Dick Francis - Straight

Many of the books were out of the bookshelves, but I saw with grim satisfaction that none of them lay open. Even if none of the hollow books had contained diamonds, at least the burglar hadn’t known the books were hollow. A poor consolation, I thought.

The police arrived eventually, one in uniform, one not. I went along the hall when they rang the doorbell, checked through the peephole and let them in, explaining who I was and why I was there. They were both of about my own age and they’d seen a great many break-ins.

Looking without emotion at Greville’s wrecked room, they produced notebooks and took down an account of the assault in the garden. (Did I want a doctor for the bump? No, I didn’t.) They knew of this house, they said. The new owner, my brother, had installed all the window grilles and had them wired on a direct alarm to the police station so that if anyone tried to enter that way they would be nicked. Police specialists had given their advice over the defenses and had considered the house as secure as was possible, up to now: but shouldn’t there have been active floodlights and a dog alarm? They’d worked well, I said, but before they came I’d turned them off.

“Well, sir,” they said, not caring much, “what’s been stolen?”

I didn’t know. Nothing large, I said, because the burglar had had both hands free, when he vaulted the gate.

Small enough to go into a pocket, they wrote.

What about the rest of the house? Was it in the same state?

I said I hadn’t looked yet. Crutches. Bang on head. That sort of thing. They asked about the crutches. Broken ankle, I said. Paining me, perhaps? Just a bit.

I went with them on a tour of the house and found the tornado had blown through all of it. The long drawing room on the ground floor was missing all the pictures from the walls and all the drawers from chests and tables.

“Looking for a safe,” one of the policemen said, turning over a ruined picture. “Did your brother have one here, do you know?”

“I haven’t seen one,” I said.

They nodded and we went upstairs. The black and white bedroom had been ransacked in the same fashion and the bathroom also. Clothes were scattered everywhere. In the bathroom, aspirins and other pills were scattered on the floor. A toothpaste tube had been squeezed flat by a shoe. A can of shaving cream lay in a washbasin, with some of the contents squirted out in loops on the mirror. They commented that as there was no graffiti and no excrement smeared over everything, I had got off lightly.

“Looking for something small,” the nonuni-formed man said. “Your brother was a gem merchant, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Have you found any jewels here yourself?”

“No, I haven’t.”

They looked into the empty bedroom on that floor, still empty, and went up the stairs to look around above, but coming down reported nothing to see but space. It’s one big attic room, they explained, when I said I hadn’t been up there. Might have been a studio once, perhaps.

We all descended to the semibasement where the mess in the kitchen was indescribable. Every packet of cereal had been poured out, sugar and flour had been emptied and apparently sieved in a strainer. The fridge’s door hung open with the contents gutted. All liquids had been poured down the sinks, the cartons and bottles either standing empty or smashed by the draining boards. The ice cubes I’d wondered about were missing, presumably melted. Half of the floor of carpet tiles had been pulled up from the concrete beneath.

The policemen went phlegmatically round looking at things but touching little, leaving a few footprints in the floury dust.

I said uncertainly, “How long was I unconscious? If he did all this...”

“Twenty minutes, I’d say,” one said, and the other nodded. “He was working fast, you can see. He was probably longest down here. I’d say he was pulling up these tiles looking for a floor safe when you set the alarms off again. I’d reckon he panicked then, he’d been here long enough. And also, if it’s any use to you, I’d guess that if he was looking for anything particular, he didn’t find it.”

“Good news, is that?” asked the other, shrewdly, watching me.

“Yes, of course.” I explained about the Saxony Franklin office being broken into the previous weekend. “We weren’t sure what had been stolen, apart from an address book. In view of this,” I gestured to the shambles, “probably nothing was.”

“Reasonable assumption,” one said.

“When you come back here another time in the dark,” the other advised, “shine a good big torch all around the garden before you come through the gate. Sounds as if he was waiting there for you, hiding in the shadow of the hedge, out of range of the body-heat-detecting mechanism of the lights.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“And switch all the alarms on again, when we leave.”

“Yes.”

“And draw the curtains. Burglars sometimes wait about outside, if they haven’t found what they’re after, hoping that the householders, when they come home, will go straight to the valuables to check if they’re there. Then they come rampaging back to steal them.”

“I’ll draw the curtains,” I said.

They looked around in the garden on the way out and found half a brick lying on the grass near where I’d woken up. They showed it to me. Robbery with violence, that made it.

“If you catch the robber,” I said.

They shrugged. They were unlikely to, as things stood. I thanked them for coming and they said they’d be putting in a report, which I could refer to for insurance purposes when I made a claim. Then they retreated to the police car double-parked outside the gate and presently drove away, and I shut the front door, switched on the alarms, and felt depressed and stupid and without energy, none of which states was normal.

The policemen had left lights on behind them everywhere. I went slowly down the stairs to the kitchen meaning merely to turn them off, but when I got there I stood for a while contemplating the mess and the reason for it.

Whoever had come had come because the diamonds were still somewhere to be found. I supposed I should be grateful at least for that information; and I was also inclined to believe the policemen who said the burglar hadn’t found what he was looking for. But could I find it, if I looked harder?

I hadn’t particularly noticed on my first trip downstairs that the kitchen’s red carpet was in fact carpet tiles, washable squares that were silent and warmer underfoot than conventional tiles. I’d been brought up on such flooring in our parents’ house.

The big tiles, lying flat and fitting snugly, weren’t stuck to the hard surface beneath, and the intruder had had no trouble in pulling them up. The intruder hadn’t been certain there was a safe, I thought, or he wouldn’t have sieved the sugar. And if he’d been successful and found a safe, what then? He hadn’t given himself time to do anything about it. He hadn’t killed me. Hadn’t tied me. Must have known I would wake up.

All it added up to, I thought, was a frantic and rather unintelligent search, which didn’t make the bump on my head or my again knocked-about ankle any less sore. Grinding machines had no brains either. Nor, I thought dispiritedly, had the ground product.

I drew the curtains as advised and bent down and pulled up another of the red tiles, thinking about Greville’s security complex. It would be just like him to build a safe into the solid base of the house and cover it with something deceptive. Setting a safe in concrete, as the pamphlet had said. People tended to think of safes as being built into walls: floors were less obvious and more secure, but far less convenient. I pulled up a few more tiles, doubting my conclusions, doubting my sanity.