Jagged edges
Jeremy Clarke
The last mile or so back to her flat was punctuated at 50-yard intervals by speed bumps purposely designed to punish drunks in late-night cabs. I had my head between my knees trying to ward off nausea by sheer force of willpower. My friend, whose insides, I suspect, are made of galvanised tin, relayed regular bulletins on the state of my health to the anxious driver, who was ready to stop the cab, he said, if the worst came to the worst.
It was touch and go, but I made it. She did the paying and was chief negotiator of the two locks on the front door and the tricky one on the internal door to her ground-floor flat. Once inside, I made straight for the bedroom.
The bed takes up most of the room. My side is the far side, next to the french windows. As I felt my way around the bottom of the bed I was surprised to find I was treading on broken glass, great shards of the stuff. And next I felt a gust of cold air coming in through a jagged hole in one of the french windows just large enough to admit a crackhead in a hurry. I reached my side of the bed, lay on my back and closed my eyes. The ordeal was over. Moments before oblivion, I heard her come bustling into the bedroom. ‘I think you’ve been burgled, dearest,’ I murmured.
When I next opened my eyes, sunshine filtering through the wistaria was making an intricate pattern on the bedroom wall. I was still on my back in my suit, on the outside of the duvet. My poppy, pristine the night before, was badly creased. A disaster. Then, realising how cold I was, I remembered the broken window. Cold air was moving the net curtain. I sat up and drew it aside. Between me and the garden at the rear (the grass needed cutting) was nothing but sharp clean air and jagged edges. The jagged edges, one might say, of a collision between belief and cynicism.
I was still slightly drunk. I looked at my friend’s unconscious face on the pillow and wondered what would be her frame of mind when she opened her eyes. Anger? Despair? And more to the point, would a proportion of this be directed at me for being supine instead of rallying round? I watched the intricate sunlit pattern on the wall change as the sun moved higher in the sky, then the intercom burped fruitily. Her eyes opened. She flung back the duvet, stood up and went and spoke to the box on the wall beside the door. It was the police.
I jumped up, picked my way across the broken glass and went and stood in the living-room next door. A policeman and a policewoman, their black vests bulging with equipment, came in. They saw me standing there unsteadily in my suit, glassyeyed, shock-headed, inarticulate, my poppy squashed, at not yet eight o’clock in the morning. And, occupationally astute to human weakness in all its manifestations, they both smiled indulgently at me.
They didn’t stay long. They had a quick gander at the window, at the broken glass on the carpet, at the open drawers, at the heap of pillaged jewellery boxes on the dressing-table, and said not to touch anything until the chap from the forensic department had been and dusted for fingerprints. And as soon as they went we picked our way back across the broken glass and climbed back into bed, and stayed there, too hungover to speak, even to have a debate about making a cup of tea, until the intercom burped again and we had to get up to admit the forensics man with his box of tricks.
Again she did all the talking while I stood uselessly in the living-room. Her laptop (borrowed) was gone. That she knew for certain. Otherwise she wasn’t sure. The forensics man — personable, sympathetic, realistic — went to work on the dressingtable and surfaces around the broken window with torch, powder and brush. I stuck my head in the room and watched. He was meticulous. After about an hour his patience was rewarded with a magnificent set of whorls on the door, at the place where the intruder had grasped the doorframe to lever himself through the gap.
Quietly jubilant, he transferred the dabs to a piece of clear film, which he laid on a piece of glass, and illuminated them for us with his torch. Often, he confided, he can go an entire month without finding anything. Weren’t they beauties?
I went and made us all a nice cup of tea to celebrate. And while I waited for the kettle to boil, I thought what if they’re mine, and the upshot of all this is me having my collar felt for past misdemeanours? But he kindly shone his torch on the ends of my fingers before he went, and, I’m happy to say, ruled them out completely.
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