The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 78

I find that I am…

… changing.

Things I steal for:

The day I stole £65,000 from a defence lawyer in Doncaster whose speciality was getting people-smugglers off, I felt… proud. Not the ecstatic pride of a job well done, not the glee of Dubai, not the adrenaline rush of diamonds in my hand. The pride of… myself. Of who it was I was becoming. Not just thief. Thief who was also me.

I stole his money and cleaned it through fifteen different accounts, breaking it apart and rebuilding, scattering it through the internet before at last re-coalescing it into a hundred different cashpoints across the north-east, sending lump sums of £200–800 to the home where Gracie lived, a charitable donation, a promise of more to come.

The manager of the home, a needy, nervous lady, was at first excited, then frightened, then angry about these sudden donations. They presented that most dreadful of problems for anyone settled into a cushy position — change. With cash coming in, it was now possible to alter things, to have better food at dinner, or think about putting new thermostats into the rooms, or fix the leaking roof in the southern corner, or maybe save the money to buy a van for the house so they didn’t always have to hire when they went on trips, or to get another night-nurse for the patients who needed twenty-four-hour care or… or…

“We can’t spend it! It might stop!” she exclaimed after nearly £6,000 had arrived over the course of four months of gentle donating. The next week I donated £1,000, to make a point, and the manager shrieked in despair, her hands quivering like flytraps in a gale, “Who is doing this to me?!” and by a unanimous vote of the governor’s board that following week, the problem was removed from her power and work began immediately to install more handles in the corridor and bathroom areas for patients who would otherwise struggle to walk or use the toilets unsupervised.

The week they gave my sister a new wheelchair, lighter than the old, narrower around the hips and with footrests that locked in position, I wheeled her round the garden hollering, “You shake my nerves you rattle my brain! Goodness gracious great balls of fire!”

After a while, the NHS declared that it was unfair for the home to have such a generous private donor without spreading the goodness around, and I did see their point, so continued donations gently on the side even as funds were siphoned off to other projects around the trust, and as the money dribbled away, began to look for someone else who seemed a worthy

worthy, how strange this new use of worthy

target of my nefarious expertise.

And then, eleven months after I’d lost her in California, Byron was back.