Sure enough, there was a security light at the back, but no one to see us as we nipped through the glare and hugged the side of the house. It was a low-built farmhouse, and they hadn’t bothered to get the control box for the burglar alarm too high up. Hooper grinned when he saw it and opened his tool bag. All the bits and pieces inside were carefully wrapped in cloth to stop them clattering against each other. He took out a mastic gun with a long thin nozzle and snipped the end off the tube with a pair of long-nose pliers. Then he got me to give him a leg up against the wall. It would have been easier if Dave had been with us, but who’d want Doncaster Dave lumbering about on a job like this?
Slow Kid helped me to support Hooper, both of us leaning against the wall while he did his bit with the alarm. Faintly disgusting squelchy noises came from overhead, like someone with a bad case of the balti belly dance.
“It’s dead quiet, Stones,” whispered Slow.
“Well, they don’t have all-night acid house parties round here.”
“Yeah?”
“Not on a Wednesday night anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? The excitement of Panorama wears them out and they have to go to bed early.”
“You’re full of shit, Stones.”
Hooper was starting to wobble a bit on our shoulders, and I heard him give a little squeak of panic. A small blob of black mastic landed with a splat on Slow Kid’s shoulder. He squirmed his face to the side to look at it.
“Do they have seagulls round here, Stones?”
“Nah. They hang around the rubbish tips and gravel pits, don’t they? They’ll have posher birds round here, like peacocks.”
“I think a bleedin’ peacock just shat on me then.”
More wobbling and grunting suggested that Hooper was ready to come down. We grabbed him and hoisted him back to ground level.
“That’ll fix that bugger,” he said. “It’s stuck solider than a constipated cow.”
“Okay, now the door.”
Hooper dug into his bag again and bent down to the back door. It was a stable-type affair in two halves, and Hooper had the bottom half open so fast that it might as well have been a giant cat flap left open specially for us cat burglars. That’s the trouble with rich gits — they think anyone who hasn’t got as much money as they have is stupid as well. This lot were about to learn a lesson in crude peasant cunning.
We left Slow Kid at the back door while Hooper and I moved about the house. Hooper had no idea what I was looking for, but I needed his experience to keep me from stumbling into an infra-red sensor or something. The only other thing I worried about was a dog. But if there had been one, it ought to be telling us about it by now, and I for one would have been back in those woods like Linford Christie, clutching my lunch box.
Just inside the back door was a hallway with coats and stuff. Then there was the kind of room that doesn’t exist in houses on the Forest Estate. I did see a picture of one once in a Sunday magazine, and the caption on the picture said it was a utility room. I suppose it’s where you’d keep your croquet equipment or send your butler to polish the silver. This one looked like you could have kept a couple of horses in it. But it was nothing compared to the next room, where you could have kept the carriage as well.
Hooper was nodding his approval as he eyed the place up, taking stock of the china and the more movable bits of furniture. I know of one job that Hooper and a couple of his mates did not far from here, where they took everything out of the house, including half a dozen solid oak doors. They just drove up in a furniture van and took it all away. That time there was nobody at home to complain about the draught.
We walked down a long, dark passageway and passed a door into a dining room with a kitchen beyond it. Doncaster Dave would have been sticking his head in the fridge by now to get at the chicken legs and left-over caviar. But I moved on, trying the next door and hitting lucky. This looked like a study, with bookshelves and a big desk over near the window. Even this was bigger than my entire house. We’d come past five rooms, and we hadn’t even seen the stairs yet.
Hooper gave the study a quick once-over and dropped me the nod. I went straight to the desk and shone my torch on the surface, looking for letters, bank statements, address books — anything to give me a handle on who we were dealing with.
A couple of letters had been left lying about. Nothing exciting — offers of investment opportunities, credit cards that supported charities, insurance deals, mobile phone offers. It was the usual stuff — the bloke had got himself on a mailing list at some time and his letter box would be jammed up for ever more. But they did confirm the name — Mr N. Perella. What would the first name be, I wondered. Nigel, Nathaniel? Not a Norman, surely? Perella sounded vaguely Italian, but I couldn’t think of any Italian first names starting with ‘N’, apart from Nero.
There were four drawers, all locked, but Hooper soon whipped them open for me with a little sliver of stiff plastic. The first contained bills and a wallet full of bank statements. Just as I thought — a rich git. My eyes widened as I looked at some of the figures, and my brain started to tick over with schemes for relieving Mr Perella of some of that excess wealth. But then I remembered why I was there and started on the second drawer. This was even more boring — share certificates, tax vouchers, letters from the Inland Revenue, copies of invoices from solicitors, accountants, estate agents. It looked like Perella hadn’t owned Old Manor Farm for more than a few months. Such a pity that he hadn’t got round to replacing the out of date burglar alarm yet.
Hooper got the first of the left hand drawers open and I heard him draw in his breath sharply.
“Bloody ’ell, I don’t like guns.”
It was an automatic similar to the one we’d taken out of the German car. If Perella had his own private arsenal, then I was with Hooper on that one. I suddenly felt even more uneasy and itched to get out of the house.
“You never told me there were guns involved, Stones.”
“Shh.”
There was just one more drawer to go, and now I hit lucky — if you can call it lucky. At least it solidified something I’d been feeling recently. I took a leaflet off the top of the pile and barely needed to glance at the papers underneath, neatly filed away in a blue folder. Yes, I’d found what I was looking for after all. I read the front sheet again, and then a third time. Boy, I was going to like this.
Hooper was looking at me strangely.
“Out?” he mouthed.
“Yeah.”
We crept back down the corridor, hearing nothing from inside the house except the usual little creaking noises from an old building at night. Hooper pulled the back door shut. They might never know they’d been broken into, until the next time they had the burglar alarm tested.
Slow Kid met us in the garden and the three of us set off back towards the trees. Then I had a thought, or a sudden impulse, and veered off towards the old dovecote that loomed out of the dark across the grass. Slow and Hooper came after me, baffled now, but not able to make a fuss.
The door on the dovecote was fairly new and solid, and it fit well. It wasn’t the sagging, loose-hinged mess that you usually see on old farm buildings. There was a smooth run up the grass to the doors, and it looked to me, even in the dark, as though cars regularly pulled up here. The dovecote was plenty big enough to use for storage. There’d be no interior walls, just tiers of nesting places reaching up to the tiled roof.