No matter how confident you may be, no matter how strong your personality, nothing can quite prepare you for seeing your own house burgled. The sight of your possessions strewn about and your property ransacked is bad enough, but then to realise that a perfect stranger has had unlimited access to personal and private items and that some of the stolen property is virtually irreplaceable, is just the icing on the cake! I fully understand that a crime such as this cannot, quite rightly, rank very highly in these days of murder and rape, but nevertheless, I can tell you from personal experience, it can be very traumatising. My story, however, is not all gloom and despondency. Our burglary gave my wife and I a chance to indulge in one of our greatest fantasies.
Sally and I had just returned from a night out with a group of friends. We had attended the opening of a local art gallery and had gone on to a club afterwards. The taxi dropped us off outside our home on the outskirts of the city, and I fiddled (rather drunkenly, I'm afraid) with my keys in the front door. In my semi-intoxicated state, I could almost sense something was amiss even before we got inside. As I flicked on the light switch in the lounge, the hackles on the back of my neck stood up. I heard Sally give a little scream as we both surveyed the state of the room. Chairs and tables had been knocked over, paintings were missing from the wall. All our cupboards had been emptied with the contents scattered over the floor.
"What the fu-" I managed to gasp out. "What happened?"
"Oh, Gerry," sobbed Sally. "We've been burgled!"
All of a sudden a sort of survival instinct took over in my mind. I had to make sure that there was nobody still left in the house.
"Stay here!" I shouted, as I began to race through the ground floor of the house.
I tore from room to room like a lunatic. It suddenly dawned on me that if there was someone still here, I was completely unprotected. I grabbed the first heavy object that came to hand; an old brass candlestick, and feeling a little braver with the comforting metal in my hand, quickly searched the rest of the house.
"Well, whoever was here has gone now." I said as I returned to the lounge a little out of breath.
Sally was still standing in her cocktail dress in the same position that I had left her a few minutes ago. She looked blank and was just staring into space.
"The rest of the house has been turned upside down too." I said. "Better call the police."
"Sally?...Sally, wake up honey!"
My wife suddenly snapped out of her reverie. "Y..Yes...the police.....I'll call them now."
Twenty minutes later, Sally seemed fully recovered and we were both giving statements to a pair of detectives sitting in our lounge. Det. Paul Davis and Det. Julie Rand seemed young but fully in control, it was obvious that this was an everyday occurrence for them. They took our details in a professional and caring way and seemed to work extremely well together. "I'm afraid that this is not the first break-in of this kind in the neighbourhood," said Paul, as he sat opposite my wife. "We are currently investigating several similar crimes in the area. Do you have a list yet? An idea of what has been taken?"
"Not yet," I replied. "It'll take me a good half hour to come up with that information."
"Okay," Said the detective. "Maybe in a moment you could start on the list while we take your wife's statement."
At that moment Sally, who was sitting on the sofa next to the female detective Julie, crossed her legs. She was still wearing the cocktail dress that she had worn earlier, and as her long legs moved, the split in the side of the satin material opened to reveal a large proportion of her leg and upper thigh. She could obviously feel the cool air on her stocking covered leg, and, apologising, pulled the dress back into position. Both Paul and Julie smiled, and I was certain that Julie moved just a little closer towards my wife, almost touching her on the sofa. For a few more minutes, both detectives asked Sally more questions, priming her for her statement. I was sitting in a chair just off to the right, and was fascinated to see that Paul could hardly keep his eyes off my wife's legs. Sally seemed to be enjoying the attention as well, because she kept crossing and uncrossing those long, sexy legs, adjusting her dress with a giggle every time it fell open.