Richie Travers carefully removed the picklock from the keyhole of the French windows of the Glen Iris estate, then looked up at the pale blue alarm box above the windows.

“Fingers crossed!” thought Richie, mindful of his first stay in prison, half his lifetime ago after the “carefully de-activated” alarm decided to go off anyway, despite his best efforts to bypass it.   But since then Richie had spent nearly a decade of his young life in the pen and had learnt lock picking from the experts.   So, with any luck, this time the alarm would not shriek as he opened the door.

He placed the picklock back into a small, plastic wallet, returned the wallet to an inner pocket of his vest, then reached out for the door handle with his right hand.   Holding the handle, he breathed deeply for a second or two to steel himself.   Then, carefully easing the French windows open, he eased around the side to glide inside catlike, rather than risk opening the windows wide.

Inside at last, he stopped to carefully ease shut the windows, then reached into his outer breast pocket to remove a small penlight.   He pressed the small switch on the torch, and nothing happened   Cursing to himself, Richie pressed the switch a little harder and a pinprick of yellowy light shot out to illuminate a small area.   Doing his best not to trip or bump into furniture, Richie slowly made his way around the small sitting hall.

A careful examination of the ground floor revealed nothing of interest, since it was mainly entrance halls.   So, he crept up one of two wide staircases to the first floor where he located a large sitting room.

“Well, one of them, anyway,” thought Richie.   Although Laura and Stephen Weston we’re quite in the same financial bracket as Joseph Gutnick or Kerry Packer, as Australia’s third wealthiest family, the Westons were still well moneyed.   “So this must be only one of their sitting rooms,” he reasoned.   Before entering the Westons’s home, Richie had acquired a copy of the blueprints of the manor and had established that it was a six-storey mansion with an average twelve rooms per floor.

Still half expecting to hear the outside alarm go off (and fearing it might be a silent alarm linked directly to D24 in Melbourne) Richie started slowly around the sitting room.