For now, he would just keep a lookout.
He spent the next few days looking out the window of the room that faced the back garden. The toilet window also faced the back garden, and after every visit to the toilet, he’d look out it, towards the gate and the lane behind.
One day he forgot to lock the toilet door. It was shut, but he had forgotten to lock it. After he washed and dried his hands, he had a look out the window. To do so was always an effort, because the window was high, and in order to look out it he had to step into the bath, and go on his tiptoes.
Linda walked in and saw him peering through the window, and asked him what he was doing.
He nearly fell in the bath. He said he wasn’t doing anything, just looking out the window. He couldn’t think of what else to say.
She looked through the window, and asked him if he was looking at their neighbour, Teresa.
He told her that Teresa wasn’t there, but when he looked out, there she was, lying in her garden, reading a magazine.
When he pictured how it looked through Linda’s eyes, it looked bad. He looked like an old-school pervert.
Linda walked away, and Gary was about to call her back to say that it wasn’t what she thought. But he knew that if she asked what it was he was looking at, he’d probably have to tell her that he left the keys in the padlock and now they were gone. Maybe he would have owned up if she kept at it, but because she walked away, he just left it.
A week passed, with no break-ins. It surprised Gary, especially considering that they’d left the house unoccupied for a few hours here and there at various times of the day.
There was even a time when they went through to Linda’s mum and dad’s for the night, and they’d made it quite obvious that they weren’t home. Gary tried hard to not make it so obvious, by leaving all the lights on and turning on the radio. Linda asked him why he was doing that, considering he didn’t usually. He told her that there was no right or wrong time to start being conscious of burglars. But she said that she doubted that anybody would be able to break in, not with all the locks they had. There were locks on the windows, and there were the special locks on the front and back doors. Multipoint locks. Burglars couldn’t kick their way past those.
‘But somebody could pick them,’ said Gary.
Gary wasn’t sure if it was a clever move to continue with the talk of burglars, or a stupid one. It would be a stupid move if the burglars chose that night to break in, on the day that Gary coincidentally became conscious of burglars. She would have asked him if he was psychic, especially because he also seemed to predict that the burglars got into the house by apparently picking the lock. Then she’d maybe wonder if they had a key. Then she’d ask Gary where the keys were, and she’d see that one of them was missing. And she’d see the look on his face. And he’d have to tell her how long he’d known for. And she’d know he let her think that he was perving on Teresa, rather than just owning up to the truth.
‘Och, forget it,’ said Gary, switching off the lights. ‘You’re right.’
He switched off every light in the house. He didn’t even close the curtains. He’d rather that the house looked unoccupied and ripe for the picking, than face the music. He’d rather jeopardise their telly, their computers and anything else worth stealing. He’d rather do that and take all the hassle that it would cause, all the phone calls and changing of passwords and proving who he was, than face the music. He could face it eventually, but he wanted some more time to try and work it all out and make things right.
They left the house, and Gary spent the night thinking about what they’d be returning to the next day.
But when they returned, everything was intact.
Gary looked around the house at all the things worth knocking. The telly, the computers, even the food in the fridge. Linda watched him as he looked at it all.
He saw her watching and said, ‘Ah, good to be back. It’s just good to be back.’
After that night, Gary told himself that if burglars were going to break in, if they truly had their eyes on the house, they would have broken in then. And because they didn’t, then maybe there weren’t any burglars. Maybe the keys weren’t really in the hands of a thief, and they were lying out there in the pebbles after all.
He took a walk to the gate and had another look, making sure again that he wasn’t spotted by Linda. He looked in the pebbles and the grass, and in the path behind the gate, but there was nothing. It was puzzling.
Perhaps somebody did snatch the keys, but the type of person that did such a thing would be out their face at the time, and they’ve since forgotten where the keys came from. Perhaps there was a thief somewhere out there, wondering whose keys were in his pocket.
Gary took off the padlock and threw it in the bin, and told himself to remember to buy a new one, so that Linda didn’t ask questions. He also reminded himself to get a copy of the key to the back door, because if they lost the one they had left, Linda would ask what happened to the other one. And she’d see the look on his face. Then she’d find out about how he left the keys in the padlock, and that he left the house unoccupied with all the lights off and the curtains open, putting everything at risk.
Gary went to the shops and replaced the padlock. He got an extra key cut for the back door, and put them on a keyring that looked just the same as the old one. Linda didn’t suspect a thing.
Everything was going to be all right. Linda had been a bit funny with him since the perving incident with Teresa, but with regards to the keys, everything was going to be all right.
Then, a few days later, while Gary was looking out the bedroom window upstairs, he saw a guy cycling about outside in the street. There was something about him that Gary didn’t like the look of.
The guy wasn’t wearing cycling clothes. He was wearing denims and a jacket, and he wasn’t wearing a helmet. That would usually be unremarkable, because you don’t have to have all the bright clothes and a helmet to ride a bike. But usually, the only people you saw without a helmet were younger guys on a BMX. But this guy was about 30 years old, and he was cycling on a mountain bike that looked dodgy. The bike looked featureless, it was completely black with no logo, like it had been spray-painted black. And why was that? Because it had probably been knocked, and probably by the guy himself.
The guy went up the street, past the house. But when he got a few doors up, he doubled back.
Gary stepped away from the window to look out the side of the curtain, so that he couldn’t be seen. He saw the guy look at a few houses, which gave Gary some relief, because it didn’t look like the guy had an interest in Gary’s house in particular. But as the guy cycled past Gary’s front gate, he turned his head quickly to look at the living-room window. And he kept looking at it, even as he passed the houses further down the street.
It was him.
He was the man with the keys.
Gary knew what was coming. It was at that point that Gary thought that he really should tell Linda. He should tell Linda the fucking truth. He should tell Linda that he was sorry, he was so fucking sorry, but he’d left the keys in the padlock around the back, and now there was a guy casing their house. They should go to the police. They were about to get everything stolen.
But it would cost a fortune to get that lock replaced.
And it wasn’t just that either. It was the fact that he caused it. And then lied about it. Plus he’d left the house unoccupied, with the lights off and curtain open, knowing that they could have had their computers stolen. Plus there was the thing with Teresa. Him and Linda had been heading for the rocks ever since that happened, and he could have turned it around with a truthful explanation, but instead of that he just let it happen.
A couple of days passed, with no sight of the guy on the bike. But Gary knew the guy was out there, just