Friday 16 January
The job at the Grand Hotel was not working out the way Darren Spicer had hoped. There were security systems in place to prevent him creating his own room keys on the system, and a supervisor who kept watch on him and his co-workers from the minute he started in the morning to the minute he signed off each evening.
Sure, he was getting paid for his work, renovating the hotel’s antiquated electrical system, replacing miles of wiring along its labyrinth of basement corridors, where the laundry, kitchens, boilers, emergency generators and stores were housed. But in taking this particular job, he’d had hopes of being able to do a little more than spend his days unspooling lengths of new electric cables from huge reels and hunt for wires chewed by mice.
He’d imagined he would be getting access to the 201 bedrooms, and the contents left in their safes by their well-off occupants, but so far this first week he had not found a way. He needed to be patient, he knew. He could do patience all right. He was very patient when he fished, or when he waited outside a house he planned to burgle for the occupants to go out.
But there was such temptation here, he was keen to get started.
Because 201 bedrooms meant 201 bedroom safes! And the hotel was busy, 80 per cent occupancy all year round.
A mate in prison had told him the way to do hotel safes. Not how to break into them – he didn’t need that, he had all the kit he needed for the safes in the Grand. No, this was how to steal from safes without getting found out.
It was simple: you stole only a little. You mustn’t get greedy. If someone left 200 quid in cash or some foreign currency, you took just a small amount. Always cash, never jewellery; people missed jewellery, but they weren’t going to miss twenty quid out of 200. Do that ten times a day and you were on to a nice little earner. A grand a week. Fifty Gs in a year. Yeah. Nice.
He had made his decision that he was going to keep out this time. Stay free. Sure, Lewes Prison had more comforts than St Patrick’s night shelter, but soon he’d get his MiPod, then hopefully, a couple of months after he’d have enough cash together for a deposit on his own place. Something modest to start with. Then find himself a woman. Save, maybe get enough cash together to rent a flat. And maybe one day buy one. Ha! That was his dream.
But at this moment, trudging back along Western Road towards St Patrick’s, at 6.30 on this freezing, dry Friday night, shoulders stooped, hands in the pockets of his donkey jacket, the dream was a long way off.
He stopped in a pub, the Norfolk Arms by Norfolk Square, and had a pint with a whisky chaser. Both tasted good. This was something he missed when doing bird. The freedom to have a drink in a pub. Simple things like that. Life’s little pleasures. He bought a second pint, took it on to the pavement and smoked a cigarette. An old man, who was also holding a pint and was puffing on a pipe, tried to strike up a conversation, but Spicer ignored him. He was thinking. He couldn’t just rely on the hotel, he was going to have to do other stuff. Emboldened by his drinks, he was thinking, Why not start now?
Between 4 and 5 on winter afternoons was a good time for burgling homes. It was dark but people were still out at work. Now was a bad time, for homes. But there was a place he’d seen on his walk around his neighbourhood in Hove last Sunday, when he’d been looking for opportunities. A place that, around 6.30 on a Friday evening, was almost certain to be unoccupied. A place that had intrigued him.
A place, he was sure, that had possibilities.
He finished his drink and his cigarette without hurrying. He had plenty of time to go to St Patrick’s and get the bag containing all the specialist kit he’d acquired or made himself over the years. He could do this job and still be back at the night shelter by lock-in time. Yeah, for sure.
Lock-in, he thought, the drink definitely getting to him a little. Lock-in, lock-up.
That made him grin.
‘Want to share the joke?’ the old man with the pipe said.
Spicer shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Nah.’