Therefore Tony led the way. The moon’s edge slipped into a cloud, and then out again. Before them roofs, copings and chimney stacks showed up sharp against the streaked, star-pocked sky. A path cut through the garden; it led under a trellis arch and then across the lawn. There was a shed and an outbuilding. Listening for the first shake of a chain, listening for the interrupted snort of canine breathing, they stood completely still, waiting a full minute. A snuffling sound from next door made them both start.
‘Nothing. Couple of hedgehogs at it, most likely.’ Tony shook his head and laughed under his breath. ‘Spiky fuckers. Supposed to be asleep, aren’t they?’
A cat screamed in the next garden, electrically loud. Vic jumped again. Again Tony shook his head. ‘Not scared, are you? Don’t you worry about a thing, mate. You’ve got your Uncle Tone to look after you.’ They carried on. The french windows were right in front of them ‘All right. Give me the doings.’
Vic had the brown paper and glue; he fished for them in the bag he’d taken over from Figgsy. The moonlight caught the fine teeth in Tony’s elegant smile. He was grinning, holding the glass cutter. ‘Nice, eh?’ He indicated the house. ‘Hope they’ve all hung up their stockings.’
There came the gritty score of the cutting wheel on the pane. Vic looked up at the dark building and nodded. He stood back a step, even as Tony was easing the glass. He held the two torches, ready. It was only a second or two’s work to get the door open.
STRAIGHT AWAY, TO the right of him, Vic’s torch beam picked out the smoked-gold frame of a painting that hung from the picture rail. Then the light sweep opened up the interior. There were several more pictures along the wall – large canvases, and some smaller. The place was lined with a distinction quite unexpected. Between and around the pictures the flickering, searchlit wallpaper showed up a drab floral blue; but a great polished table was dressed with silver furnishings. It had carved upright chairs tucked beneath, and it filled much of the centre space, though there were smaller tables and a sideboard in the distance. All the surfaces were cluttered with objects, many of them glittering, cut glass, silver. There were no Christmas decorations.
Embers glowed in the grate. The torch showed the chimney breast with a poor brick fireplace, yet over the mantelshelf an astonishing high gilt mirror was mounted. Vic looked up from the eerie reflection. The ceiling had plain mouldings, but from the central rose hung a vast glass chandelier. The signs of wealth reminded him of the time when a kindly foreign professor had invited the external students to Prince’s Gate for drinks. A tang of cigar smoke drifted in the air.
Chest high under the pictures ran shelves of books, so many in the torch’s beam. He moved closer. The spines showed old-fashioned letter shapes which he couldn’t read. Tony, gone ahead once more, was already about his own concerns.
‘Come on then, brains. Finger out. No use standing here gawping. See that clock. And this bloody sideboard.’
Vic tiptoed to the far end of the room, and made himself lift the old gilded clock from its shelf. But the light from his torch was fading – the batteries must have been dud. With one hand he unhooked the long pendulum and tried to wriggle it free. The lever flicked back and forth like a live thing. He silenced it. The torch went out. He shook it back to life. A wonderful engraved bowl lay on its own tray on the sideboard. On either side of it, among the rest of the silver, stood two fine twisted candlesticks. They felt weighted by more than metal, clanking wretchedly against the clock. He imagined Tony’s laugh. Ten quid, maybe. Even twenty, the lot. Something told him what he knew already – that, financially, Tony had no need of this job, or his help. A sound of ripping filled the dark beside him.
The sideboard drawers hung open, revealing cutlery in disorder. Now Tony’s shape, the torch gripped under his chin, stood at a small bureau in the corner. ‘Get me your light on this lot,’ he whispered.
Vic shone his weakening beam on to a riffle of letters and bills. There were storage envelopes too, and a wadge of personal papers, with a passport, nipped up in a bulldog clip. Tony shook out the envelopes and snatched at the papers. ‘Not this, you bastard. Where’s your bloody ill-gotten? Come on.’ He flung the documents on to the floor and snickered. ‘Who knows, eh?’
Vic felt a movement behind him, and smelt a trace of hair oil. His torch beam suddenly caught Tony, slipping his fingers around the edge of a long drape. The door behind it gave a moaning swish. ‘Tony!’ But Tony had disappeared from view, and Vic stood rooted to the soft rug by the sideboard.
Character, Perce had so often said, was about not cracking up. Vic’s father had seen men crack up: men who couldn’t move – either towards the enemy, or back. Those buggers, Perce had said, were sitting ducks. A picture by the tapestried door hanging was caught in the beam. From it a man of property in sober seventeenth-century dress stared dimly back at Vic. There was reproach in the painted eye. Beside the figure were brown water scenes with boats and houses.
He heard noises in the hall beyond, as if Tony were trying to prise something away. ‘Tony!’ He turned and, in the dark, inadvertently swung his own bag against the back of one of the dining chairs. The rattle was deafening. Now his torch came to rest on the large canvas above the sideboard he’d just looted. Bold smears of red might be lips, or nipples; and there were eyes, gilded, female eyes, pale, laquered skin.
It was slashed, and the hardened paint near the bottom had come off in chunks, revealing the canvas. Below the cut Vic caught a signature in the bottom corner which he couldn’t read. It was as though he’d brushed up against Clarice’s naked body, there in the room. He stretched to feel for the table and began backing towards the french window.
‘Tony!’ His nerve failed. ‘Tony. I’m going back to the bike.’
‘That’s what you want, isn’t it, Vic.’ Like a tinkling whisper, out of nowhere.
He plunged after Tony into the hall where the wrenching sound had come from. A floorboard creaked above him. Across a vast chequerwork of tiles, he could just make out a front door and a large newel post at the foot of the staircase.
His torch went out and he groped for the banisters. And then holding fast on to them, he stepped sideways, several paces, still feeling for the woodwork. Above, in the stairwell, there was the faintest of gleams, the merest sense of outlines, no more.
Then a thump, and a woman’s scream and footfalls overhead. Vic panicked, his arms outstretched. He heard a man’s gruff voice upstairs and the sound of a door handle being turned. Something on the landing went over with a crash and there were footsteps on the stairs. Tony rushed past him in the hall and Vic turned back to follow. In the dining-room he clattered into the heavy chairs, and fell against a small table, dashing the glassware.
He was at the french windows. As he burst his wrist through a pane, a light switched on. He heard a run behind him, felt a blow to the back of his head and he swivelled, enraged, hitting out at the pyjamaed figure, raining and pummelling blows with his strong fists against the righteous protective arms, the plump sides, the grunting, wet, tobacco-smelling face, feeling the glass of spectacles against his bare knuckles, and its give.
He was escaping down the garden, his ludicrous sack bouncing and jingling on his back. A low wall tripped him. He crashed through stalks, was whipped by branches. He scrambled at the fence. Next he was paralysed and the forest was a sightless chaos. His chest was scraped and his foot hurt. A motor bike in the distance kicked into life: once, twice and then the roar. He inched his way towards the trace of its sound, shuffling with his feet for the path, feeling for tree trunks with his hands, but there was only the unexpected ditch, the unremembered scrub, the wicked bramble thorns. The back of his head ached with a dull, throbbing pain and he put his knuckles in his mouth, tasting blood.
Someone was shouting. He attempted to retrace his steps. But he could find no fence, no house. The ground was dropping away and frosted spines rose up and stung his hands. He straggled back again. Then he plunged in a different direction, and again.
He