back down again as she stepped on a wind-up car and twisted her ankle. The hallway walls were covered in scratches and grubby handprints and the smell of stale cigarette smoke lingered in the air. Lauren tried letting Kerry in through the front door, but it was deadlocked.
She crouched down and shouted through the letterbox. ‘I won’t bother picking it. It’s easier if I let you in around the side.’
Lauren walked through to the living-room. She undid a catch and pulled open the central sash of the bay window.
‘Cheers,’ Kerry said, as she straddled through. ‘Millie said the computer was upstairs in the back bedroom when she baby-sat. You copy everything off that and I’ll start hunting for paperwork.’
‘Aye aye, captain,’ Lauren said, as she ran off up the stairs.
The computer was covered in crayon and there was sticky orange stuff all over the keyboard, which Lauren hoped was juice. It struck her that the Patels were slobs; definitely not the kind of people who organised household accounts or other valuable data on their computer.
Downstairs, Kerry had found a mountain of unfiled paperwork in a living-room cupboard. She had a high-speed document scanner in her backpack, but she realised it would take hours to copy every piece of paper, particularly as loads of them were still in their delivery envelopes accompanied by leaflets offering low-interest loans and discount car insurance.
Lauren looked through the program menu and found nothing but a bunch of games for pre-school kids. It took her under a minute to put everything from the computer on to a flash memory drive, then she ripped the power leads out of the back before shoving the monitor off the side of the desk. After that she yanked out the keyboard and used it to batter books and ornaments off two shelves, before swinging it above her head and demolishing a paper lampshade.
She checked the drawers built into the computer desk for documents, then moved into the bathroom. She grabbed the shower gel, shampoo and toothpaste in turn and squirted them across the floor and up the walls. Then she found a lipstick and wrote on the bathroom mirror: HOPE U ENJOY CLEARING UP MY MESS with a smiley face underneath it.
There was a jewellery box in the main bedroom. Lauren stuffed her tracksuit pockets with Patricia’s collection of brooches and rings, before opening up her wardrobe and ripping all the clothes off their hangers. She found a couple of credit cards and about a hundred pounds cash in the cabinet on Michael’s side of the bed. After a further rummage, she uncovered a little bag of white powder that was probably cocaine.
‘Aren’t you a naughty boy,’ Lauren grinned, as she ripped the small drawer off its runners and hurtled its contents across the room.
Next, she opened up Michael’s wardrobe, which contained half a dozen sets of police uniform in dry-cleaners’ bags. She shot everything out of the sock and underwear cubbies, before she spotted a small safe bolted to the wall with three pairs of polished shoes standing on top of it. Lauren hadn’t studied safe cracking and didn’t have tools with her even if she had, but she knew CHERUB might want to send someone back for another look.
She cleared a space around the chunky metal box, then slid out her digital camera and took two photographs. The first was of the front of the safe. The second was a close-up of the sticker on top that had the name of the manufacturer and the serial number on it.
After a brief rummage through a chest of drawers, Lauren moved to the final room on the upper floor: the bedroom where the Patels’ daughter, Charlotte, slept. She tipped out a few boxes of toys and games, but didn’t have the heart to smash up the property of a three-year-old and headed back downstairs to find Kerry. She was kneeling on the living-room floor surrounded by piles of paperwork.
‘I don’t know how long we’ve got,’ Kerry gasped, as she ran the portable document scanner over a credit-card statement, before hurriedly folding it and stuffing it back in an envelope. ‘But we won’t get all this junk copied, even if the Patels stay out till midnight.’
Lauren knelt down beside Kerry.
‘Help me sift through,’ Kerry said. ‘We want credit-card statements, bank statements, phone bills, large invoices. Ignore the rubbish, like gym memberships and stuff.’
For the next hour, the girls were like robots, repeating the same task until their backs and shoulders hurt.