Cops and Robbers Part Two

Not a happy bunny.  We had another break in attempt, and the wobbly shock is just starting to set in now.  This time the sods managed to get away with a very expensive laptop that Angus bought not so long ago.  I heard Bella barking at around four this morning, had a look outside and didn’t see anything so I shuffled back to my office to my computer.  Then I heard a little noise but wasn’t overly worried because it was quite windy.  I went through to the lounge anyway, and there it was.  An arm sticking through the burglar bars waving a rake around.  I was so shocked that I never wondered why it was waving a rake around, but just freaked right out.  The only thing around that I could lay my hands on was a long fluorescent light tube, so I just grabbed that and whacked the arm, yelling “Get out of here, you f****r”.  Rude word I know, but really appropriate at the time.  The tube shattered, so I zoomed off to fetch my big knife, although my yelling had woken Angus up, who was now also beating the daylights out of the tenacious bloody arm. I reckon he’s chipped a bone on his own arm too in all that chaos, and there’s broken fluorescent glass all over the floor and blood all over the curtains.  It was really shocking the way that the arm just kept coming for more.  Not cool.

Even more not cool was trying to figure out what the arm and rake was doing in the first place.  At some point they’d already managed to hook the laptop off the dining room table onto a nice soft chair, and then they pulled the chair to the window and got hold of the laptop that way.  They really wanted it too considering that they’d added a wire hook to the side of the rake, so they must have been very busy fellows outside for quite a while.  There was a strong garden broom lying snapped in two on the floor, which I reckon they might have used to try and pull out the burglar bars first.  They’d got the broom and the rake by first getting into a locked outside room through a window they managed to open.

The police took a while to get here this time, but I’d also phoned the neighbourhood watch, who were really cool and arrived in force, but didn’t stay long after the cops got here when they got a report of a car being broken into up the road.  Walking around outside with the police we discovered that the thieves had dropped a carved walking stick.  I’ll take a picture of it later because we’ve been told not to touch anything till the fingerprint people come, and I’m a bit too shaky anyway to get a decent shot right now I reckon.  Looking at it did make me wonder how many people have been clouted with it during the course of their general activities.  Also makes me wonder if they’ll come back again, and then third time could be the charm for them.  And then even more wondering if they might think about retrieving their walking stick.  It’s obviously some specially made thing, and the head of it looks like a carved baboon face, or monkey, so I’m guessing that whoever dropped it isn’t overly happy about losing it.  Thieving sod.

I think I may have got a new reader though, as long as he’s cool with typos and a lot of scribbling and scratching out in a book.  While the one policeman was getting all the details down, he asked me what I do, and when I said I write books, the senior one asked to see them.  I haven’t actually got any around here right now apart from the old original proofs because I’m holding off ordering any until I update the back covers.  I showed him those, and he sat reading the two “diary entries” by Christopher that I put in the back of African Me while I finished giving the statement.  When they left he said he loved it and wanted to read the whole thing, so with fair warning about it being the very first proof and not looking really good at all I gave it to him.  He then thanked me for all of them and tootled off, so now I better move my jacksie and order some more.  Who knows, he might spread the word.

Right.  Now I’m off to strongly spike my tea, give Bella a big bone for saving the day a second time, and Freddie a smaller one for sleeping through the whole thing.  And now the last letter of the alphabet has gotten stuck down on my keyboard too.  Bah humbug.