Chronicle: The Grey Umbrella — The High Street Robbery

That same evening, at a quarter to nine, Nigel Fitzgerald stood in a dark alley behind the jeweller's on the High Street, thinking that, objectively speaking, an umbrella was a ridiculous weapon.

He'd thought so for two years now, ever since he discovered by accident that a folding umbrella, swung correctly, stopped a baseball bat about as effectively as an actual blade — while attracting none of the attention a blade would. A man with a sword in an alley gets noticed. A man with an umbrella does not, even after three straight days of clear London skies, which is, in itself, an achievement deserving its own news segment.

Two young men at the jeweller's back entrance were working at the window grille with the confidence of professionals and the caution of amateurs — a rare but not unheard-of combination, according to the statistics Nigel kept himself, in a separate notebook, hidden under a floorboard in his hallway. (That floorboard. The one that creaked on Tuesdays. Dave had been right about the creak, wrong about the cause, which was, on the whole, a fairly accurate summary of their entire neighbourly history.)

"Right," Nigel said aloud, addressing himself more than anyone else, because two years of practice had taught him that a quiet word with himself before stepping in did wonders for the nerves. "We've got a Yale lock, a grille from Security Plus, and judging by the hesitance of that one in the yellow jacket — this is his first job."

He stepped out of the shadows the moment the man in the yellow jacket finally got the lock open — Nigel had long ago learned that the best moment to intervene is the moment of someone else's triumph, when vigilance drops to zero and self-satisfaction rises to meet it.

"I do apologise," he said, in a voice so unfailingly polite that both robbers spun round more out of reflex than fright, "but this is barbaric. Decent people use a lockpick. They don't lever a grille off with a crowbar like it's nineteen-eighty."

A pause. Then the man in the yellow jacket swung the crowbar — with the same uncertainty as everything else about his evening — and Nigel did what he'd already done roughly a hundred and forty times over two years: snapped the umbrella open with one flick of the wrist, caught the crowbar in the canopy, twisted — and the crowbar went clattering into a bin while the man himself, losing his balance, sat down hard on the pavement with the expression of someone firmly reconsidering his career options.

The second robber, wiser, simply put his hands up.

"I'm not even involved," he announced, in the tone of a man who was clearly not saying this to law enforcement for the first time.

"Of course not," Nigel agreed, pulling out his phone and dialling nine-nine-nine with the same unhurried air he'd have used to book a taxi. "You just happened to be standing next to a broken grille at half eight in the evening with a crowbar in your colleague's hands. Pure coincidence."

While he waited for the police — and he always waited, that was rule number one, never run before the constables arrive, or the whole thing turns into rumour, and rumour is far more dangerous than fact — he checked his phone. Two new messages.

The first from Marlon: "found sumthin on grimshaw, lets go tmrw, not on the phone." Nigel sighed. Marlon always wrote "not on the phone" on the phone, and there was a certain unkillable logic to it that Nigel had long ago decided not to argue with.

The second, from Dave, his upstairs neighbour, sent forty minutes earlier: "okay, no worries, another time then :)"

The smiley stung, slightly. Nigel was fairly sure Dave was hurt — or, worse, suspicious, because lately Dave had taken to looking at him in the lift with the expression of a man working through a hard sum, already close to the answer but still with two factors transposed.

Nigel typed: "Sorry, mate, definitely next week," and, after a moment's hesitation, added one more word, which he then deleted, because it was a touch too honest: "promise."

He didn't like promising things he couldn't always keep. The coat was already torn at the elbow — a sharp corner on the window grille — and tomorrow evening promised a meeting with Marlon, which almost certainly meant another ruined suit and another plausible lie about the dry cleaner's.

The police car turned in at the end of the street. Nigel straightened his coat, tucked the umbrella under his arm like a walking cane, and, with the composure of a gentleman who'd simply happened to be passing, prepared to give a statement that would, as usual, sound both thorough and entirely unconvincing.

"The Grey Umbrella himself," said the young constable, climbing out of the car with barely disguised fanboy enthusiasm, the sort usually reserved for meeting a celebrity.

"Just a neighbour, out for a walk," Nigel replied, with the smile he'd perfected to complete automation over two years.

Seven minutes' walk from here, on a corkboard in a flat one floor above his own, the first drawing pin had already gone in. Nigel, of course, had no idea yet.

The constable turned out to be chatty — new to the job, judging by how eagerly he scribbled in his notebook, as though this were an autograph session rather than routine paperwork.

"Is it true you pulled that bloke off the roof last month, the one threatening to jump?" he asked, not looking up from his notes.

"He wasn't threatening to jump," Nigel corrected patiently. "He was stuck up there rescuing a cat. The papers rather dramatised it."

"Did the cat make it?"

"The cat saved itself while we were talking," Nigel said, with the weary philosophy of a man who'd spent far too much time on rooftops. "Cats, on the whole, don't need superheroes. Rather humbling for the profession, honestly."

Once the report was done and both robbers safely loaded into the car, Nigel stood alone in the alley a while longer, listening to the evening hum of London somewhere in the distance — buses, sirens, someone a street over swearing about parking with the same passion people usually reserve for parking and football.

He thought about Dave. Not because he suspected Dave was onto anything — that thought still struck him as absurd, that evening — but because he suddenly felt genuinely bad about the cancelled pint, yet again. Dave was a good neighbour. Held the door. Never complained about the creaking floorboard. Once even brought his shopping in when it had been left outside, without a word, just a note by the milk: "saw this had fallen." Neighbours like that were rare, Nigel thought, doing up his coat buttons, including the one that had cracked at the elbow an hour earlier. Neighbours like that weren't something to take lightly, even if fighting crime was, technically, the only thing that had made Nigel Fitzgerald's life feel like it meant anything, ever since that business five years ago changed everything.

But that was another chapter entirely, one Nigel, as was his habit, put off until whenever he'd be ready to tell it — if he ever would be.

He caught a taxi home, gave the driver an address two streets over from his real one — a habit impossible to shake, even when you know for an absolute fact that no one's watching — and spent the whole ride thinking about Marlon, about Grimshaw, and about the fact that the building manager's name kept coming up too often lately to write off as coincidence.

Dave, for what it's worth, had been entirely right about one thing he hadn't yet realised himself: the coincidences in this story really were running out. Just not where he was looking for them.

At home, climbing the stairs — Nigel tried to avoid the lift after a shift, since mirrors in lifts are merciless to torn coats — he paused for a second outside his own door, hearing footsteps upstairs, at Dave's. Up late, Nigel thought. Can't sleep, probably. Ought to take him for a proper pint sometime, no cutting it short, no rushing — a genuine invitation, not just an apology.

He took off his coat, hung it on the hook beside an identical one, intact — a spare — and pulled the notebook out from under the floorboard. He opened it to a blank page, wrote the date at the top, and beneath it, the one word that had been showing up more and more often in his notes lately: "Grimshaw."

He'd meant to write more, but thought better of it. Too tired. Too long an evening, for a man who, according to his work calendar, had a nine a.m. meeting about flood-insurance rates the next morning — which, for the record, was entirely true, no force majeure required.

His lights went out at a quarter to midnight. Right around the time, upstairs, Dave's light came on — a small desk lamp over a corkboard.

Neither of them knew, in that moment, that very soon the two of them, each in his own way, would arrive at the same building from opposite sides of the law — just from different floors, and with wildly different degrees of understanding what was actually going on.