The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (9 page)

“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 Café 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 knowing 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.