Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

Mrs Fernshaw made a quick movement, drawing her hand over her face and pointing at me, nodding all the time, in a gesture that can only have meant: Yes, your face is familiar. I felt she wanted to say something more about him and I waited for a moment on the step. She hesitated, then smiled and turned away.

As I got into my car for the short drive home I was thinking to myself that the real risk in spending time with other people was that you might find you liked it. That was the dangerous outcome Patrick had ended up protecting himself against.

The grass on my lawn seemed to have grown during the afternoon. The blades were loaded with rain and brushed water on to my feet and the bottoms of my trousers. I tried to avoid getting my shoes soaked by picking a path along a slight ridge in the roll of the lawn where the grass was shorter and less like a brush full of wallpaper paste. I was so absorbed in finding my way in the dim light that I had virtually reached the porch before I noticed that my front door had disappeared.

The gap that remained was perfectly neat, but there was a suggestion of violence in its absence — like a missing tooth, or an empty sleeve pinned to the front of a veteran’s jacket. It was only when I got closer that I realised the door had been taken clean off its hinges and laid flat inside the entrance.

I CALLED THE POLICE from the Fernshaws’ house and waited there for the patrol car to arrive. I had thought of going in by myself, but my natural timidity and a reasonable fear that whoever had knocked the door in might still be inside soon put an end to that plan. I had been thinking about the bit in Cross My Heart and Hope to Die when the caretaker of the school gets out of bed in his pyjamas to check a door banging in the attic and ends up impaled on a flagpole.

Officers Santorelli and Topper from the local force followed me back up the road in their car and we investigated the house together.

‘When did you become aware that your property had been burglarised?’ said Officer Santorelli.

‘An hour, half an hour ago. Whenever I called.’ I was distracted by the figure of Officer Topper, who was creeping through the kitchen with his long-handled torch held in that odd overhand grip that seems to be an obligatory part of police procedure, along with resting your thumbs in your belt loops and having a swaggering-buttocked waddle. I switched on the main light and he gave a slight start which he tried to conceal.

‘Apart from the damage to the front door, have you noticed any damage or items missing?’ said Officer Santorelli.

‘Hey hey, what’s this?’ said Officer Topper, playing his torch over the vitamin pills in the bathroom. ‘Looks like someone’s been after your pharmaceuticals.’

‘No, that was like that,’ I said. ‘There’s no room in the cupboard.’

‘Entry was gained via that. I’d guess egress was made via the same route,’ said Santorelli, pointing at the front door. He made ‘route’ rhyme with ‘grout’. ‘I’m going to take a look upstairs. Wait down here and see if you can find anything missing.’

The house looked much as I had left it — or, more accurately, as Patrick had left it. The burglar had opened some of the cupboards in the library, but didn’t seem to have made it as far as the second storey of the house. The hard part was figuring out what, if anything, he had taken. It took a peculiar kind of mental effort to look at everything that Patrick had gathered under that one roof and try to determine what wasn’t there. It was hard to imagine which, if any, objects would appeal to a burglar. It didn’t seem likely that someone would have bothered making off with an ice-cream scoop, or a set of hub-caps decorated with the Coca-Cola insignia.

‘British?’ said Officer Topper shyly.

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

‘You’re British.’

‘That’s right.’

Officer Topper looked pleased with himself. ‘I thought I detected an accent. What part are you from?’

‘Wandsworth,’ I said. ‘But my family’s originally from the States.’

He nodded knowingly. ‘My own family hail from up Norfolk way. The Thetford Toppers. The name Topper comes from “de Pearce”. My ancestors fought alongside Richard the Lionheart in the Holy Land. That there’s my crest.’ He held out a ring as big as a knuckleduster so that I could peer at his coat of arms. ‘A serpent couchant on a ground of gules,’ he said.

‘De Pearce — I think I’ve heard tell of their deeds,’ I said. ‘Will you and your colleague be dusting the house for prints?’

‘Unfortunately we’re seeing a lot of these seasonal break-ins,’ said Officer Santorelli when he returned. I explained about the derelict I had seen in the rainstorm. Santorelli made notes and then told me I would be contacted by a counsellor who specialised in helping the victims of crime.

I walked the policemen back to their squad car and then tried to go to sleep under the life mask of Keats in the summer kitchen. Although I felt indifferent about any losses, I had misgivings about sleeping in the house until the door had been strengthened and put back on its hinges. There was the unpleasant possibility that whoever had broken in might return to find something he had missed the first time. The summer kitchen had a sturdy wooden door with a porthole. It looked like something you would find on the wheel-house of a tea-clipper and felt solid enough to withstand a typhoon.

I was scared, of course, because of the burglary, but I also felt disappointed and angry. I turned on to my side in a futile effort to get comfortable in that narrow bed. I felt the weight of the possessions in the main house exerting a gravitational pull on me. I was a swimmer unable to free himself from the vortex of a sinking ship.

Irrationally, the break-in seemed to confirm all my misgivings about living in the house. This life wasn’t what I had imagined, I thought ruefully. I had turned out to be the beneficiary of a dusty, fusty, overcrowded, high-maintenance, accident-prone wooden shack of a building. The house was a tar baby.

THERE WAS WORSE NEWS to come. The burglary had delayed any possibility of my leaving by at least two weeks.

A cursory inspection of the house in the morning showed no obvious evidence of theft or damage, apart from the broken door. But after a frantic hunt for money to pay the locksmith, it became apparent to me that the burglar had made off with the black leather pouch that contained virtually all my cash, my credit cards and chequebook, both my passports, and my plane ticket back to London.

The locksmith was sympathetic; I was mortified. We had to drive in convoy to Westwich where I borrowed the money to pay him from Mr Diaz.

The previous day’s rain seemed to have purged the air of humidity. It was bright and dry, and the sea sparkled lazily all the way out to the horizon. It was a beautiful place, no doubt about that. The horn blast of the outgoing ferry split the air with an enormous moo. At the beginning of the summer I had welcomed the idea of spending months on Ionia. Now, two obligatory weeks there felt like a prison sentence.

‘What else did you lose?’ said Mr Diaz, when the locksmith had been paid off. His assistant brought us crullers and strong filter coffee. The office was furnished with a chunky reproduction Victorian desk and armchairs upholstered in generic law-office leather.

I told him I had no idea. ‘Nothing is obviously not there. I mean, nothing that was there is obviously missing. But you’ve been to the house — the difficulty is knowing where everything is … was. I could really use the inventory you mentioned.’

‘I am so sorry.’ Mr Diaz slapped his hand theatrically on his forehead. ‘I promised to get one to you and it completely slipped my mind. Let me get one copied for you now.’