“Okay.”
Robert Dyas is a home-ware and gift shop, part of a chain and one of its retail outlets was in the town of Maidenhead. It boasts many departments and loads of stuff for all the family. Kenneth was a gadget fiend, so Keira was as well. As they browsed, Keira saw a woman looking very furtive as she walked around the store. She wasn’t looking at the goods, but was watching the other shoppers.
Keira immediately suspected she was a shoplifter casing the joint in preparation of a thieving spree. Keira kept her under observation and watched as she wandered, seemingly aimlessly, touching something her and another thing there. She held a shopping bag that Keira was convinced held her swag so far purloined.
The woman was dressed casually, in a pair of jeans and a pink top. She had long hair tied back in a pony-tail, and Keira guessed she was in her mid twenties.
Anyway, as she was following another woman out of the shop, Keira grabbed her and pushed her up against the window.
“You’re a shoplifter!” Keira said, triumphantly.
“No, I’m fucking not! I’m a store detective and I was following a suspected thief!”
Keira felt about one inch high.
She apologised and let the woman go.
Swearing, the woman ran after the real shoplifter, so Keira grabbed Connie and they ran the other way, towards the bus stop.
“What happened?” Connie asked.
“Nothing,” Keira replied.
“Something happened.”
“Okay, I made a mistake. I have just learned to be a little more observant and to take greater care when selecting potential customers.
“Customers?”
“Yeah, customers for my attention. Crime fighting is not as easy as I thought it might be.
Nine
Ray was a car thief. Actually, he was a lot of things, and wasn’t awfully good at most of them. However, at taking cars that didn’t belong to him, he was actually quite adept. Unfortunately for Ray, the cars he targeted were the fancy new and expensive ones; you know, the ones with the hi-tech security systems that you just can’t steal without the key and fob. Unfortunately, very few people leave their keys lying about, so if you want the keys, you have to go into the home or office and steal them.
There wasn’t much money in the old and beaten up Fords and Vauxhalls that one could steal with a screwdriver and a hammer, but even they were getting harder to pinch these days.
Ray was paid reasonably for his skills. He suspected that all his merchandise was in a container and in a foreign land within three days of his taking them. He also suspected that his fees were considerably less than the price that the next man in the chain received.
However, heroin is an expensive habit, so a regular source of income for very little outlay kept him happy.
That meant that in order to steal these fancy cars, Ray had to become a burglar, at which, he was mediocre, to be honest.
You see, people fill their garages with junk and leave their £100,000 cars on the drive. Okay, so they lock them, but then walk in the front door and plop the keys on the hall table next to the door.
You would be surprised to learn the amount of cars that are stolen by the crooks using the keys that have literally been fished through the letter box off the hall table.
Ray was fishing.
Gerrards Cross is one of the most expensive places in the UK (outside London) to buy a home. Within just twenty-five minutes of a central London railway station, most of the bigger homes on the Dukes Wood estate were valued at somewhere in the region of one to two million pounds, and many were double that!
Apart from the occasional fishpond, there is not a body of water in Gerrards Cross that one can consider catching a fish.
Still, Ray was using a fishing rod in Gerrards Cross. To be specific, he as fishing at Honeysuckle House on Dukes Wood Drive. On the drive behind him was a Bentley and a brand new Range Rover Sport. He might have been pleased to know that in the large, locked, double garage was a rack of indifferent wine, four bicycles that no one used any more, two sets of golf clubs, a windsurfer, a kayak that was last used four summers ago and a go-cart that was last used in 1997. Oh yes, and six old kitchen units stood where the workman had left them in 2006 because the lady of the house wanted to put them up in the garage to put things away for storage, but no one could be bothered to get round to it.
Ray was aiming for the Bentley keys, but wouldn’t mind if he could snaffle the Range Rover keys as well.
It was three in the morning, and Ray knew that there were no police at the local police station any more. The government cuts reduced the police to one Police Community Support Officer operating two days a week out of Burnham.
“Ah!” he breathed. “Got one!”
Delicately he handled the fishing rod, so as not to displace the keys that he had just snared on the end. With a big blob of sticky stuff, the keys were now secure.
He started to pull the rod back, and with it the set of keys.
“Excuse me?” said a pleasant female voice from behind him.
Ray froze.
No, it was his imagination, there’s no one behind him, for he would have heard them on the nice crunchy gravel.
Without moving his hands, he risked a quick peek behind him.
There, nothing!
“I’m up here,” said the same voice.
He turned a little too quickly and the keys fell off his fishing rod on the parquet floor.
They lay there forgotten as Ray looked up at the girl who floated five feet from the ground.
“You’re a naughty man, stealing these nice people’s cars, aren’t you?” she said.
Ray looked at her. She was a pretty girl, with long fair hair. She had normal clothes on, just a black sweater that showed off her boobs okay, and a tight pair of black leggings. Her pink trainers were hardly the superhero type. He guessed she was around sixteen or seventeen.
“Shouldn’t you wear a mask?” he heard himself ask.
“Why should I bother; who the hell would believe that you were caught by a flying girl?”
He blinked a couple of times.
“Caught?”
“Oh yes, you see, you’re nicked, I think they say.”
“Like fuck I am,” said Ray and set off across the gravel at a run.
Now, in being pretty mediocre at most things, Ray was actually quite nimble on his feet.
He wasn’t fast enough, for he felt a hand on the hood of his hoodie, and then next moment his feet no longer touched the ground. It was as he realised the rooftops were below them that he started to panic. You see, poor Ray wasn’t good with heights.
At around one hundred and twenty feet, the girl stopped. Ray took a swing at her with his fist. All that happened was that his fist hit something akin to an invisible brick wall and he felt shooting pains from his damaged hand.
“Okay,” said the girl in a cheerful tone. “We’re going to play a game now. I will ask you a question, and you will answer the question. If you refuse to answer or lie to me, I drop you. It’s easy, really, if you want to live, you just answer the questions and answer truthfully; okay?”
Ray was too busy looking at the ground below.
“Oi!” the girl said, raising her voice. “I was talking to you. Do please have the decency of attending to me when I speak!”
Ray stared at her.
“Huh?”
Sighing, she repeated her statement about the game they would play.
“You’re mad!” he said, feeling more than slightly worried.
“No, I’m very dangerous and you are possibly going to die very soon. Now, question number one – what is your name?”
Police Constable Debbie Harris was bored. Contrary to Ray’s inaccurate idea of how many officers were on duty, Debbie was actually a police officer and on duty. She was one of six that covered the South Buckinghamshire area this fine night.
Night shift in the Eastern Sector of the South Bucks division of the Thames Valley Police area was hardly the centre of crime and disorder. Boasting the towns of Gerrards Cross and Beaconsfield, plus several substantial villages in between, it managed to include some of the most expensive housing in the UK. It also managed to possess a minimal amount of more basic housing, so most of the criminals that preyed on the wealthy came in from outside.