The Messiah Secret - James Becker [36]
He rested the ladder against a tree, well out of sight of the house, then moved forward a few feet. There were no cars parked in front of the property, which presumably meant that the British Museum people had all gone for the day. Then he looked more closely at the house itself, and spotted a dim glow in both the upstairs and downstairs windows. Somebody had obviously left a light – maybe two or three lights – switched on.
He wasn’t going to go near the house if there was anyone still inside and there was one way he could check this out. He still had the telephone number of Carfax Hall, a hangover from the days when he’d been a welcome guest there, before Oliver had turned against him.
Pulling his mobile from his pocket, he dialled the number. Faintly, across the intervening distance, he could hear the sound of the house phone ringing. If anyone was in the property, he was sure they’d pick it up.
Watching from the upstairs bedroom window, Bronson jumped slightly as the unexpected sound of a ringing phone echoed from the hall downstairs. The only person likely to phone him was Angela, and she’d call his mobile, not the house phone. Just to check, he pulled out his Nokia and looked at the display. His battery showed a full charge, and the signal strength was near maximum.
It was most likely a wrong number or a cold call, he decided. He’d let it ring. He looked again to the edge of the wood, where he’d seen the movement.
A minute later, the ringing stopped and the house fell silent.
18
Bronson had been standing in the same spot for perhaps ten minutes, and the movement he’d seen hadn’t been repeated. He was just beginning to think he’d imagined it, maybe it had been an animal – a fox or a deer, perhaps – when he saw it again.
This time there was absolutely no doubt about it. From the undergrowth an object emerged horizontally, about four feet above the ground, and for an instant Bronson couldn’t work out what it was. Then he recognized the end of a ladder and smiled to himself.
‘Cheeky bastard,’ he muttered, easing forward slightly, the better to see the man as he approached the property. He didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry, and was walking steadily across the uncut grass towards the back of the house, the ladder slung on his shoulder, looking for all the world like a workman arriving to do a job. Perhaps his lack of haste was a measure of his confidence that the house was empty – or maybe, more prosaically, it was just that the ladder was so heavy that he couldn’t run or trot with it. In any case, he seemed to know exactly where he was going, and in a few moments vanished from Bronson’s line of sight, moving around to the rear of the property.
Bronson stepped back out of the bedroom, and waited, listening intently for the sound of the top of the ladder being placed against the wall of the house. But he heard nothing, and after a few seconds he walked back to the bedroom at the end of the corridor and peered out of the window.
Then he saw the man again: he was running back towards the tree-line and then vanished among the trees. Less than half a minute later he popped back in to view with a bulky bag clutched in his left hand, and jogged over to the house.
A few minutes later, Bronson clearly heard a metallic scraping sound from the bedroom to his left, and crossed to the doorway. He looked inside the room, checking the window, but the burglar was not yet visible. Bronson slid into the room, walked swiftly across to the rear wall and flattened himself against it, where he knew he’d be invisible to anyone looking in through the window.
He felt in his jacket pocket, checking that the handcuffs he’d collected from the Canterbury station were still there. When Angela had told him what she thought had happened at Carfax Hall, he’d decided that having a pair of cuffs in his pocket made sense. And it looked as if he’d been right.
Using his ears rather than