The mystery of the Bloomsbury bandits

It was 3am the first time John Torres* awoke to the sound of shattering glass. He thought so little of it he didn’t even get out of bed on that late August night: there’s a certain level of background chaos you bake into living anywhere in inner London, let alone in a flat opposite the British Museum. It was only when the same thing happened again a few days later that he started to suspect something was off. This time it occurred at 9pm, and his flatmate looked out of the window in time to see a man clad all in black sprinting away from the scene.

On both occasions the target had been the same place: Kiltane, a Scottish luxury clothing store, specialising in cashmere. But there was something strange about the attacks. The windows had been smashed — intensely, almost methodically. On one occasion nothing at all was stolen. On another, just one or two items from a window display were grabbed. Was this an inept robbery, or something altogether more unusual?

After weeks of speaking to those involved, we discovered the two attacks were just a small part of an ongoing campaign inexplicably targeting this one store. Staff have lost count of the number of times they’ve come into work to see their windows smashed, over the course of just a few weeks. On most occasions nothing is stolen, and in some cases the windows are only being cracked — damaged enough to need replacing, but not enough to allow a would-be thief access to the high-end cashmere clothes just inches away. In recent weeks, they’ve even successfully hit the store while a newly hired overnight security guard was sitting inside. Trying to work out why it’s all been happening unexpectedly opened a saga involving Chinese mafia conspiracies, soot-covered robbers and late night visits from glaziers, and revealed that this isn’t the first time this has happened.