The Swap - By Antony Moore Page 0,16

in undoing such careful handiwork. That this was an inappropriate concern in a burglar who had already broken a window struck him forcibly and he began tentatively picking at the strips with his fingernails. This took some time. The tape had been layered in thick gouts, one strip on top of another, and Harvey's fingernails were bitten almost comically short. After some ineffectual picking and swearing, he ran back downstairs and returned armed with a long-handled kitchen knife. Panting, but prepared, he slashed the masking tape with inexpert precision. The Superman One was not inside. What was inside was a very motley collection of items. Maths text books; some electronic devices of unknown use; a hairdryer (when did Bleeder Odd ever wash his hair?); a Dennis Wheatley novel; a picture of Victoria Principal; a packet of condoms (when did Bleeder Odd, etc); three pairs of shoes; a nasty and possibly unsanitary pink teddy bear; and at the very bottom of the box, under some tight-waisted knitwear with stars up the front, a pile of comics.

Harvey's heart had started beating too quickly for a man of his girth who is sitting down as he reverently removed the comics one by one. But they were just the typical frayed remnants of a boy's collection, like so many he had been sent for valuation over the years at the shop. No rare first editions, nothing special at all. He read a few pages of an Iron Man that he hadn't looked at for years, not really being much of an Iron Man fan, and then remembered his predicament and stood up fast.

When upright he found that some of his fear had lifted. The fact that his mission seemed to have failed had removed some of the terror of discovery, as if the criminality had somehow slipped out of his actions now that there was nothing to steal. With great care he put everything back in the box in the right order and then did his best to reseal the tape. That done he made his way back onto the landing. Logic said he should leave now – surely Bleeder's room was the likeliest place to look – but his future self, the one who had come to him in the restless night and said it was better to be arrested, even go to prison, than to live with uncertainty any longer, was back with him. 'I will make you come back here again if you don't finish this today,' it told him. 'I will send you to reburgle the same house again tomorrow. And just think how much more difficult that will be.' With an irrational desire to punch his own future, Harvey made his way to the next room. It was clearly Mrs Odd's bedroom and was as yet unpacked. It smelled strongly of faeces and talcum powder, reminding Harvey of a great-aunt from his youth who had been both fashionable and incontinent. The idea of Mrs Odd keeping the comic he'd swapped with her son in 1982in her bedside cabinet was pushing reason beyond any natural limit, future self or no future self. But he looked anyway. It wasn't in there. There were lots of lightbulbs and a packet of lemon jelly.

Harvey followed his own absence of logic carefully through each room in turn, and once started he was thorough. He looked under beds and inside bathroom cabinets. He opened four more cardboard boxes using the red-handled kitchen knife. None of them contained anything of any interest, or not at least to a burglar. There was a Dukes of Hazzard baseball cap that Harvey found rather captivating. As he made his way to the stairs it occurred to him that he might find some other object of value: what would he do then? He was surprised but pleased to find that the idea of stealing anything else held no interest for him. Perhaps he wasn't a criminal after all. Perhaps he was merely reclaiming something that belonged to him. Perhaps it was really his to retrieve . . . 'My preciousssss,' Harvey hissed and giggled loudly as he made his way back downstairs.

On the ground floor he followed the same procedure. Most of the fear had now passed, to be replaced by a sort of jumpy boredom. All the boxes contained unpleasant objects that he really had no wish to see, including an extraordinary amount of counterpanes. Did she collect counter panes? And why were so many of them orange candlewick