The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam by Chris Ewan Page A

fellow
inmates. Assuming I had fellow inmates, that is, because there was
always the very slim possibility I was the only individual
currently detained in Amsterdam on suspicion of committing a
crime.
    It was all a far cry from the only other police cell I’d ever
known, back in England, when I’d first been arrested for burglary.
That had been in Bristol city centre, late on a Saturday afternoon,
and the place had given me a life-long lesson in just how
oppressive a confined space can feel. It didn’t help that the
holding area was full of drunken football hooligans, swearing and
raging and singing Rovers and City chants, kicking the bars and the
few pieces of metal furniture, snarling and spitting at one another
and spoiling for one more fight. It had made me feel very young and
vulnerable at the time, which was not altogether surprising,
because I was only just sixteen. And I was a posh kid, way out of
my depth, and truth be told, I was scared witless.
    I’m pretty sure it’s not too fashionable to admit this, but
thieving, for me, began at boarding school. You see, on weekends,
when a lot of the other kids would go home to visit their parents,
I’d wander along the empty school corridors, sometimes trying the
odd door here and there. Most of the classrooms would be locked but
every once in a while I’d find one that had been left open and I’d
walk inside and pace the room and sit down and listen to the
silence or to the distorted noises of other kids out on the playing
fields. It was enough, to begin with, to be somewhere I wasn’t
meant to be, without anybody knowing about it. It was my thing, in
a world without privacy.
    Soon, of course, just being in a classroom wasn’t quite the
thrill it had been and I started to find myself looking for things
to take. I wasn’t looking for any one thing in particular, but
every desk drawer and every supply cupboard held a secret and I was
the type of kid who wanted to know what those secrets were, even if
they turned out to be as mundane as pens and paper. It was nearly
always pens and paper. And part of me was disappointed by that.
    So I began to look around the boys’ dorms. I’d wait until they
were empty, which wasn’t all that difficult, and then I’d approach
a bed and open a drawer or two beside it and see what I could see.
I found letters from parents, medicines, books, walkmans, cash.
Very occasionally, I took something insignificant that the boy
wouldn’t miss, perhaps an eraser or an old birthday card, and then
invariably I put it back the following weekend. Once, I found a
condom.
    The condom was a precious thing and I put it in the locked
drawer beside my bed. We all had locked drawers beside our beds. It
occurred to me then that everyone kept their most prized
possessions in these drawers. Some drawers were never locked and
their contents were generally quite dull. But it was the locked
ones that intrigued me and I soon began to ask myself how I could
get inside them?
    The answer, of course, was to pick the locks. The fact I had no
idea how to pick locks wasn’t the kind of barrier to stand in my
way back then. Pretty soon, I’d equipped myself with a small
screwdriver from the technology classroom and a metal implement
with a long spike on it from a science lab. And I practised. For
hours. In fact, I must have spent just about every spare moment I
could find probing at the lock on my own drawer, teasing the pins,
trying to force the cylinder to turn. It took me weeks, perhaps an
entire half-term, of experimenting. And then one day the thing just
opened, simple as that. I locked it with my key and tried again and
I was just as successful the second time around. I got quicker,
more skilled. Days later, I tried unlocking the drawer of the boy
who slept next to me. It was no different. On a whim, I tried my
key and discovered that it fitted his lock too! It turned out my
key fitted roughly one in every eight locks. Using my key was
quicker than picking