Rhinoceros 5
The dark clouds beyond the grimy window seemed to have seeped into the flat. Alan Scope was sat where he always sat, facing the doorway to the hall, the chaos of his frantic search around him. His mind had lost the capacity to prioritise, pinpoint, consider or act. It merely roved over the events of the last few days in an unending cycle of fatalism. Such was the density of this miasma of thought that he physically jumped from his chair when the front door delivered a loud rap.
The same two police officers who had visited him at the hospital stood indifferently in the stairwell. As they came in they gazed around the flat in some wonder.
“You’ve kept it as you found it then,” the crumpled one noted, surveying the mess.
“What?” Alan seemed to be permanently on the back foot these days.
“Christ, he made a right mess of the place. Little shit. We’ll catch him in the end. There’s been a spate of them round here.”
“He was quite big really.”
“Who?”
“The burglar.”
“I see he took your TV too.”
“No, I – “
The policewoman stepped in with a hint of exasperation. “It’s just a post crime visit. Check you’ve got a suitable lock on your door, see if you’ve remembered anything else. Any signs of post trauma stress?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Sometimes the signs appear much later. There’s no point keeping the flat like this. We can’t gather any more clues. Have you discovered anything missing?”
“No, nothing.” Alan looked purposefully out of the window.
“If you tidy all this up you might realise what you have missing.”
“I guess.”
The crumpled policeman stood in the centre of the sitting room with his hands on his hips. The accoutrements of his profession were collected about his jacket in a variety of packages. He looked like an accidental suicide bomber. “Your security’s dodgy, that’s what it is. Even that replacement lock on the door is rubbish. I don’t want to put the willies up you but you’re a sitting duck in this place. Have you looked into cameras?”
Alan was thrown by this reference to his missing item. “What? In what way?”
“They’re getting cheaper all the time. We can advise you on a good set-up. Very discrete, too. You can have them implanted.”
“Good god, where?” Alan panicked.
“In your door, probably. Insurance companies love them, though you have to put a big sign up warning burglars.” Alan breathed a sigh of relief.
“I’ll think about it. Do you advise certain companies?”
“Dunno. We can recommend some products. Why?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
The policewoman took over, perhaps realising the futility of the visit. “You’ve already got our card,” she said, looking despairingly around the flat. “Do a proper check of contents, perhaps retrace your footsteps at a similar time to the event. It might trigger something. We’d better be off.”
“Does that actually work?” Alan asked.
“What?”
“Going back over events, physically?”
“No idea. It’s just one of the things we’re supposed to say.”
“So there’s no research?”
“We’re coppers, Mr Scope, not scientists.”
And with a small fluttering of scattered papers and swirl of dust they were gone, and Alan slumped back into the armchair and resumed his unfocused vigil on the doorway and the gathering night.
***
There’s no doubting that Alan was apprehensive about going back to school. It showed in his erratic driving on the way to Greenlands, and in the fact that he’d forgotten his fob, keys, and mobile phone – a supreme act of forgetfulness even for Alan – and the unusual sight, noted by a number of colleagues, of Mr. Scope sat quietly in his car in the car park staring morosely at the security fence.
Actually, he was merely summoning up the blandest set of replies he could muster for the inevitable questions from colleagues. He felt that if he rehearsed his lines he would be less likely to place his foot in his mouth, or say something plain weird – which apparently he was prone to do. On his face was the hint of a wry smile, which would have allayed the fears of the assembled staff at the breakfast bar window if they could have seen more clearly into his misted car.
Eventually he emerged from his theatrical cocoon and got someone to let him into the building.
In the staff room there was a significant furore of fussing and offers of support. “Should be shot,“ announced Mick, briefly diverting his attention from the back of The Sun. “Did you get a look at him?” several asked, possibly hoping to match the description to members of their form groups. “Get a camera on your front door: I know someone who’s selling one,” was one entrepreneurial suggestion. Alan replied carefully and non-commitally, and after a few more questions, hints and tips, and soundbites on the state of the nation, the staff saw the futility of their gestures, like waves crashing on granite, and they embarked on a conversation amongst themselves , leaving Alan to his thoughts.
“This is what gets me,” Mick addressed the gathering at one point. The staff were in various stages of preparing for the day. “The police know who the suspects are. They only need to come here to ask us. In fact they could round up half this school and solve the crime wave in the North of Sheffield.” Mick was loud, red-faced, with smoothed down gelled hair, and squeezed into the same sweatshirt every day – either that or he never removed it. But he was harmless, as Alan discovered when he had been forced on occasions to contradict some of his less inclusive work habits. “It was only yesterday,” he continued, “that Jak in my form was telling us that he’d sold three iPods to the Mitchelsons last week. And he had got them from two lads who were doing the train station at rush hour. It doesn’t take Sherlock to work it all out.”
“It’s not that easy, Mick.” Mary suggested. She had a carrier bag full of ASDAN folders and wore baggy clothes that accentuated, rather than hid, her rippling belly and low, volumous breasts. With her wiry, unkempt hair, plain, lined features and missing tooth, she really did not care a jot. Alan sort of admired her for this. “First they need hard evidence; second, the stuff is stolen and passed on before you can say J R.”
“They’d only need to watch the Mitchelsons for twenty four hours. Hardly rocket science,” announced Mick from behind The Sun.
Francine, the permanently stressed, undervalued, harried French teacher, muttered, “At least I know where to get an iPod now.”
“Trouble is,” said Mary, “it’s probably Alan’s you’ll end up with.”
Alan accepted all this without proffering much by way of reply or explanation. His swirling undercurrents of thought and counterthought had crystallised into a luminescent piece of wreckage, on which was written: Ryon.
