When I dropped Julia off at work we noticed a table on the veranda had been knocked over.
“Must have been windy last night.” I said.
“Or we’ve been burgled.”
They had an attempted break in last week and she can sometimes concentrate on the negative too much.
I, on the other hand, can sometimes be wrong, and I was wrong today.
A person of low moral standards had indeed tried, unsuccessfully, to break in. They have wrecked the door handle, scratched the exterior, left boot prints all over the front and strained the window shutters.
What they didn’t do was gain entry. And if they had have done their haul would have been confined to a selection of second-hand gardening books and used wellingtons.
I imagine the police are looking for a youth of low intelligence and poor upper body strength,. He will be either unemployed or in a low-paid job.
“How,” asked my imaginary assistant, “can you tell that? (Apart from the fact the majority of burglars fall into that category).”
Well, he’s male because he wears big boots. He’s stupid because there’s clearly nothing of value in there. He’s not in a highly paid job, because if he was he’d have access to £10 and he could buy a decent wrecking bar. He has poor upper body strength because anyone with decent strength would have levered the door or shutters within minutes, even using a makeshift tool. And finally he’s youthful because nobody over 40 could lift his legs enough to leave boot prints that high up a wall.
The police, meanwhile, are going to come out and look at the damage.
They say the boot prints are unlikely to be of much value.
This is real life, not CSI – no database of boot prints for us.
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