Love You Dead

20 Monday 23 February

Shelby Stonor’s mate, Dean Warren, had sat opposite him in the pub a few weeks ago.

‘You know what you is, don’t you? An effing dinosaur!’ Dean said. ‘No one burgles houses no more. Why you faffing around, being out late at night, taking all those risks? Anyone what’s got anything worth stealing has burglar alarms, safety lights, dogs, CCTV cameras. There’s much better stuff, and with less chance of getting caught — and lighter sentences. You could make several grand a week dealing drugs or doing internet scams, yeah? Or nicking high-end cars, like what I’m into right now. Range Rovers pay the best. A simple bit of technology that scoops up their keyless door and ignition codes lets you open and drive one off in minutes. They’re paying ten grand for a top-end Rangie right now! Five grand for a convertible Merc SL! Within twelve hours of nicking ’em, they’re into a container being shipped out of Newhaven to the Middle East or Cyprus!’

‘All you have to do is nick it and deliver it somewhere?’ Stonor asked him.

‘Piece of piss,’ Warren replied. ‘You could learn to use the kit in a couple of hours. That and the garage-door opener — opens any door in seconds — I could teach you. It’s quicker with two people — we could do a bunch of cars in a night — or better, in a day. Daytime is favourite. Less chance of being stopped in daytime. Really, you could learn to use the kit, easy mate.’

But Shelby Stonor wasn’t into technology — he just didn’t really understand it — beyond the basics of texting and the internet, and taking the occasional photo on his phone. ‘Not my thing. I like my burgling, mate.’

‘All right, but you could still help me, yeah? Well — we could help each other.’

‘How?’

‘I could give you commission on any cars you spot. Rangies, Bentleys, Beemers, Mercs, Porsches — anything high value that I nick. I get given orders, like a shopping list of cars, yeah? So if you see any on your travels — like in garages, on your burgling — text me their registration and address, and I’ll give you five per cent of what I get. Fair?’

‘I just have to text you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When I see a car that might be on your list?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Sounds like money for old rope.’

‘It is. That and drugs. Money for old rope.’

Stonor didn’t reply. They’d had this discussion before, arguing late into the night, increasingly less coherently as they got drunker and drunker. Dealing in drugs was immoral in a way that, in his mind, burgling wasn’t.

Drugs destroyed people’s lives. Whereas burgling was a game — always had been. You took stuff from rich people’s homes and the insurance replaced it. What was the problem? Yeah, fair dues, occasionally you took a precious heirloom, some geezer’s war medals — sentimental shit like that — and the old bloke got upset and had a whole page in Brighton’s Argus newspaper showing him looking all sad and bewildered. But people had to remember all that biblical stuff about possessions. We all come into this world with nothing and we leave with nothing. Shelby hadn’t had much in his life to be sentimental about. Taken into care by social workers at the age of seven from his alcoholic mother, after her divorce from his father, he had been shunted from foster home to foster home up until the time of his first incarceration. Shelby didn’t have much understanding of sentiment. Nobody ever got a meal paid for by sentiment. But he’d had a lot of meals paid for from burgling.

He’d done his first house at the age of fifteen — a neighbour in the Whitehawk suburb of Brighton. Stupidly, he’d not worn any gloves, and he’d been nicked for that offence a few weeks later, after being arrested for joyriding. His fingerprints matched those on a video camera he’d flogged to a Brighton fence who in turn had flogged it, unwittingly, to an undercover CID officer.

By the time he came out of a young offender institution two years later, older and more streetwise, if not actually wiser, he had figured out that you faced pretty much the same length of prison sentence regardless of whether you did a poor house or a posh house. So he’d decided to specialize in Brighton’s high-end homes, where there would always be rich pickings to be had.

For the next twenty years this had netted him a good living, despite being caught on almost too many occasions to count. But prison was fine. He enjoyed reading and being inside gave him time to indulge that passion. There was television in his cell, the food was all OK and he had plenty of recidivist mates.

Now he’d been out for nearly a year — one of the longest periods of freedom he could remember — and he had been doing a lot of taking stock of his life. A decade ago his wife, Trixie, had finally tired of his endless spells in prison while she was stuck at home with their three small kids. She’d met someone and moved abroad with the kids, Robert, George and Edie, whom she’d poisoned against him.

He’d never heard from her or the little bastards again. And when he stopped to think about it, he couldn’t really blame the kids. Just how many days in all their years had he ever spent at home with them? He’d felt a stranger every time he’d walked in through the front door.

What he really wanted now, he realized, was what he had once had and lost. To be married, have kids, live in a nice house, drive a nice car. But above all to be a proper father. A parent. The father he’d never had.

But how?

Approaching forty, with 176 previous offences, that was not going to be so easy, he knew. Not many people would give him a job — and most of the limited options were menial and poorly paid. His best hope was to carry on with the lucrative trade he knew — and just hope to hell he could be smart enough not to get caught and arrested yet again.

He was seeing a new lady, Angi Bunsen. She was thirty, had her own house and a job as a book-keeper with a firm of accountants. She knew all about his past and didn’t mind. She’d told him last night, in bed, that she loved him. She wanted to have his child. He’d proposed to her as he held her in his arms and she’d said yes, she would marry him. On one condition. No more burgling. She didn’t want a husband she’d only get to see in a prison visiting room. She didn’t want to have to fib to their children that Daddy was away on business or, worse, have to take them to see him in his prison clothes and with his prison complexion.

So he’d promised her previously. Told her a white lie that he had a job stacking pallets in a car spares warehouse, often working late and night shifts, and she believed him. He felt happier tonight than he could ever remember. He wanted to buy her a ring, a great big rock, put it on her finger and take her away to somewhere beautiful in the sun, somewhere that she deserved to be.

Angi!

He really did love her. Loved her name. Loved her tenderness. Her trusting eyes. If he could only get a bit of money together to give her all the things he wanted to, and that she deserved. There were a few ways for ex-cons to make big money legally. Telephone sales was one. He’d heard from a fellow cellmate a few years ago that some telesales companies didn’t care about your background, so long as you could sell. But he wasn’t sure he was much of a salesman. Driving a cab was another option which appealed more. An owner cabbie could gross fifty grand a year in Brighton. A journeyman driver got a lot less.

But to buy a taxi plate in the city was currently £48,000. And the gap at this moment between that and what he had in his bank account was precisely £47,816. He could probably get another few hundred quid towards it from flogging his shit heap of a car — his fifteen-year-old, clapped-out rust bucket of a Fiat Panda. But for a while longer, he needed it.

Forty-eight thousand quid wasn’t an insurmountable gap. The Argus from time to time very obligingly printed a list of the top-twenty most expensive properties in the city.

It was as if they printed it just for him!

He’d wised-up in this past year out of prison. There was no point stealing cheap shit — just like the lesson he’d learned when he’d been caught burgling in Whitehawk. So he’d been doing his research on the internet, learning to identify expensive jewellery and high-value watches. He reckoned himself now to be a bit of an expert. And he’d identified a group of houses where he was likely to find these. Watched the movements of the owners over the past weeks.

He felt ready.