the alarm had been tripped accidentally. When they went unsatisfied, they would phone the contact numbers they'd been given. When that didn't suffice to bring an end to the incessant screeching of the siren, they might phone the police, who in turn might or might not show up to check matters out. But in any case, that eventuality was a good twenty minutes away, which in itself was ten minutes longer than Kimmo needed to score what he was looking for in the building.
He was a specialist in this particular field. Leave to others the computers, the laptops, the CD and DVD players, the televisions, the jewellery, the digital cameras, the Palm Pilots, and the video players. He was looking for only one kind of item in the houses he visited, and the benefit of this item he sought was that it would always be in plain sight and generally in the public rooms of a house.
Kimmo shone his pocket torch round. He was in a dining room, and there was nothing here to take. But in the sitting room, he could already see four prizes glittering on the top of a piano. He went to fetch them: silver frames that he divested of their photographs-one always wanted to be thoughtful about some things-before depositing them carefully in his pillowcase. He found another on one of the side tables, and he scored this as well before moving to the front of the house where, near the door, a half-moon table with a mirror above it displayed two others along with a porcelain box and a flower arrangement, both of which he left where they were.
Experience told him that chances were good he'd find the rest of what he wanted in the master bedroom, so he quickly mounted the stairs as the burglar alarm continued to blare against his eardrums. The room he sought was on the top floor, in the back, overlooking the garden, and he'd just clicked on his torch to check out its contents when the shrieking of the alarm ceased abruptly just as the telephone started to ring.
Kimmo stopped short, one hand on his torch and the other halfway to a picture frame in which a couple in wedding gear kissed beneath a bough of flowers. In a moment, the phone stopped just as abruptly as the alarm, and from below a light went on and someone said, "Hullo?," and then, "No. We've only just walked in...Yes. Yes. It was going off, but I haven't had a chance to-Jesus Christ! Gail, get away from that glass."
That was enough to tell Kimmo that matters had taken an unexpected turn. He didn't pause to wonder what the hell the family were doing home when they were still supposed to be at Gran's at church at yoga at counseling or wherever the hell they went when they went. Instead, he dived for the window to the left of the bed as below, a woman cried, "Ronald, someone's in the house!"
Kimmo didn't need to hear Ronald come tearing up the stairs or Gail shouting, "No! Stop!" to understand that he had to be out of there pronto. He fumbled with the lock on the window, threw up the sash, and heaved himself and his pillowcase out just as Ronald barreled into the room armed with what looked like a fork for turning meat on a barbecue.
Kimmo dropped with an enormous thump and a gasp onto the overhang some eight feet below, cursing the fact that there had been no convenient wisteria vine down which he could Tarzan his way to freedom. He heard Gail shouting, "He's here! He's here!," and Ronald cursing from the window above. Just before he scarpered for the rear wall of the property, he turned back to the house, giving a grin and a saucy salute to the woman who stood in the dining room with an awestruck sleepy child in her arms and another hanging on to her trousers.
Then he was off, the pillowcase bouncing against his back and laughter bubbling up inside him, only sorry he hadn't been able to leave behind the rose. As he reached the wall, he heard Ronald come roaring out of the dining-room door, but by the time the poor bloke reached the first of the trees, Kimmo was up, over, and heading across the wasteland. When the cops finally arrived-which could be anywhere from an hour to midday tomorrow-he'd be long gone, a faint memory in the mind of