2007 - The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

by Chris Ewan

  “Who should I make the dedication out to?” I asked, motioning for Burggrave’s companion to lend me his biro. “My favourite Dutchman, perhaps?”

  Burggrave snatched the biro from his colleague’s outstretched hand and glared at him. Then he sat down in the plastic chair that was facing me from across the interview table.

  “Your picture,” Burggrave said, opening the inside back cover of the book, “it is not you.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Why is this?”

  “Women readers like a handsome author,” I said, shrugging. “This guy was a catalogue model, I believe.”

  “But you use your real name.”

  “It’s a paradox, alright.”

  “You write books about criminals.”

  “A burglar, yes.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “And you are a criminal.”

  “Well now,” I said, scratching my head, “I can only assume you’re referring to an incident from when I was a much younger man.”

  “You were convicted for theft.”

  “Actually, for giving, though I admit there was a little stealing before that. I was sentenced to a short spell of community service. What of it?”

  Burggrave chewed his lip and leaned back in his chair. “It is interesting, I think, that you are a criminal, and that you write books about a criminal, and that you lie about meeting a criminal.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t class myself as a criminal. And as for lying, I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Burggrave made a show of shaking his head, as though he was mystified by my response, and then he removed his gleaming spectacles to buff them unnecessarily with his handkerchief. When he was done, he put his spectacles back on and blinked at me, as if he was seeing me for the first time, almost as though the glasses had suddenly afforded him a rare form of super-sight that enabled him to see clean through my lies.

  “You told me you did not meet Mr. Park.”

  “Did I? I have to admit I don’t remember the finer details of our conversation.”

  “You said you did not meet him. But I have witnesses. Three men who saw you in Cafe de Brug on Wednesday evening.”

  “Well how can that be?” I asked. “I hope you didn’t show them the picture from the back of my novel. That could be most misleading.”

  “They described you.”

  “They must have very vivid powers of description.”

  “I can arrange an identity line, if you wish.”

  I thought about it. There seemed little point in goading him further.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” I said.

  “So you admit you were there, that you lied to me before?”

  “I met with Mr. Park, yes. But as I say, I’m afraid I don’t remember exactly what was said in our previous conversation. I know I wasn’t under caution then.”

  Burggrave made a growling noise deep in his throat.

  “Why did you meet?” he snapped.

  “I’d really rather not say.”

  “You are under arrest now,” he said, pointing his finger at me.

  “You must answer my questions. This man is in hospital.”

  “I’m not responsible for that.”

  “Prove this.”

  “How?”

  “Answer my questions!”

  “I’m not sure you’ll believe me. I think you have a closed mind, Inspector.” I turned to his wordless companion. “Is he often this way?” I asked.

  The officer looked at me dumbly, then shook his head in a self-conscious fashion. He was using his biro to make notes on a pad of yellow writing paper. I couldn’t read what he was writing because it was all in Dutch. Perhaps it was a book report on my novel.

  “Tell me why you met him,” Burggrave demanded.

  “Alright,” I said. “I will. He wanted me to write a book.”

  “A book?”

  “His memoirs. He mentioned that he’d been in prison, for theft I believe. I understand he even killed a man. He had the idea I could write his story for him, given that I write books about burglary. I told him that wasn’t possible. I’m a fiction writer, not a biographer.”

  “This you expect me to believe?”

  “Believe what you like,” I told him. “It’s the truth. And I didn’t tell you before because as far as I’m concerned a man’s past is his own business. What difference would it make?”

  Burggrave gave a testy shake of his head, then gestured for his colleague to note down what was about to be said. “You left at what time?”

  “Nine o’clock, maybe.”

  “Did you meet him the next night?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you when he was attacked?”

  “I have no idea when that was.”

  “Thursday night.”

  “I was writing,” I said. “Finishing my latest book.”

  “And you did not leave your apartment?”

  Something about his tone put me on my guard.

  “Let me see, I may have gone out for a quick stroll. Yes, I think I remember now. Not long after ten o’clock or so.”

  “Where?”

  “Just around the neighbourhood.”

  “To St. Jacobsstraat?”

  “Possibly. I don’t remember too clearly.”

  “Try Mr. Howard. I think you had better try much harder.”

  He stood up and said something to his colleague in Dutch.

  “He will take you to your cell,” he told me. “You will eat.”

  “You’re not letting me go?”

  “You are under arrest. Do not forget this.”

  How could I forget? Give the Dutch their due, they know how to put a police cell together. The walls that imprisoned me were painted two-tone, deep beige on the bottom and a lighter beige above. Against one wall there was a hard plastic bed with a thin, stained mattress resting on it, and on the opposing wall was a metal toilet and basin. I had no window to gaze longingly out of—the only light in the room came from an overhead strip light that was housed in one of the ceiling panels above me, beside a heating vent. The door to my cell was made of some kind of reinforced metal, with a slot a little bigger than a letterbox in it, and it was through this slot that my food tray had been passed and where, every hour on the hour, an officer would peer inside to check I hadn’t conspired to dig an escape tunnel through the concrete floor with my plastic cutlery. They may have done something clever to the walls, too, because I couldn’t hear anything from my fellow inmates. Assuming I had fellow inmates, that is, because there was always the very slim possibility I was the only individual currently detained in Amsterdam on suspicion of committing a crime.

  It was all a far cry from the only other police cell I’d ever known, back in England, when I’d first been arrested for burglary. That had been in Bristol city centre, late on a Saturday afternoon, and the place had given me a life-long lesson in just how oppressive a confined space can feel. It didn’t help that the holding area was full of drunken football hooligans, swearing and raging and singing Rovers and City chants, kicking the bars and the few pieces of metal furniture, snarling and spitting at one another and spoiling for one more fight. It had made me feel very young and vulnerable at the time, which was not altogether surprising, because I was only just sixteen. And I was a posh kid, way out of my depth, and truth be told, I was scared witless.

  I’m pretty sure it’s not too fashionable to admit this, but thieving, for me, began at boarding school. You see, on weekends, when a lot of the other kids would go home to visit their parents, I’d wander along the empty school corridors, sometimes trying the odd door here and there. Most of the classrooms would be locked but every once in a while I’d find one that had been left open and I’d walk inside and pace the room and sit down and listen to the silence or to the distorted noises of other kids out on the playing fields. It was enough, to begin with, to be somewhere I wasn’t meant to be, without anybody knowin
g about it. It was my thing, in a world without privacy.

  Soon, of course, just being in a classroom wasn’t quite the thrill it had been and I started to find myself looking for things to take. I wasn’t looking for any one thing in particular, but every desk drawer and every supply cupboard held a secret and I was the type of kid who wanted to know what those secrets were, even if they turned out to be as mundane as pens and paper. It was nearly always pens and paper. And part of me was disappointed by that.

  So I began to look around the boys’ dorms. I’d wait until they were empty, which wasn’t all that difficult, and then I’d approach a bed and open a drawer or two beside it and see what I could see. I found letters from parents, medicines, books, walkmans, cash. Very occasionally, I took something insignificant that the boy wouldn’t miss, perhaps an eraser or an old birthday card, and then invariably I put it back the following weekend. Once, I found a condom.

  The condom was a precious thing and I put it in the locked drawer beside my bed. We all had locked drawers beside our beds. It occurred to me then that everyone kept their most prized possessions in these drawers. Some drawers were never locked and their contents were generally quite dull. But it was the locked ones that intrigued me and I soon began to ask myself how I could get inside them?

  The answer, of course, was to pick the locks. The fact I had no idea how to pick locks wasn’t the kind of barrier to stand in my way back then. Pretty soon, I’d equipped myself with a small screwdriver from the technology classroom and a metal implement with a long spike on it from a science lab. And I practised. For hours. In fact, I must have spent just about every spare moment I could find probing at the lock on my own drawer, teasing the pins, trying to force the cylinder to turn. It took me weeks, perhaps an entire half-term, of experimenting. And then one day the thing just opened, simple as that. I locked it with my key and tried again and I was just as successful the second time around. I got quicker, more skilled. Days later, I tried unlocking the drawer of the boy who slept next to me. It was no different. On a whim, I tried my key and discovered that it fitted his lock too! It turned out my key fitted roughly one in every eight locks. Using my key was quicker than picking my way inside so I stuck with that method of snooping. But I remembered what I’d learned.

  And then the Easter holidays came around and I found myself at home again in Clifton. Home with my parent’s place to myself for much of the day and too much time on my hands. And one morning, bored out of my skull, I got a familiar itch in my fingers and dragged my school trunk out from beneath my bed and rooted around in it until I found my screwdriver and my pick. Then I went downstairs and tackled the Yale lock on my parent’s front door. To my surprise, the Yale lock worked on much the same principles as the drawer locks at school and it proved only a little harder to open. I locked and unlocked the door a few times and then I decided to take things up a level.

  Our neighbours, the Baileys, were away at their holiday villa in Spain. I’d been in their house on a couple of occasions before but never by myself and I decided that was going to change. After a quick recce, I flicked back the snap lock on their back door with one of my parents’ cheque guarantee cards, then spent around an hour familiarising myself with their dead-bolt. It snuck back, eventually, as something inside me had known it would, and after that I had only to turn the handle and walk inside.

  Inside to a place that made me feel two hundred feet tall—a space where I made my own rules. I went to their bedroom first, naturally, since I was of an age where bedroom cabinets usually delivered some kind of titillation. Those particular cabinets didn’t disappoint. At the back of one of them was a large rubber dildo, along with some lube. I examined the dildo for a while and then I returned it and took a tour of the rest of the house—the avocado bathroom suite, the chintzy spare bedrooms, Mr. Bailey’s study, Mrs. Bailey’s exercise room, downstairs to the kitchen-diner, the lounge and the cloakroom. Pretty soon, I found I was hungry and returned to the kitchen to see if there was something I could snack on. I stuck my hand in the biscuit tin and discovered almost fifty pounds in cash. I put the money back, helped myself to a packet of salt and vinegar crisps from a nearby cupboard and then I left, re-engaging the snap lock behind me.

  Over the following week or so I broke into a number of our neighbours’ homes, always through the back door, where there was often just a single snap lock that never tended to delay me. Few of the homes held anything of special interest—just being inside them was more than enough to give me the thrill I was after. But I did get into the habit of always taking something to eat, even if I wasn’t especially peckish, and on one or two occasions, when I heard a noise out on the street and had to wait nervously for it to pass, or when a fridge shuddered or a water pipe knocked, I found I had an urge to find someplace to hide and, once, had to make immediate use of the toilet facilities.

  At nights, I replayed my adventures over in my mind, carrying out an inventory of all the rooms and the possessions I’d seen, of the locks I’d opened and the private places I’d accessed. Before long, my thoughts turned back to that fifty pounds in the Baileys’ biscuit jar. It was just sat there, no use to anyone until the Baileys returned from Spain, and if it was gone by the time they got back, they might not even notice, might very well just assume that they’d spent it before they left. I became convinced that had to be right and so one Saturday morning not too long afterwards I found myself flicking back the snap lock on their back door, helping myself to another packet of salt and vinegar crisps and pocketing the cash from the biscuit tin. This time, I primed both locks when I left since I had no intention of returning, but instead of going home, I walked a couple of streets away to the nearest council estate. It took me a little while, walking along the thin, litter-strewn back alleys, to find the kind of place I was looking for, but once I had it, I knew it was just what I was after. It was a small terraced property with rotting, single-glazed windows and a scattering of children’s toys in the muddy back yard. I let myself in through the rear gate and peered through the unwashed glass of the patio door. There were no lights on inside and no signs of life. I pulled my burglar tools out of my pocket and probed at the by-now simple cylinder lock. The bolt snapped back in no time at all and I walked inside.

  The tour didn’t take me long. There were only two bedrooms upstairs, a laundry cupboard and a cramped bathroom. Downstairs there was a lounge that the front door opened into directly and an open-plan kitchen. I found myself some Wagon Wheels in the kitchen and returned to the lounge to find a good place to leave the money. I thought about leaving a note too but then I decided that was a stupid idea. Better to just get out of there. And that was precisely what I was about to do when all of a sudden the patio door flew open and two policemen rushed in, rugby-tackled me to the floor and pinned me to the ground. They were community officers, it turned out, and I’d made the mistake of casing for a likely target in a Neighbourhood Watch Area with a high break-in rate. Needless to say the police had no interest in my Robin Hood credentials and after handcuffing me and throwing me into the back of a waiting panda car, they drove me to the city centre police station, where I spent the longest afternoon and evening of my life before my father arrived to post bail and offer me the most distressed look I’ve ever had the misfortune to experience.

  Come to think of it, I suppose those of you who’ve read my second Faulks novel, The Thief in the Theatre, might recognise much of this, the reason being I used it as back story to explain how Faulks became a burglar in the first place. There were differences, of course. For starters, there was no mention of boarding school, because Faulks is an everyman kind of guy my readers can identify with. And Faulks took more than just the money, he was also trying to deliver some new toys for the kid in the council house. And, of course, Faulks didn’t blub like a child in front of the officer who arrested him. But one thing was as true for me as it was for Faulks—from that day on, I vowed always to keep the things I stole for myself.

  The c
lock above the door to my cell read ten o’clock and I knew by now that I wasn’t going to be spending the night in my own bed. I was tired and I was feeling low and suddenly all I wanted to do was shut my eyes and block out the beige walls for a while. So I took off my shoes and I lay down on the plastic-coated mattress and pulled the single, coarse sheet over my head, trying to think of nothing but how slowly I could breathe. I didn’t ask for the lights in my cell to be turned off, though, because I knew there wasn’t the slightest chance I would sleep.

  TWELVE

  I was in the middle of pushing some processed scrambled egg around my plate the following morning when the locks turned in my cell door and the door swung inwards to reveal Burggrave stood in the threshold with the duty officer by his side.

  “The American is dead,” he announced.

  “You’d better get me a lawyer then,” I told him. “One who speaks English, preferably.”

  When he arrived, it turned out my lawyer actually was English. He told me his name was Henry Rutherford and that he’d been sent on behalf of the British Embassy. Rutherford was short with a large, beach-ball gut and a chipmunk-like face, all swollen cheeks and fatty jowls. His balding head had just a few thickets of fair hair on it and his shirt collar, which seemed at least a size too small, bit into the loose, rolling skin of his neck. He extended a clammy hand to shake, and after I’d given him a brief summary of my arrest and a tailored version of what had led to it, he asked me a more important question.

  “Where did you school, dear boy?”

  I told him Kings’ and we had the usual kind of conversation about it. Then he got around to the task at hand and asked me if I’d received any legal advice since my arrest.

  “They gave me someone Dutch before,” I told him. “He barely spoke English.”

  “Good,” he said, and when I looked at him for an explanation, added, “It could help us. Unreasonable here in The Netherlands, you see. I say, how much money do you have?”

  “On me? I had around six thousand euros when I was arrested.”