Waiting for Wednesday

the door open.’
    ‘Was the door usually
double-locked?’ said Karlsson.
    ‘Not when they were at home,’
said Yvette. ‘According to the husband.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Also according to the husband, when
he’d calmed down and looked around, a set of silver cutlery had been stolen from a
drawer in the kitchen dresser. Also a Georgian silver teapot that was on a shelf in the
dresser. Plus the money from her wallet, of course.’
    ‘Anything else taken?’
    ‘Not that we know of,’ said
Yvette. ‘She had jewellery upstairs, but it wasn’t touched.’
    ‘And –’ Riley began, then
stopped.
    ‘What?’ said Karlsson.
    ‘Nothing.’
    Karlsson forced himself to adopt a gentler
tone. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘If you’ve got an idea, just say it. I
want to hear everything.’
    ‘I was going to say that when I saw
the body, she had nice earrings on and a necklace.’
    ‘That’s right,’ said
Karlsson. ‘Good.’ He looked back at Yvette. ‘So? What are we
thinking?’
    ‘I’m not saying you
shouldn’t talk to the husband,’ said Yvette, ‘but the state of the
scene seems consistent with a burglary that was interrupted. The burglar goes to the
kitchen, takes the silver. Then he encounters Mrs Lennox in the living room.
There’s a scuffle. She receives a fatal blow. He flees in panic.’
    ‘Or,’ said Karlsson,
‘someone who knows Mrs Lennox kills her and stages the burglary.’
    ‘That’s possible,’ said
Yvette, woodenly.
    ‘But not very likely. You’re
right. So there we are: an apparent burglary, a dead woman, no witnesses, no
fingerprints as yet, no forensics.’
    ‘What about your old detective?’
said Munster.
    ‘I think we need him,’ said
Karlsson.
    Standing on the pavement outside the
Lennoxes’ house, Harry Curzon looked like a golfer who’d taken a wrong
turning. He was dressed in a red windcheater over a checked sweater, light grey chinos
and brown suede shoes. He was overweight and wore thick, heavy-framed spectacles.
    ‘So, how’s retirement?’
said Karlsson.
    ‘I don’t know what kept
me,’ said Curzon. ‘How far away are you? Seven, eight years?’
    ‘A bit more than that.’
    ‘You need to see the writing on the
wall. It’s all productivity and pen-pushing now. Look at me. Fifty-six years old
and a full pension. When you called me I was heading up to the Lee River for a
day’s fishing.’
    ‘Sounds good.’
    ‘It is good. So, before I head off and
you go back to your office, what can I do for you?’
    ‘There’s been a murder,’
said Karlsson. ‘But there’s also been a burglary. You worked
here.’
    ‘Eighteen years,’ said
Curzon.
    ‘I thought you could give me some
advice.’
    As Karlsson showed Curzon around the house,
the older man talked and talked and talked. Karlsson wondered whether he was really
enjoying his days of fishing and golf as much as he’d said he was.
    ‘It’s gone out of
fashion,’ said Curzon.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Burglary.’
    ‘Back in the seventies it was TV sets
and cameras and watches and clocks. In the eighties in was video players and stereos,
and in the nineties it was DVD players and computers. It took them a few years but then
the burglars suddenly woke up. A DVD player costs about the same as a DVD, and people
are walking around in the streets with a phone and an iPod and probably a laptop
that’s worth more than anything they’ve got at home. What’s the point
of breaking in and getting a couple of extra years inside when you can mug them in the
street and get something you can sell?’
    ‘What indeed?’ said
Karlsson.
    ‘Try going to a dodgy second-hand
dealer and offering them a DVD player and they’ll laugh in your face. Gardenequipment, though, that’s saleable. There’s always a
market for a hedge-trimmer.’
    ‘Not really relevant in this
case,’ said Karlsson. ‘So, you don’t think this was a
burglary?’
    ‘Looks like a burglary to me,’
said Curzon.
    ‘But couldn’t it have been
staged?’
    ‘You could say that about anything.
But if you were doing that, I reckon you’d break a window at the back.
You’re less likely to be spotted by a nosy neighbour. And you’d take some
stuff from the room where the body was.’
    ‘That’s basically what
we’ve been thinking,’ said Karlsson. ‘So we’re looking for a
burglar and you know about burglars.’
    Curzon grimaced. ‘I’ll give you
some names. But these burglaries are mainly about drugs, and the junkies come and go.
It’s not like