smiled at the old man. “You can call me Daniel,” he said. “And Janet is at home. She gave me her set of keys to your house.”
“Did you kill her? Are you going to kill me?”
“Old age is killing you, Jeremy. I’ll only put you out of your misery if you give me good reason to.”
Jeremy pushed himself up into a sitting position with his back against the padded headboard. “What do you want?” he said.
“Just a little of your ill-gotten wealth. You’re a very rich man. As a member of parliament you also sat on many companies’ boards as a director, and you still have your stained fingers in the tobacco industry.”
“But―”
“That’s a bad word, Jeremy, please don’t use it again,” he said, drawing the pistol from his waistband and pointing it at the now trembling man’s chest. “You have money and credit cards in the house. I want the cash, the cards and your PIN numbers. And if you hold out on me or try to be clever and give me false or reversed numbers, then you’ll die.”
Jeremy didn’t want to die. Even at his advanced age and with all his infirmities, he realised that he still had a potent lust for life. Most of his wealth was in stocks and shares, and so the few thousand pounds he kept in his safe was paltry. And the major credit cards in his wallet would only allow a relatively small amount to be withdrawn off each.
“How much do you have in the house?” ‘Daniel’ said.
“Approximately ten thousand pounds. And my cards are in my wallet in the top drawer of the dressing table behind you.” Jeremy said.
“Get up and take me to your safe,” Daniel said as he opened the drawer, took out the wallet and removed the cards.
Jeremy could not rush. He climbed out of bed slowly and limped over to the door in his baggy pyjamas, to be followed down the stairs and into a study on the ground floor, where he moved a small occasional table that was positioned in a corner of the room. Kneeling down with difficulty, Jeremy pulled back a corner of the carpet to reveal a hinged lid that was set flush to the floorboards. Lifting the small trapdoor up and laying it back against the wall, he punched a four digit number into the panel on the upturned safe door and opened it.
“Okay, move away from it,” Daniel said.
Jeremy didn’t get up off his knees, just crawled like a baby to several feet from the robber and sat with his back up against the wall, to concentrate on drawing air into his phlegm-filled and decaying lungs.
There was twelve thousand pounds neatly banded in a dozen blocks. Daniel found nothing else worth taking. He was not greedy, and made do with cash and cards from his selected prey. Jewellery and other valuable articles had to be fenced, and were therefore risky to take and convert to money.
“Back upstairs,” he said to Jeremy. “Your tea will be going cold.”
It took Jeremy a while to shuffle up to his bedroom, where he climbed back onto the bed and watched and waited as Daniel took a small notebook from a pocket and wrote down the names of the banks corresponding to the credit cards.
“Write your PIN numbers where appropriate,” he said, handing Jeremy the book and a ballpoint pen. “And bear in mind that I’m going to leave you tied up and gagged. If the numbers are false, I’ll come back, and you really wouldn’t want to see me pissed off.”
Jeremy wrote the correct numbers next to the names of the banks in a scrawl that was only just decipherable. Daniel then turned to a blank page and told him to write them down again, just in case he had made them up. They matched.
Pouring tea from the pot into a china cup and adding milk, he said, “Do you take sugar?”
Jeremy shook his head and reached out to take the tea with both hands. Took a sip of it to ease his dry throat, and looked into the young man’s eyes. All he saw was a twinkle of humour, overlaying a coldness that he imagined a worker in a slaughterhouse with a bolt gun possessed as he dispatched beasts without a shred of empathy for them.
Daniel allowed the old man time to drink the tea; took the cup from him, placed it back on the tray, and then shot him once between the eyes.