Dick Francis - Silks

I sat on the torn arm of my sofa and looked about me. Everything that could have been broken had been. My brand-new expensive large flat-screen plasma television would show no pictures ever again. Angela’s collection of Royal Worcester figurines was no more, and the kitchen floor was littered deep with broken crockery and glass.

I looked at the phone in my hand. At least that was working, so I used it to dial 999 and I asked the emergency operator for the police.

They promised to try and send someone as soon as possible but it didn’t sound to me like it was an urgent case in their eyes. No one was hurt or imminently dying, they said, so I would have to wait. So I thumbed through a sopping copy of Yellow Pages to find an emergency plumbing service and promised them a big bonus to get here as soon as humanly possible. I was still speaking to them when the ceiling around the light fitting, which had been bulging alarmingly, decided to give up the struggle and collapsed with a crash. A huge mass of water suddenly fell into the centre of my sitting room and spread out towards my open-plan kitchen area like a mini tidal wave. I lifted my feet as it passed me by. The plumbing company promised that someone was already on the way.

I hobbled around my house inspecting the damage. There was almost nothing left that was usable. Everything had been broken or sliced through with what must have been a box cutter or a Stanley knife. My leather sofa would surely be unrepairable with so many cuts through the hide, all of which showed white from the stuffing beneath. A mirror that had hung this morning on my sitting-room wall now lay smashed amongst the remains of a glass-and-brass coffee table, and an original oil painting of a coastal landscape by a successful artist friend was impaled over the back of a dining chair.

Upstairs in my bedroom the mattress had also received the box-cutter treatment and so had most of the clothes hanging in my wardrobe. This had been a prolonged and determined assault on my belongings of which almost nothing had survived. Worst of all was that the perpetrator, and I had little doubt as to who was responsible, had smashed the glass and twisted to destruction the silver frame that had stood on the dressing table, and had then torn the photograph of Angela into dozens of tiny pieces.

I stood there looking at these confetti remains and felt not grief for my dead wife, but raging anger that her image had been so violated.

The telephone rang. How was it, I wondered, that he hadn’t broken that too?

I found out. ‘I told you that you’d regret it,’ Julian Trent said down the wire, his voice full of menace.

‘Fuck off, you little creep,’ I said and I slammed down the receiver.

The phone rang again almost immediately and I snatched it up.

‘I said to fuck off,’ I shouted into the mouthpiece.

There was a pause. ‘Geoffrey, is that you?’ Eleanor sounded hesitant.

‘Oh God. I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

‘I should hope so,’ she said with slight admonishment. ‘I called because I have some good news for you.’

I could do with some.

‘I’ve found a copy of the photo of Millie with the foal.’

It took the emergency plumbers forty-five minutes to arrive at Ranelagh Avenue, by which time not only had the ceiling in my sitting room collapsed but also two ceilings below. I know because I heard about it at full volume from my neighbours when they arrived home at five past nine. It was a shame, I thought, that they had decided not to eat out. They wouldn’t be able to produce much of a dinner in the flood. Only when they came upstairs and saw the state of my place did they understand that it hadn’t been a simple thing like leaving a tap running or overflowing a bath.

The police showed up at least an hour after the plumbers had successfully capped off the broken pipe and departed. Two uniformed officers arrived in a patrol car and wandered through the mess, shaking their heads and denigrating the youth of today under their breath.

‘Do you have any idea who may have done this?’ they asked me.

I shook my head. Somehow not actually speaking seemed to reduce the lie. Why didn’t I just tell them that I knew exactly who had done it. It had been Julian Trent and I could probably find his address, or, at least, that of his parents.

But I also knew that Julian Trent was far from stupid, and that he would not have been careless enough to have left any fingerprints or other incriminating evidence in my house, and that he would have half of London lined up to swear that he was nowhere near Barnes at any time during this day. If he could get himself off an attempted murder rap, I had no doubts that he would easily escape a charge of malicious damage to property. To have told the police the truth would simply have given him an additional reason to come back for another dose of destruction – of me, of my father, or, as I feared most, of Eleanor.

The police spent some time going all round my house both outside and in.

‘Whoever did this probably got in through that window,’ one of the policemen said, pointing at the now-broken glass in my utility room. ‘He must have climbed the drainpipe.’

I had changed the locks and bolstered my security on the front door after the time I’d had an unwanted guest with his camera. I now wished I had put in an alarm as well.

‘Is there anything missing?’ asked one of the policemen finally.

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t seem so. It’s just all broken or slashed.’

‘Mmm,’ said the policeman. ‘Mindless vandalism. Happens all the time, sadly. You should be grateful that the whole place isn’t also smeared with shit.’

‘Oh thanks,’ I said rather sarcastically. But Julian Trent wouldn’t have done that for fear of leaving some speck of his own DNA along with it. ‘So what happens now?’ I asked them.

‘If nothing’s been stolen then CID won’t really be interested,’ he sounded bored himself. ‘If you call Richmond police station in the morning they will give you a crime number. You’ll need that for your insurers.’

That’s why I had called them in the first place.

And with that, they left. No photos, no tests, no search for fingerprints, nothing. As they said, no one was hurt and nothing had been stolen, and the insurance would deal with the rest. End of their problem. They had no hope or expectation of ever catching the person responsible, and, to be fair, I hadn’t exactly been very helpful with their inquiries.

I sat on a chrome kitchen stool and surveyed my ruined castle.

Surprisingly the electrical system seemed to have suffered no ill effects from the cascade of water through the sitting-room light fitting. I had quite expected there to be a blue flash followed by darkness when I chanced turning on the switch, but instead I was rewarded with two bulbs coming on brightly. The remaining bulbs, those in the wall brackets, had received the baseball bat treatment. At least, I assumed that Trent had been accompanied by his weapon of choice. The damage to some of the fittings was too much to have been the result of only a kick or a punch. Even the marble worktops in the kitchen were now cracked right through. Young Julian clearly had considerable prowess in the swing of his bat.

Eleanor arrived at just before ten. She had been so distressed to hear me on the telephone describing the shambles that was now my home that she had driven up from Lambourn as soon as she could. She had only been back there an hour, having caught the train from London to Newbury at the end of the veterinary symposium.

I hobbled down the stairs to the front door to let her in and we stood in the hallway and hugged. I kissed her briefly with closed lips. It was a start.