You Need Excitement in Your Life

I slept a lot over the weekend to get over Friday night's 'work' and of course the relaxation before and after. My mother handed me my letter on Monday morning, a job offer, minimum wage and long hours for unskilled work. My mother was pleased, I pretended that I wasn't interested, pretended that I didn't really want to take a dead-end job on minimum wage, mum said, "If you want a better job with better pay you'd better get off to university and get some better qualifications!"

I did two more jobs with Mark during the week; I'd crept out of my bedroom window in the dead of night dressed in my working clothes and met Mark at the end of the village in one of his stolen cars. We'd burgle an empty house so Mark could talk openly about what we were doing as part of my learning process.

I was surprised that a burglary of the magnitude that we'd committed the previous week had gone unreported in the local press. The whisper in the King's Head was that two youngsters from the gypsy encampment on the recreation ground had followed us into the house and run out with their arms full of jewellery and gold trinkets with the house's owner in hot pursuit. They had got away with some very expensive stuff, Mark and I had shared out the sixty-six thousand pounds of currency we'd stolen, I had one third of that money added to my account and with what I'd helped Mark to steal I'd amassed enough to buy a small detached house. It wasn't a simple process for an eighteen year old girl to buy a house, not when her total provable wealth was just two hundred pounds.

The house was a wreck of a building too but Mark and I used it as a training ground in between jobs. I worked on the locks with tools that Mark got for me through the 'trade'. I worked diligently until I could pick standard door locks in just a few minutes; the high security locks took me an hour each, twice as long as it took Mark to defeat them. I even repaired my own roof; Mark thought that it would improve my skills if I practiced getting up onto my roof, forty foot above the ground without the help of a ladder or scaffolding.

I was having a blast, I left home every morning dressed in my office clothes and pretending to be miserable. I'd catch the commuter bus with all of the other drones but when they climbed the stairs into dull office blocks I headed out of town to the other side and to my ancient house with crumbling walls and windows. We did two or three burglaries a week; I was saving my proceeds to pay myself so it looked like I had a salary coming in and the rest I used to buy new windows and doors. The most expensive locks I could find but first I'd check how easy they would be to pick.

Along with my training to become a professional criminal Mark and I planned my revenge on Peter Fenton-Williams. In no time at all my house was finished and I moved out of home, I told my parents that I was renting the flat from a landlord for an exorbitant price. My dad helped me move in, he looked at the roof, "Is that roof okay, did the landlord have it checked out recently?"

"The roof is fine daddy, all the tiles are new, the roof was totally replaced just a few months ago."

"The boiler, when was that last checked out, is there a gas safe certificate anywhere?"

"The boiler is brand new; I've got all of the papers that the engineer left when he installed it."

"That girl in the flat down below you, she looks like a prostitute, are you sure that you'll be safe living above her?"

"That's Kelly Thatcher, she was in my class at school, she is a bit of a good time girl but I trust her!"

Yes, I'd brought Kelly back from the brothel she was working in down in London, Kelly had spent a few weeks working out of the flat that Steve and Mark got for her in Kettering but had been tempted by false promises by a pimp from London and had gone to work for him at his brothel in London. She wouldn't earn as much money in Kettering as she made in London but she'd keep more of what she made now that she was away from the pimp that was 'looking after her', I'd had an independent valuation on Kelly's flat so that she was just paying me the right rent and not a penny more.

23,899 Words.