‘Liv? You home?’
I edge backwards, avoiding the glass as I head for the stairs, repeating Olivia’s name from the bottom. Again there’s no reply – it’s only me here.
It’s been a really long sixteen or seventeen hours since waking up in that field and the exhaustion hits me all together. I lean on the kitchen counter, closing my eyes and battling a yawn. I fumble through my thoughts, trying to remember what I’m supposed to do. I’ve already pressed the second ‘9’ on my phone, when I realise 999 is meant to be for emergencies. As I stare at the broken glass, I’m second-guessing myself. Am I in imminent danger? Will I be wasting someone’s time? There are those adverts in which someone’s in desperate need of an ambulance – but the emergency call is delayed because of someone phoning up to complain about whoever got voted off X Factor or Strictly that week. The thoughts clutter together and I have to force myself to Google the non-emergency number because 101 has somehow eluded me.
The call handler is kindly and polite with the exact type of soothing authority that I think I need to hear. She first asks if I’m all right and it’s only at that when I hear the crack in my own voice as I assure her – waveringly – that I am.
She asks if there’s anything missing and there’s a strange moment in which I wonder why it never occurred to me that something might be. I fumble my words embarrassingly and look across to the living room. The television is on the cherry-wood unit, where it always is. I apologise to the handler for taking my time and check the drawers underneath the television. The laptop and iPad are both there, where Dan or I left them. Not that any of it is particularly valuable to a burglar, but the mixer, coffee machine and microwave are all present and correct in the kitchen. A silly thought flutters across my mind of a thief trying to sell a food mixer on the streets of North Melbury to fund some sort of drug habit. It’s ridiculous and I’m not sure where the idea came from but I have to suppress the smile when I tell the handler that everything seems to be where it was.
She is reassuring and gives me a crime reference number, saying that I can pass it on to my insurance company.
‘Is that it?’ I ask. ‘Isn’t somebody coming out?’
‘I’m afraid there are no free officers,’ the voice replies. She sounds genuinely apologetic.
‘Don’t you normally send someone out to check for DNA, or fingerprints, or something…?’
I wonder if I’ve seen too many TV cop shows but it doesn’t seem like too much to ask for.
‘No one is available until morning, I’m afraid.’
She goes on to say that I should take photographs of everything – but that’s it. Nobody is coming to look for clues. I could kick off and bang on about paying taxes and the like, but there’s no fight in me. There would be no point anyway – this woman is only doing her job. She can’t decide how many officers are available at any given time. This is the age in which we live: cuts, austerity, not enough ambulances and breakins for which the best a victim can hope for is a reference number to give to the insurance company. I wonder if it would have been different if I said things were missing. Bit late now.
I say goodbye and tread carefully around the glass, checking the back door to find that it’s unlocked. The spare key is still in the kitchen drawer with the rest of our junk and I can’t believe anyone would be capable of stretching through the glass to reach the drawer and key. It’s near – but it’s not that near.
Except that the door is unlocked. Did either Dan, Olivia or myself leave it like that? We do pop in and out to put things in the bin, so it’s possible. Unlikely, but possible.
I move around the house, checking drawers and cupboards. My most expensive jewellery – which isn’t worth much – is still at the back of the bottom drawer in the bedroom. Not that I’m a cliché, or anything. I poke my head around Olivia’s door, taking in the bomb site and figuring it’d probably look a bit cleaner if someone had broken in. At least the intruder would have picked out anything valuable, meaning some degree of sorting would have happened. As it is, her floor is littered with clothes, shoes, cables and who knows what else. I don’t dwell.
Downstairs and the keepsakes with no particular value are fine. There is the official photograph from the day Dan and I were married pinned to the wall; with plenty more pictures of Olivia growing up. I take a moment to brush dust from the frames, remembering the happy times on beach holidays. She’s there with her father, each licking an ice cream; then in another photo with me riding the donkeys at Blackpool. She’s on the London Eye, pointing at Parliament, riding a canal boat somewhere I can’t remember – and so on. Each photo has her a little older than the last until everything stops in her mid-teens.
I check the drawer that contains our birth certificates, passports and the like – but they’re all present, too. The more I look, the less I see. What would be the point in breaking in to steal nothing? And if nothing has been taken, then why break the window? There’s no easy way into our back garden, except for climbing a fence and dropping down. Someone would surely be more likely to break in through the garage?
The last place I check properly is the drawer near the back door. There are small shards of glass on the floor and I wince at the crunch under my feet as I try – and fail – to manoeuvre around the remnants of the windowpane.
As well as the back-door key, the drawer is full of the same junk I looked at earlier. Other random keys, receipts, coupons, lottery tickets. The stuff neither Dan or I can be bothered to throw out. I empty it all onto the kitchen counter for the second time that day and notice that the emergency money has gone. There’s normally two twenties and a ten-pound note and I’m certain it was there a few hours ago. It could be Olivia who took it, of course – except that she never has in the past. She’s many things but I don’t think a thief is one of them.
I pick through all the scraps of paper, piling and replacing them in the drawer until I’m certain the money has gone. Is this what the breakin was about? Fifty quid? It’s not much compared to the expensive electrical items that have been left – and it’s a lot of effort. That said, I don’t know much about drugs. I’ve read that most crime is drug-related in one way or another, so perhaps two twenty-pound notes and a ten will go a long way for someone.
Either way, it’s very disciplined of the thief to only take that.
Despite that, something doesn’t feel right. How would someone know to come to this drawer specifically? Or was it simply chance?
It’s only as I’m replacing everything in the drawer that I find myself staring at the single object I know for a fact wasn’t there this morning. It was the reason I emptied everything in the first place. I couldn’t find it then – but here it is now, my work pass, sitting among the rest of the junk, exactly where it wasn’t a few hours ago.
Chapter Ten
Dan gets in from the gym and heads straight to the fridge. His top has a V of sweat from his neck to his belly button and there’s still a sheen across his forehead. It’s only when he turns around, protein shaker bottle in hand, that he notices the wooden board across the pane of glass.
‘What happened?’ he asks.
I’m on the other side of the room, sitting on the sofa, half-watching TV but really refreshing the news sites. There have been no hit-and-run reports but also no updates on Tom Leonard. The hotel worker is still missing.
I also had a good nosey at Natasha’s Instagram feed. She went to a local pub after work, where she had some sort of salad. It was both #yummy and #scrummy apparently.
‘I’m not sure,’ I reply. ‘We might have had a break-in.’