along Southwark Street to the heavier traffic of Blackfriars Road till, in a crisscrossing fashion, he reached the environs of Kennington Park. From there, traffic or not, it was more or less a bullet's path to Clapham Common and his destination: a conveniently detached redbrick dwelling of three storeys, which he'd spent the last month carefully casing.
At this point, he knew the comings and goings of the family inside so thoroughly that he might as well have lived there himself. He knew they had two children. Mum got her exercise riding a bike to work, while Dad went by train from Clapham Station. They had an au pair with a regularly scheduled two nights each week off, and on one of those nights-always the same one-Mum, Dad, and the kids left as a family and went to...Kimmo didn't know. He assumed it was Gran's for dinner, but it just as easily could have been a lengthy church service, a session with a counselor, or lessons in yoga. Point was, they were gone for the evening, till late in the evening, and when they arrived home, they invariably had to lug the little ones into the house because they'd fallen asleep in the car. As for the au pair, she took her nights off with two other birds who were similarly employed. They'd leave together chatting away in Bulgarian or whatever it was, and if they returned before dawn, it was still long after midnight.
The signs were propitious for this particular house. The car they drove was the largest of the Range Rovers. A gardener visited them once a week. They had a cleaning service as well, and their sheets and pillowcases were laundered, ironed, and returned by a professional. This particular house, Kimmo had concluded, was ripe, and waiting.
What made it all so nice was the house next door and the lovely "To Let" sign dangling forlornly from a post near the street. What made it all so perfect was the easy access from the rear: a brick wall running along a stretch of wasteland.
Kimmo pedaled to this point after coasting by the front of the house to make sure the family were being true to their rigid schedule. Then he bumped his way across the wasteland and propped his bike against the wall. Using the pillowcase to carry his tools and the rose, he hopped up on the saddle of the bike and, with no trouble, lifted himself over the wall.
The back garden was blacker than the devil's tongue, but Kimmo had peered over the wall before and he knew what lay before him. Directly beneath was a compost heap beyond which a little zigzagging orchard of fruit trees decorated a nicely clipped lawn. To either side of this, wide flower beds made herbaceous borders. One of them curved round a gazebo. The other graced the vicinity of a garden shed. Last in the distance just before the house were a patio of uneven bricks where rainwater pooled after a storm and then a roof overhang, from which the security lights were hung.
They clicked on automatically as Kimmo approached. He gave them a nod of thanks. Security lights, he'd long ago decided, had to be the ironic inspiration of a housebreaker, since whenever they switched on, everyone appeared to assume a mere cat was passing through the garden. He'd yet to hear of a neighbour giving the cops a bell because of some lights going on. On the other hand, he'd heard plenty of stories from fellow housebreakers about how much easier those lights had made access to the rear of a property.
In this case, the lights meant nothing. The uncurtained dark windows along with the "To Let" sign told him that no one resided in the house to his right, while the house to his left had no windows on this side of it and no dog to set up a spate of barking in the nighttime cold. He was, as far as he could tell, in the clear.
French windows opened onto the patio, and Kimmo made for these. There, a quick tap with his emergency hammer-suitable in a crisis for breaking a car window-was quite sufficient to gain him access to the handle on the door. He opened this and stepped inside. The burglar alarm hooted like an air-raid siren.
The sound was earsplitting, but Kimmo ignored it. He had five minutes-perhaps more-till the phone would ring, with the security company on the line, hoping to discover that