Day 286 – Writing Exercise

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Arthur Noble tried to live up to his name.

Of course, it wasn’t easy with a bumbling safe cracker father who had spent more time in jail than out, and a mother who, when she wasn’t cleaning nights at the local polytechnic, was making cakes for anyone in the neighbourhood who would visit her small café.

That’s why Arthur thought their surname was rather ironic.

While his brothers, Louis and Walter, fell into the game fairly early in life, following in their father’s footsteps, Arthur was not having any of it.  He was going to make a difference.

He was going to go straight.

The problem was that life wouldn’t let him off that easily.   Every time he thought he had broken the cycle, circumstances would step in and make it impossible.

Yes, he had choices, but it never quite seemed the time or the place, or expediency dictated that it was now or never.

Or that his father’s wish, the Jack O’Donnell, cat burglar extraordinaire, should take his gangly and awkward son and turn him into what the media had dubbed ‘the gentleman thief’.  At first he hated it, but now, six capers down and getting bolder, he was beginning to believe he was uncatchable.

O’Donnell was proud of the man he had created, fulfilling his obligation to his comrade, Stephan, and dying a happy man, his last words to his protégé being, ‘your father would be chuffed, young Arthur, quite chuffed’.

This next job, Arthur said, in a private eulogy over the grave of his mentor, that dark and dreadful day in November, was going to be a fitting tribute, a huge pay day, and maybe Arthur could retire, perhaps travel and see something of a world outside of Islington.

Blackwood Manor, the Thorogood Diamond, two million pounds.  It was there for the taking.  He’d done his homework over six weeks, blending into the landscape, checked and rechecked every detail, right down to every nuance on the blueprints for the house, built back in 1685.  He knew every nook and cranny, secret staircase, hidey hole, entrance and exit.

And best of all, there were three hapless and incompetent souls watching over the manor house: the deaf cook, the septuagenarian gardener, and the artless chauffeur, a thief himself, hiding in plain sight.

It was going to be like taking candy from a baby.

Bex LLewellen, short for Deth, her mother’s name, and anything but her real name, Elizabeth, was the proverbial ugly duckling, scorned by her sisters, schoolmates, and her mother.

Her older sister, Rowena, sucked all of the oxygen out of any room she walked into, demanding and getting all the attention, while her middle sister fawned over her, trying to get some of the sunlight left.  Bex hated them.

In fact, Bex hated everyone and everything.

Except her father, who believed that the only good thing to come out of a luckless and domineering marriage was his youngest daughter.  There were no sons, and whatever legacy he thought he was going to pass on it certainly wasn’t going to be through Rowena, or Cleo.  Down the pub he was often heard to say, ‘Who the hell names a girl Cleopatra these days?’

No, of late he was now heard to say, ‘Bex is going to be the one, she’s got her head screwed on right’.

At least he hoped she did.

While the other two girls were ‘good for nothing’, Bex had discovered a flair for gymnastics, and under the watchful eye of the school’s physical education teacher, Miss Bennett, an ex-Olympic hopeful herself, Bex blossomed into a candidate for the district championships.

Until her sisters, seeing their influence being eroded, played a cruel trick and sent her tumbling down the stairs, ruining any chance she had.

It was the last straw; she packed everything she wanted into a backpack and disappeared into the night, never to return.

She had good intentions, finding a job as a server in a small café, and try to regain the mobility that she had before the accident, but it was just not there.  The damage was too great, and in between bouts of considering going home and strangling the two sisters who had ruined her life, and trying to make ends meet, she met a boy, Richard, at the rehab centre, same as her, though he wasn’t pushed down the stairs; he had tumbled from the top of a human pyramid when one boy at the base couldn’t hold his position.

The night he proposed to her, he told her what his real job was: a car burglar, working for a man who scoped his jobs and paved the way for easy money.  His athleticism was the basis: scaling buildings, nimbly fitting through impossible openings and spaces, rich pickings.  He had told the man he had found a partner who might be interested in what could be a rich and rewarding life.

She agreed to both.

Then tragedy struck.  While Richard was doing the reconnaissance on Blackwood Manor, he had made one very small mistake, a mistake that cost him his life, and he was found the following morning on the ground outside the ballroom on the grounds of the Manor, having fallen off the roof onto the very hard paved patio.  Broken.  Dead.

It was going to pay for their wedding and honeymoon, three months slowly wending their way through the luxurious hotels of Europe.

The thing was, with or without him, she was still going.  The job was still on the books, and she had decided it would be her first and last job.  All she had to do was get the book, sitting somewhere on the shelves in the library, hiding in plain sight.

At precisely one a.m., on a very wet, windy, and cold Thursday night, Arthur, almost comically dressed in an outfit that was more suited to Halloween than doing a job, was ready to slide down the roof to the spot over the fourth-floor window that belonged to one of the servants’ quarters in the roof of the west wing.

There was a half dozen such rooms with windows, but this was the only one that couldn’t be shut properly.  It was his entrance to the Manor, and from there it was down the rear servants’ staircase, designed to be out of sight and make it easy for the servants to appear and disappear without disturbing the residents.

Tonight it was his entrance and exit, invisible to everyone until he reached the first floor, the location of the safe in the study and library.

At the same time, at the foot of the east wing, outside the kitchen and storage area, Bex was looking at the iron covering of the disused coal chute.  It had been recently replaced, and was oiled and greased, making no noise as she opened and closed the hatch.  From the entrance, it was a mall slide down to the floor of the coal pit, then out into the kitchen storerooms, up the staircase, and into the library on the first floor.

The hardest part was to find the book, but how many books could there be?  She never kept any, not that she did much reading, and who else could be bothered.  She was expecting a few bookshelves, a quick search for an old book that would stand out, and be gone.

Five minutes tops.

Her watch vibrated.  Time to go.

Sliding from the top of the roof down to the apex of the window was the tricky part, and the rope was a precaution in case he slipped, which he did, once.  It was pouring rain, and the storm raged with both thunder and lightning.  It was not a night to be out on the ground, let alone dangling from the roof, high above a very hard landing place.  More than once he cursed himself for picking the wrong night.

Once down to the edge, he lowered himself down to the small balcony, just enough room for one person to stand, and checked the window.

Ajar, as he suspected, and requiring a sharp tug to get the rusty hinges to work.  He had brought some lubricant and sprayed the hinges first, reducing the screech of grinding metal.  Then, he was inside, dripping excess water onto the bare floorboards.  A crack of lightning lit the room, a cobweb-covered bedspread, a dust-covered dresser, a jug and bowl on top of it, and newspaper scattered on the floor.

Three steps, and creaking floorboards.  He hoped that wasn’t going to follow him through the house.  The wind howled through the crack in the window and sent a shiver through him.  Was that a ghost that just passed through him?

Or was it his mentor sending him a warning?

Whilst the chute door might be new, nothing else was, and by the time she reached the pit she was covered in coal dust.  And had not anticipated landing on the floor among scattered chinks of coal, hurting her back.  The first groan reverberated in the small space, sounding very loud; she stifled it with a grimy hand, wishing instantly she hadn’t/

In total darkness, she switched on the small torch and nearly screamed.  Not a person, but a very lifelike poster of a person looking straight at her.

Out of the pit, into the storeroom, and then into the kitchen.

Spotlessly clean, all set up ready to cook the next meal, food arranged perfectly, plates, cutlery, everything.  It was like people were living there, and life was about to start again in a never-ending cycle of providing meals for the residents.

Only there were no residents.  No staff; well, no one but three- what would you call them, servants, or more like aged caretakers – waiting to die, like the house.

Or had she been given the wrong information?

A complication, but it was an in-and-out job, no time to do any sightseeing or worry about what was and what wasn’t right or wrong.  Her sole mission was to get the book and go.

The steps creaked and groaned as Arthur descended quickly and as quietly as possible, sucking in the stale air, and taking in the aroma of wet newspapers.  It was at times almost overwhelming.

Three flights down he came to the door, and it wouldn’t open.  The damp hand expanded the wood, making it stick.  Good thing he had brought a large screwdriver, and pried it open, not before splintering the wet and rotting wood.

It took time, three valuable minutes, but then it broke free and swung inwards.  Into a small anteroom and then out into a passage – or so the blueprints had told him.  The door was locked, so another five minutes were spent picking the lock.

Now and then he could hear the thunder and the howling of the wind.  It was getting worse outside, not easier, and his getaway, at least not back over the roof, was not going to be straightforward.  At least that noise covered the scratch of the lock pick, and the crunching of the wood earlier.

A single gong stopped him.  A clock somewhere near, then another, quieter, from somewhere else.  The clocks were not synchronised.  In fact, why were they still working if no one was in the manor?  The servants didn’t need working clocks in a house they rarely went through.

He shivered again.  Not a ghost.  A bad feeling.

He came out into the darkness of the passage and switched the torch back on and was immediately confronted by a tall man in armour.  A painting, very lifelike, a forebear perhaps, but one of many.  On the other side, balustrades, and a view down to the ground floor, a large open space which he assumed was the ballroom.

At the end of the passage, the study and library overlooked the rear rose garden and lawns, which led down to a lake.  The place was huge, over a hundred rooms, and there were rumours it was going to be sold to a large hotel chain to be converted into a resort and golf course.  Of course it would.  All those mad golf players, chasing a little white ball around during the day and watching the world go to hell in a handbasket during the day, while sipping champagne and whisky and shovelling down canapes.

The idle rich, as far as Arthur was concerned, were exactly that.

He waited outside the study door and instantly felt like he was outside the headmaster’s office waiting for punishment.  No amount of punishment would ever change him, the headmaster said, a product of his environment and parentage.

The only thing his father was right about was that the class war had never ended after the war; it just became more subtle.

A sound.  Light off.  Breathe quietly.  He could still hear his heart beating very loudly.

A cat.  A gentle mewing, brushing up against his leg, then moving on.

Jesus, he had to get it together.

He opened the door, went in, and closed it quietly behind him.  Torch on.  Over to the mahogany desk, looking like the owner would be back the next morning, everything set out in a particular way.  Clean, neat, like it was just another day in the life.

Except there was no owner, no one in the house, and no reason for it to look like this.

On the wall behind the desk was a painting of the house on the land before the gardens were created.  Behind that painting was a safe.  In that safe was the diamond.  In his pocket was the combination to that safe. 

In five minutes this place would be a distant memory, and he could retire.

Bex was in utter awe of a place she knew she would never see the likes of again.  Ornate, filled with paintings and sculptures, pots of flowers, staircases and passageways.

The double curved staircase that led up to the first floor was the sort of a woman in an expensive dress could make an entrance that would make the front page of the newspapers, or magazines, the sort she had read for years, and wondered how those women made it.

Being born into the right family, marrying the right man, becoming a renowned and successful Olympic gymnast?  She cursed her luck.  Her fate was to see the inside of the house, in the middle of the night, as a thief.

Still, for a moment she could take it in and wish…

A cat walked past, mewing softly, rubbing up against her leg and continuing.  This was her house, and she was just letting the visitors know.  The passage passed windows that overlooked the rear gardens lit by a lightning strike, and barely discernible through the torrential rain.  Her departure was not going to be simple, and she was already dreading having to leave by the coal chute.  Perhaps there would be another way.

Outside the library door, she stopped, listened, and thought she heard something.

From behind the door.

She waited.  Silence.  Five minutes, nothing but silence.

She shrugged and opened the door.

Darkness.

She slipped in and closed the door behind her but didn’t switch on her torch.  Not straight away.  Something was wrong.  Someone else was in the room, or had been.  She detected a whiff of aftershave.  One of those expensive ones she had smelled on the rich café customers, some who used far too much, perhaps to hide something else.

In the dark, she felt her way rather than saw, towards the desk, a heavy-duty wrench she found on the kitchen table in her hand; its cold, hard handle reassuring.

On the other side of the desk, Arthur had an outstretched, black-handled stun baton ready.  He could barely breathe, the sudden realisation this caper was about to go south very quickly, and already looking for the exit.

Then, suddenly, the door opened slowly, as if it had something to say.

A second later, the main light came on, and a woman stood in the doorway with a shotgun in her hand, curlers in her hair, combat boots, and a serviceman’s overcoat.  What was more noticeable was the angry expression.

“Don’t move, either of you.  This gun has scattershot and has a very sensitive trigger, and I’ve got a bad case of the shakes.”

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©  Charles Heath  2026