People LIke Her(31)

It was because I have something much worse planned for Emmy Jackson and her family.





Chapter Seven


Dan

We get back home from the party to discover our house has been broken into. As we’re turning onto our road, I can hear an alarm going off and I say something like, “I hope that’s not ours.” Emmy looks up from her phone.

“What’s that?”

I turn the radio off. In the back, both Bear and Coco are fast asleep in their seats. As we get closer to our end of the street, the alarm gets louder. I can see the bloke from across the road standing in his doorway as we approach. A couple of the other neighbors from farther down are out on the pavement.

“I’ve already called the police,” one of them shouts as I am getting out of the car.

There are no signs of attempted entry at the front of the house. The frosted glass panes in the front door are still intact, all the windows closed. I go around to the side return and test the gate and find that’s also still locked, so I hop up and look over it to see if I can see anything. I can’t. “How long’s it been going off?” I ask one of the people standing around.

He shrugs.

“Half an hour maybe?”

Once we’ve turned off the alarm and dispelled the cluster of concerned yet curious neighbors, it doesn’t take us too long to put Coco and Bear down and work out what happened. The house was untouched when Winter left it, having retrieved the spare T-shirts for Emmy, so we know it happened after three p.m.—Emmy checked the time on the Uber receipt. The intruder came in through the back door, probably climbing over the gate and in via the garden. Having taped a bit of cardboard over the missing pane of glass, I secure the back doors as best I can with some twine around the inside handles and a footstool from the living room pushed up against them. Then I start wandering around the house, checking once again for anything that might have been moved or taken. Nothing seems to be missing. There are no muddy footprints, nothing disturbed in the living room or the kitchen.

There’ve been a lot of these sorts of opportunistic burglaries in this area recently, the police tell us, when they eventually show up. Just kids, a lot of the time. Looking for electronic goods, cash. Had we noticed anything missing, anything like that?

I tell him that as far as I can see, nothing’s been taken at all. I mention I have taken photos of the back door, with its broken window, the glass on the kitchen floor, and pass him my phone. He thumbs through them without great interest.

“You were lucky,” he says. “The alarm must have spooked them.”

I ask him what he thinks the chances are of catching whoever did this. He tells me the police do not normally even bother investigating burglaries like this these days. Probably the best thing to do, if we’re worried, is to get a camera installed; that tends to put them off. Make sure we don’t leave our valuables lying around. Then he gives us a crime reference number on a slip of paper and leaves.

THE THOUGHT I KEEP trying to suppress is that this might not be just a random break-in. That whoever did this knew exactly whose house it is and what we were doing all afternoon. It wouldn’t have been late when they were jumping the gate and creeping around the back garden, and putting a flowerpot through one of the panes of glass in the back door. It was still more or less light when Emmy and I were putting Coco and Bear in the car to come home.

What I keep telling myself is not to be so paranoid.

I remind myself of the rules, and how careful Emmy is to stick to them; how obsessive she is about never writing anything or posting any pictures that might give away the exact location of where we live. I tell myself to get a grip. That kind of thing might happen to a premier league footballer, their mansion cleared out on match day, but I can hardly see the average burglar having heard of Mamabare or seeing our home as an especially tempting target—unless, that is, they fancy a load of plastic toys smeared with yogurt, a bunch of beauty products, a not-very-big TV, and three laptops, none of them particularly new, mine so old and crappy I caught someone sniggering at it in a coffee shop the other day. Not a fancy hipster coffee shop, either. A Costa, I think.

Emmy scans the rooms after I’m done, trying to work out if there’s anything glaring I’ve missed. What quickly becomes clear is that—obvious electronic goods aside—she has very little idea of what she actually owns, perhaps because she paid for so little of it. Some of the unopened bags of freebies, which may or may not have included a NutriBullet, she thinks, could have gone. A handful of the gifted jewelry she leaves tangled at the bottom of a bowl, maybe? A pair of Burberry boots that she vaguely remembers leaving by the front door to be reheeled, although she can’t recollect whether she ever took them or not, and if she did, where, and a two-thousand-pound Acne sheepskin jacket that, now she thinks about it, she may have left in the back of a cab six months ago.

While she starts looking into our insurance situation online, I drift around the place, unable to settle, doing all sorts of pointless things, like checking the burglar is not still lurking on the premises in the closet under the stairs or behind the door in the downstairs bathroom. It would be horrible knowing someone has tried to get into the house at the best of times. Having a four-year-old and a newborn here makes it infinitely worse, and I feel I ought to go around washing everything, wiping it down.

There’s a small part of me that would have loved to catch the bastard in the act, would have loved to get my hands on them—a part of me that, as I’m moving from room to room, is working out how I could barricade the rest of the house, planning all sorts of traps.