The Guilty Couple(19)

‘Hope.’ She grimaces. ‘Never a good idea. Just keep your head down as we go up the drive. If there is a new system we can’t let our faces be picked up by the cameras.’

‘I can’t do this.’ I move to stand up. ‘It’s too risky.’

She grabs my hand and pulls me back down onto the bench. ‘Look, I’m not trying to freak you out, Liv. I’m just making sure we’ve got everything covered. It’ll be fine. I’ve done this loads of times.’

‘And you’ve been caught.’

‘Only when I was sloppy.’

‘But is it worth it? What if Dominic’s destroyed the repayment schedule? What if we find it and it doesn’t prove he paid off Dani?’

‘Then we keep looking until we find something that does. Come on, Liv, don’t lose your bottle now. I spent three years listening to you whitter on about how you were gonna prove your innocence when you got out. Now’s your chance. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.’

‘But …’ A new worry hits me. ‘… what if Dom’s changed the alarm codes.’

‘One step at a—’ Smithy breaks off. She’s just spotted what I’ve noticed too: Rosa, my old cleaner, walking out of the gates of my old house. She’s got a bucket of cleaning supplies in one hand and a vacuum cleaner in the other. Her handbag is strapped across her chest with the body of the bag resting above one slim buttock. I feel a strange rush of nostalgia as I watch her walk down the street in search of her red Mini. I took on Rosa when I was pregnant with Grace. I had Symphysis pubis dysfunction and it was hard to walk, never mind clean. We’d have a coffee and chat in the kitchen before she started cleaning, and by the time my maternity leave ended and I went back to work I felt like I knew Rosa’s family as well as my own.

‘You were right,’ Smithy hisses. ‘She still cleans on the same day.’

Rosa is the reason we’re sitting in the bus shelter rather than breaking into the house. Over our Nando’s dessert of gooey caramel cheesecake I spotted a flaw in our plan. If Rosa still cleaned from 9 a.m. until lunchtime on a Friday we’d either have to break in on a different day, or at a different time. When I said the word ‘cleaner’ Smithy’s eyes lit up. If we had Rosa’s keys we wouldn’t have to smash a window, we could just let ourselves in. We’d take off our shoes just inside the front door, search through Dom’s study and be long gone by the time Grace came back from school. Rosa would assume she’d lost her keys, Dom would get some more cut and no one would be any the wiser.

There was just one problem.

In order to avoid Rosa recognising me, Smithy would have to provide the distraction while I lifted the keys. I’d never stolen from anyone before, unless you counted an ice-cream eraser I’d ‘accidentally’ borrowed from a friend in primary school and taken home in my bag. Sitting in our cell listening to Smithy describe how she swiped wallets, purses and phones was one thing but rifling through someone’s handbag myself was another. And I didn’t even know if that’s where Rosa kept our spare house key. It might be in her pocket for all I knew.

Last night I barely slept for worrying. What if Rosa caught me in the act? What if she screamed and alerted a neighbour? What if someone called the police?

I got up at 5 a.m. this morning to go over what Smithy had taught me in a side alley beside Nando’s. I fashioned a ‘person’ out of a pair of Ayesha’s jeans stuffed with pillows and propped them up against the kitchen counter, then I hung my bag around the hips, with a pan full of water securing the bag’s strap to the counter top. The first time I tried to get into the bag the ‘mannequin’ fell over. The second time the bag fell off. Finally, after twenty or thirty attempts, I managed to twist open the clasp, scoop my hand around the bag and withdraw a key.

‘You ready?’ Smithy nudges me with her shoulder.

An image flashes up in my mind, of Grace’s terrified face when the police turned up to arrest me, then I see Dominic’s mouth, twisting into a smirk when my sentence was announced.

‘I’m ready,’ I say.

We peel off, Smithy crossing the road to cut Rosa off before she reaches her car while I head down the street in the opposite direction to approach her from the rear. I keep my hood up, face averted so Rosa can’t see my features if she glances across the street. When I’ve passed her I hurry across the road and jog after her, keeping my footsteps light. The plan doesn’t involve hurting Rosa in any way but I feel wretched anyway. However I try and excuse it it’s a mugging; we’re going to steal something that someone doesn’t want stolen.

When Smithy put the plan to me I suggested that I ask Rosa for the keys instead of taking them from her. The words had barely left my mouth before I realised what a foolhardy idea that was. Like almost everyone else I know, Rosa thinks I tried to have Dom murdered. There’s no way she’d hand over the keys. She’d ring him the moment I was out of sight and he’d ring the police. I considered texting Grace to ask her to let me in after she got back from school but our relationship is too fragile to suggest something like that. She might have issues with her father but she doesn’t trust me either.

I’m no more than a couple of metres away from Rosa now and over her shoulder I can see Smithy is a similar distance in front of her. Surely Rosa must be able to sense me behind her? She’s weighed down with the hoover and her bucket of cleaning products but she’s moving at a pace, eager, I imagine, to put everything down once she reaches her car.