Bank Vaults and Fairy Lights

Fairy lights. They really are quite pretty, aren’t they? Like fireflies trapped in tiny bottles. Except the lights, for one, don’t blink and moreover, are probably 100 times more luminescent than the light that comes a firefly. Probably being the key word. Robert quickly made a mental note to do more research on bioluminescence later. Right now, he had a case to tackle, though he, like everyone else in the room knew that it was nothing more than a waste of time and effort. If only they had a real-life Sherlock Holmes. Someone who could deduce a person’s height from the dust patterns on the floor. Someone who could tell you your whole life story from a few scratches present on your phone case that even you hadn’t noticed. But you would need a Sherlock only if you had a Moriarty on the loose, thought Robert. It damn well felt like they had one.

Detective Robert Paramour had been, well, a detective for nearly 12 years now. An early promotion had made him hopeful that he was special. Different. But after 12 years on the job and no, absolutely no front page, eye-catching solve, like he had hoped for all those years ago, he had been disappointed. He had given up, blaming fate, destiny and anything and everything along those lines for the way his life had turned out.

 But as of now, Robert was only thinking about how weird it was that he was completely indifferent to the fact that he was standing in an empty bank vault decorated on all four sides with fairy lights. It wasn’t his first time standing in such a room. Neither was it his second or third time. Seven. That’s how many times he had been in rooms identical to the one he was in now. It was the same every single time. An empty vault, corrupted security footage, all lights down and not to forget, the eerie-looking yellow and red fairy lights. That’s the only thing that really stood out. Everything else was just the aftermath of a genius heist.

“Genius, isn’t it?”, the bank manager was saying, reading Robert’s mind, “How he manages to break in successfully even though we had doubled security.”

“He?”

“huh, what?” replied the manager, turning his head to face Robert, eyebrows scrunched in confusion.

“You just said ‘He’. How do you know it’s a ‘He’, not a ‘She’?”

“Would you rather I say ‘it’? I wasn’t being sexist or anything.”, said the young man with a sigh, “I just said the first thing that came to mind. That’s all.”

It was Robert’s turn to look at the manager. “Don’t get upset. I was insinuating anything. I just wanted to know your thoughts, just in case you had a reason to believe that the culprit is male.” The young bank manager just shrugged, then walked out of the room, shaking his head. If only people were not so non-cooperative all the time. Robert took a long breath and decided to get back to the Station. Everything was going exactly the way he had thought it would when he had received news about the heist, half an hour ago. He walked out the vault, not knowing what he should feel, except…. something stood out in the hallway. There was a red notice board on the way out, filled with various advertisements and motivational quotes, written by, Robert guessed, those who worked there. It wasn’t the notice board as a whole though, that stood that. It was a card that was pinned onto one corner of the board that had caught Robert’s eye.

One look at the card and Robert had felt a shiver at run down his spine. The card was designed with hand-drawn, yellow and red fairy lights. In the middle, was the name and address of a Fish and Chips shop, located two blocks away, under which a phrase was written in devilishly-elegant looking cursive.

The clock is ticking

My tongue is clicking

Tick -Tock Tick-Tock

Was this some kind of a joke? Did the Fish and Chips place actually design the card? Or was it just some employee having some fun? Robert’s head was buzzing with such questions. But at that moment, Robert, for the first time in his entire career, truly understood what an intuition felt like. He felt it in his bones. To confirm his suspicion, Robert asked a random person walking down the hallway to go and call the manager at once. The woman just stood there looking at Robert, with her hands on her hips, her face showing clear signs of annoyance. “Oh, for God’s sake”, yelled Robert, flashing his badge at the woman, whose face immediately went pale. The woman ran down the corridor (at least as fast as she could in those enormously-long and scarily-thin heels she showed off with every step). Robert quietly stood there with a smirk on his face from the fun he had just had in seeing the woman’s reaction. Though his face had a smirk etched onto it, Robert felt his heart skip a beat. He put a hand on his chest. His chest was pounding.

On enquiry, the bank manager informed that he had absolutely no idea as to where the card had come from. He hadn’t even seen it until the detective had shown it to him. Robert asked him if it could have been the work of one of their employees by any chance. “I don’t know” said the young man, scratching his sheepish brown hair that fell on his shoulders messily. “It could have been one of the employees but right now everyone’s out for lunch. You would have to wait another half an hour, if you want to ask them about it.” Even though Robert was slightly annoyed at how the manager showed him no respect (considering that he was at least a good ten years older than the young man and not to forget the fact that he was talking to a Police officer), he pushed a piece of paper onto the manager’s hand. It had his number written on it. “Ask them about it and call me immediately if you get any information. Alright?” Robert instructed. He turned around to leave when the young man had given him a slight nod.

Robert saw some parts of himself in the manager. He knew that the man’s arrogance was the result of the feeling of pride he felt in his position, considering his age. It was the same feeling that used to engulf Robert’s heart all those years ago. Robert shook the thought out of his head with a sigh. If only he could shake the shiver that ran down his spine every once in a while, reminding him of the task at hand that demanded his undivided attention. For the next ten minutes, as he drove to the Fish and Chips shop in his beaten-up Nissan, his mind was blank. His usual rush of thoughts had taken a different form – fear. Fear that his suspicion was true and that the card was put there on purpose for him, by the mastermind behind the eight genius heists (Robert felt that whoever that genius was, he or she, did not deserve to be called a thief or a robber). Fear that this just as well could be the long overdue turning point of his career and that he would mess it up as always. But deep down, a fear that had managed to lodge itself in Robert’s heart. Fear of a feeling that he had - that something bad, really bad was about to happen.

The Fish and Chips Shop was unusually crowded for a Monday morning. Robert made his way into the small room, frantically searching for a notice board. There wasn’t one. At least not in the main room. Maybe they had one in the kitchen. He walked around observantly for a door with a sign that said – Authorized Personnel only. He shoved the door open. A warm breeze that smelled overwhelmingly of fish, hit him in the face. Disappointingly, there wasn’t one in the kitchen either. The breakroom. They must have one up there for putting up shift schedules and stuff. The poorly air-conditioned breakroom had nothing but a sofa and a side table with a few bottles of water on it. The walls were damp and there were mounds of mold in a few spots. No one was occupying it at the moment. With good reason, thought Robert. But there sure was a tiny notice board on the opposite wall. It had many yellowish-papers with faded letters pinned onto it. On one corner was a card identical to the one at the bank. There were 2 noticeable differences. One, the name and address of the Fish and Chips place had been replaced by one of a Gas Station. His next destination, figured Robert. Two, something was printed onto the back of the card in a tiny yet easily-readable font. Robert took his glasses out of his front shirt pocket and put them on:

‘Once upon a time, not too long ago, on a summer afternoon, a red-headed girl was born. Sandra Gilles, like many would say, was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. As the only daughter of billionaires, Adam and Miranda Gilles, life as an urban princess was boring. Maybe it was because she was blessed with both beauty and brains, that she had had it so easy. She was seven when she first understood the true pleasure of the act of stealing. That feeling of satisfaction, of not getting caught. She enjoyed it. Maybe a little too much. She was bored, so, she continued stealing. Soon, the things she she stole weren’t petty anymore. Have you already judged Sandra? Thief? Liar? Cheat? …… No, she was none of that. In fact, she was much more. Way more than you can even imagine.’

Robert for a second contemplated going back to the Station and discussing the details with the others but decided against it. He was too curious, too invested. He headed straight to the gas station. On finding the next card, he continued reading:

'Back for more already? Good Boy.

You see the thing with Sandra was that she didn’t understand so many things that happened in the world. Why was money so inappropriately proportioned? What is the difference between right and wrong? Doesn’t it just depend on which side you are on? She questioned everything. After she had read Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’, she couldn’t help but be fascinated by the question – ‘Could murder be justified?’. Little did Sandra know that she would be faced with the same question a couple years later. ‘

More. Robert needed to know more. His culprit, Sandra Gilles was an interesting one, thought Robert. Weirdly, he liked her. Questions were swirling around in his head like ink drops in water. They were going to have to wait. His next destination was a warehouse.

The place was less like a warehouse, more like an abandoned garage, located literally in the middle of nowhere. This time there was no noticeboard. Instead, the card that Robert was, by now, eagerly expecting was pinned directly onto the wooden door. The card neither had the devilish phrase nor an address for the next place. Beneath the drawing of the fairy lights, in black font was engraved –

Sandra Gilles

May 16,1998-August 19,2019

August 19? That was today. Robert’s heart skipped a beat again. He turned the card over. It read:

‘You must be wondering why a billionaire’s daughter needed all that money. She didn’t. She just liked the suspense and act of stealing. She liked living in the moment. So, what did she do with the money? She gave it away. She donated some to charities anonymously. She put some in a bag and left it on the doorsteps of some poor households. Some she hid in secret places. Later, she had drawn treasure maps leading to those places. The maps were given away to random kids on the street. She was happy and satisfied with what she did with the money, so she continued stealing. If she was ever caught, she could easily escape. How? you may ask. Let me remind you that she was the only daughter of a billionaire. The world worked on money and if you had enough of it, you could do anything you wanted. Sandra knew that very well. But one day, everything changed. Her life turned upside down. She found out that her dad, whom she admired with all her heart was a bad man. A bad, bad man. I am not going to tell you what her dad did. You will know all about it soon enough as Sandra had made sure that her dad’s face and his crimes was going to be all over the news in a few days. When she had confronted her father about the matter, her father had become a different man. Except, her dad had always had that side inside him, a side Sandra had never seen. His eyes gleamed with something Sandra didn’t have the courage to admit. Adrenaline rushed through her body. As Adam came closer, she picked up the gun she knew her dad kept hidden in his drawer and instinctively shot him. She fell to the floor with a thud that resonated among the walls. Only one thought filled her head, as she held it in her hands. Could murder be justified? Maybe it could be but Sandra was never going to be able to live with it.'

Robert’s head was unable to process all the information he had just read. It was too much. Way too much. He was about to turn around, but something told him to open that garage door. Only he wished he hadn’t once he had done it. On a chair behind a desk was a red headed girl. She had a gun in one hand and a bullet hole on her forehead. Her lips were curled into a smile. Creepy.

“It was never much of a chase from the beginning, was it?” said Robert as he stood there with his head inclined to one side. “…. Sandra”.

There was scrunched piece of paper in Sandra’s other hand. Robert nudged it from her lifeless, clamped palm. It read:

'Why the fairy lights?

Just for a dramatic effect ;)'

Dark? Mysterious? Evil? Cruel? How wrong we all were about Sandra.