Skin and Other Stories

The weekend was pleasant and uneventful, and on Sunday evening Robert and Betty Sandy drove home again, arriving at the house in Acacia Road at about seven p.m. Robert took the two small suitcases from the car and they walked up the path together. He unlocked the front door and held it open for his wife.

'I'll make some scrambled eggs,' she said, 'and crispy bacon. Would you like a drink first, darling?'

'Why not?' he said.

He closed the door and was about to carry the suitcases upstairs when he heard a piercing scream from the sitting-room 'Oh no!' she was crying. 'No! No! No!'

Robert dropped the suitcase and rushed in after her. She was standing there pressing her hands to her cheeks and already tears were streaming down her face.

The scene in the sitting-room was one of utter desolation. The curtains were drawn and they seemed to be the only things that remained intact in the room. Everything else had been smashed to smithereens. All Robert Sandy's precious little objects from the coffee-table had been picked up and flung against the walls and were lying in tiny pieces on the carpet. A glass cabinet had been tipped over. A chest-of-drawers had had its four drawers pulled out and the contents, photograph albums, games of Scrabble and Monopoly and a chessboard and chessmen and many other family things had been flung across the room. Every single book had been pulled out of the big floor-to-ceiling bookshelves against the far wall and piles of them were now lying open and mutilated all over the place. The glass on each of the four watercolours had been smashed and the oil painting of their three children painted when they were young had had its canvas slashed many times with a knife. The armchairs and the sofa had also been slashed so that the stuffing was bulging out. Virtually everything in the room except the curtains and the carpet had been destroyed.

'Oh, Robert,' she said, collapsing into his arms, 'I don't think I can stand this.'

He didn't say anything. He felt physically sick.

'Stay here,' he said. 'I'm going to look upstairs.' He ran out and took the stairs two at a time and went first to their bedroom. It was the same in there. The drawers had been pulled out and the shirts and blouses and underclothes were now scattered everywhere. The bedclothes had been stripped from the double-bed and even the mattress had been tipped off the bed and slashed many times with a knife. The cupboards were open and every dress and suit and every pair of trousers and every jacket and every skirt had been ripped from its hanger. He didn't look in the other bedrooms. He ran downstairs and put an arm around his wife's shoulders and together they picked their way through the debris of the sitting-room towards the kitchen. There they stopped.

The mess in the kitchen was indescribable. Almost every single container of any sort in the entire room had been emptied on to the floor and then smashed to pieces. The place was a wasteland of broken jars and bottles and food of every kind. All Betty's home-made jams and pickles and bottled fruits had been swept from the long shelf and lay shattered on the ground. The same had happened to the stuff in the store-cupboard, the mayonnaise, the ketchup, the vinegar, the olive oil, the vegetable oil and all the rest. There were two other long shelves on the far wall and on these had stood about twenty lovely large glass jars with big ground-glass stoppers in which were kept rice and flour and brown sugar and bran and oatmeal and all sorts of other things. Every jar now lay on the floor in many pieces, with the contents spewed around. The refrigerator door was open and the things that had been inside, the leftover foods, the milk, the eggs, the butter, the yoghurt, the tomatoes, the lettuce, all of them had been pulled out and splashed on to the pretty tiled kitchen floor. The inner drawers of the fridge had been thrown into the mass of slush and trampled on. The plastic ice-trays had been yanked out and each had been literally broken in two and thrown aside. Even the plastic-coated shelves had been ripped out of the fridge and bent double and thrown down with the rest. All the bottles of drink, the whisky, gin, vodka, sherry, vermouth, as well as half a dozen cans of beer, were standing on th

e table, empty. The bottles of drink and the beer cans seemed to be the only things in the entire house that had not been smashed. Practically the whole floor lay under a thick layer of mush and goo. It was as if a gang of mad children had been told to see how much mess they could make and had succeeded brilliantly.

Robert and Betty Sandy stood on the edge of it all, speechless with horror. At last Robert said, 'I imagine our lovely diamond is somewhere underneath all that.'

'I don't give a damn about our diamond,' Betty said. 'I'd like to kill the people who did this.'

'So would I,' Robert said. 'I've got to call the police.' He went back into the sitting-room and picked up the telephone. By some miracle it still worked.

The first squad car arrived in a few minutes. It was followed over the next half-hour by a Police Inspector, a couple of plain-clothes men, a fingerprint expert and a photographer.

The Inspector had a black moustache and a short muscular body. 'These are not professional thieves,' he told Robert Sandy after he had taken a look round. 'They weren't even amateur thieves. They were simply hooligans off the street. Riff-raff. Yobbos. Probably three of them. People like this scout around looking for an empty house and when they find it they break in and the first thing they do is to hunt out the booze. Did you have much alcohol on the premises?'

'The usual stuff,' Robert said. 'Whisky, gin, vodka, sherry and a few cans of beer.'

'They'll have drunk the lot,' the Inspector said. 'Lads like these have only two things in mind, drink and destruction. They collect all the booze on to a table and sit down and drink themselves raving mad. Then they go on the rampage.'

'You mean they didn't come in here to steal?' Robert asked.

'I doubt they've stolen anything at all,' the Inspector said. 'If they'd been thieves they would at least have taken your TV set. Instead, they smashed it up.'

'But why do they do this?'

'You'd better ask their parents,' the Inspector said. 'They're rubbish, that's all they are, just rubbish. People aren't brought up right any more these days.'

Then Robert told the Inspector about the diamond. He gave him all the details from the beginning to end because he realized that from the police point of view it was likely to be the most important part of the whole business.

'Half a million quid!' cried the Inspector. 'Jesus Christ!'

'Probably double that,' Robert said.

'Then that's the first thing we look for,' the Inspector said.

'I personally do not propose to go down on my hands and knees grubbing around in that pile of slush,' Robert said. 'I don't feel like it at this moment.'

'Leave it to us,' the Inspector said. 'We'll find it. That was a clever place to hide it.'

'My wife thought of it. But tell me, Inspector, if by some remote chance they had found it ...'

'Impossible,' the Inspector said. 'How could they?'