Free The Good Thief's Guide to Paris by Chris Ewan

trying to prove the existence of a ghost – all I had were signs of the painting’s absence.
    I suppose if I’d had a camera with me I could have taken a photograph of the bare patch on the wall. But really, that wouldn’t have helped a great deal. I mean, there would be nothing to say I hadn’t just removed the painting from the wall and set it down on the floor before taking the photo. And if I’d had the foresight to bring a camera along with me, it would only have made it seem as if I’d planned the whole thing in advance.
    So far as I could see, all I could really do was take something that would prove I’d been inside the apartment. It wouldn’t be any kind of guarantee that I hadn’t double-crossed Pierre, but it was the best I could manage in the circumstances.
    With that in mind, I turned my attentions to the antique dressing table on my left. The dressing table had been crafted from cherry wood and it had a quite beautiful roll-top lid. I approached the table and rolled the lid open. Of course, I wasn’t looking to take anything the owner of the apartment might miss – I’d been under strict instructions to take only the painting in the first place – but I figured there had to be something appropriate.
    The first thing I saw was a framed photograph and the reason it drew my attention was because it had been turned face-down. I propped it up and found myself looking at a portrait shot of a man and a woman. The man appeared to be mid-to-late-sixties, with grey hair pulled back from his forehead into a greasy ponytail. The woman looked around ten to fifteen years younger. She was platinum blonde with a bottle tan and heavy eye make-up. The picture seemed like a holiday snap – the couple were sat on a sunny balcony and there was a sliver of green ocean behind the woman’s nut-brown shoulder.
    I set the photograph back exactly as I had found it. I had no idea what they’d done to deserve being positioned face-down like that but I did know that a personal photograph was likely to be missed. There was a fair amount of make-up and some hair bands and brushes scattered across the surface of the dressing table, as well as various lotions and nail files and tweezers, all of which made me even more certain that Bruno didn’t live in the apartment. I opened a pair of miniature drawers and found that the first drawer was filled with balls of cotton wool and the second drawer was crammed with yet more make-up.
    None of it was of any use to me so I stepped backwards and looked beneath the dressing table and right then I happened to notice a plastic accordion folder down by my feet. I reached for the folder and popped the clasp and the insides fanned open to reveal a well-ordered collection of personal effects. I found store cards and video membership cards, insurance policies and credit card bills, general correspondence and medical prescriptions. There was also a driver’s licence. All of the items belonged to the same person – a Madame Catherine Ames – and the pixelated image on the driver’s licence matched the platinum blonde woman in the photograph. At first, I thought about pocketing one of the cards, but only the driver’s licence had an address on it and I wasn’t about to take that.
    I went back to the accordion folder and riffled through the various sections until I found a series of bank account statements. I paused and absorbed the details of the first statement I came across and then I worked backwards through the pile until I found a statement from many months beforehand that I thought it would be safe to take. I removed the statement, checking the name and address once more, and then I slipped it into my pocket, set the folder back down on the floor and closed the roll-top lid on the dressing table.
    I hadn’t been inside the apartment all that long but I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. This wasn’t one of those jobs where I knew when the apartment was likely to be empty and how long