confidence. ‘But if there were, say, only two of something: I took one and placed the other on a different aisle. That way, the store would think that one of their dumber staff had put both in the wrong places, but they could only find one. It wouldn’t occur to them that the other one had been stolen.’
She reminded herself that Nathan had had hundreds of hours to think this through in fine detail. ‘Ingenious. No wonder we had no idea this was going on in a regular way. Or at all, for that matter.’
‘It wasn’t simply to avoid detection. Please don’t get me wrong. I only took what I needed, when I needed it. I didn’t want to damage the store. I hoped one man’s needs, every few months, wouldn’t kill their business.’
They both paused. The room became heavy; the heat was beginning to bite. Nathan took bigger swigs of the water. Sweat was beginning to form on the back of his hands. He seemed aware of the glow of his skin but apparently connected it with his emotions, not the temperature.
‘You were ashamed of doing this, Mr Whittler.’
He pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes, and sniffed. ‘Yes, I… yes. I was. Very much so. Horribly so.’
More gulps of water, and a deep breath. The increased temperature was working; making him rush and blurt, and feel obligated. ‘The first few times, not so much, strangely. You might think I was mortified to begin with and gradually got used to it. In fact, it was the other way around. The first few times I was so focused on how to get in and out undiscovered I thought less about the morality. It was later on, when I was practised and somewhat skilled – when it was almost banal, usual – that I really felt the shame.’
He placed both palms on the table. ‘I’m… I’m so sorry. For those people, the people I stole from. I’d never done anything like that before in my life, Detective. Never. It was not nice, to be dragged down to that level. To drag myself to that level.’