‘We were burgled in our Riviera villa as we slept’
Iknew the second I walked into the sitting room that something was wrong. It was 6.15am on Thursday, and the last day of our holiday in the South of France. The previous night had been spent getting our rented house ready for “check-out” – but the place was a mess. My handbag was upside-down on the sofa, the box I keep my jewellery in lying empty beside it. And there was something else. I was the first up, but the air felt different, as though something or someone fast-moving and violent had passed through it. It felt like a room that had only recently been vacated.
This made sense later. The burglars would have left 15 minutes earlier, the French police estimated. They would, they think, have heard the alarm I silenced with the snooze button (best decision of the year), and scarpered, leaving a trail of loose change, Tate and gym membership cards from my wallet in their wake.
Which should have reassured me: these people were themselves scared of an altercation – even if that altercation was with a woman in Moomin-print sleep shorts. But then I remembered something that made me feel sick: the upturned handbag found in the sitting room had originally been on a chair in our bedroom. They must have crept in there and stood inches away from us while we slept.
Knowing how much worse things could have been had we woken to find intruders in our bedroom put things into perspective when it came to working out what had been taken. They’d stolen all the cash they could find, right down to the few pounds I hadn’t spent at Heathrow on the way out, but left the credit cards, along with my driver’s licence. I felt a stomach-plummeting sense of violation at the actions of these depraved and despicable inhuman beings.
The jewellery part did sting. It still stings now, almost a week on. “They’re just things,” I keep telling myself, and they are just things, but they’re also memories that have been trampled over. The art deco ring my husband had bought me for our fifth wedding anniversary; the vintage Pucci cuff I’d picked up at a flea market in LA; those earrings I’d bought from Alfies Antique Market on the Edgware Road when my first book advance came through: every last piece I had with me was gone, none of it of great value, all of it irreplaceable.
“These guys are only after jewellery and cash,” the police explained when we asked why they left our laptops and phones. “They don’t take tech any more: too easily traceable.” They would have been disappointed with their haul, then: I could see it in the police’s faces when we gave our statement. “These guys” are used to making off with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of diamonds and Cartier watches. They “do the season” on the French Riviera, the police told us, in the same way that we tourists do – only unlike the rest of us, they leave the area a hell of a lot better off.
The Côte d’azur has long been “a sunny place for shady people,” as Somerset Maugham once put it. But today it’s as much of a burglar’s playground as a billionaire’s, and the tactics these organised gangs are using are becoming increasingly sophisticated. For years, thieves stuck to a basic but efficient plan: they would wait outside famous restaurants such as Club 55 and follow anyone wearing particularly expensive watches and driving particularly expensive cars back to their homes.
In the early Noughties the gassings started. Between 2002 and 2018 everyone from Trinny Woodall and footballer Patrick Vieira to ex-f1 driver Jenson Button, former Top
Gear presenter Richard Hammond and ordinary British holidaymakers in camper vans were knocked out (using gas pumped into the air-conditioning vents) and cleaned out on the Riviera.
This year the police assured me they hadn’t dealt with any gassings. This year, as what they called “the seasonal activity” reached fever pitch, they were most concerned with the drones many burglary victims had seen flying over their homes days before break-ins. Drones which were being used to case the joint. Drones like the one my husband had seen hovering over the back garden a week before the burglary.
After all the stories I’ve heard over the past few days from neighbours and friends who have been burgled in that same area, I feel grateful that we got off as lightly as we did. There’s but one silver lining: I will never feel guilty for pressing that snooze button again.