I am on the taxi rank, but somehow I feel absolutely exhausted.
I feel bruised and tired, as if I have been fighting criminals, not merely legging after them in itchy underwear and oversized flip flops.
Obviously I was wearing clothes as well. Just making that clear before anybody’s imagination gets the better of them.
The following is a long yarn about fighting crime and solving mysteries, like an elderly Famous Five. I have skipped out the dull bits, like a very great deal of cleaning the camper van, and also dealing with the colossal mountain of stinking washing that has come out of it, being all of the quilts and towels and cushions and blankets. So far I have done six loads, and I am not even halfway through. You do not need to hear about that. Too much scrubbing and swearing is dull.
I decided today that we would pursue Mark’s missing clothes ourselves.
It is not exactly that I have got no confidence in our overstretched Boys In Blue. They are made up of enthusiastic, determined individuals who believe wholeheartedly in the rule of law and who would wear their underpants outside their trousers if uniform regulation permitted it.
The problem is that there are not anywhere near enough of them.
Last night’s captured rascal had told me that it was his friend who had taken Mark’s clothes and been wearing them. He thought, in a rather splendid pot-and-kettle conversation, that his friend was a bit unbalanced.
He had added that his friend was not really homeless. His friend lived with his mother and his grandparents in a mansion on a very upmarket road in the village, but occasionally got chucked out due to drug related tiresomeness. His grandparents, he added, were wealthy, and had once had a restaurant in Bowness.
I pondered this.
After work, instead of taking the dogs on their usual jaunt around the Library Gardens we went for a stroll along the upmarket road in question.
Despite it being half past four in the morning, in one house all of the lights were on.
In one of the windows a young man was busily going through the pockets of a coat.
Obviously we did not bang on the door and demand the return of our property. We did not know that it was the right house, and there are all sorts of reasons why somebody might quite innocently be up and sifting through the pockets of stolen coats in the middle of the night.
We stared, and he saw us in the street lights and panicked. He went rushing around the house and watching us and let his dog out into the garden to bark at us.
Our dogs barked back, enthusiastically.
He must have called the police because within a few minutes a police van came screeching down the road.
We explained that we were walking our dogs and must have scared somebody.
To our surprise the police did not ask why we were walking our dogs down an expensive cul-de-sac some distance from our house at half past four in the morning. They nodded wearily and let us buzz off.
When we got back I thought hard about everything that the man had told me and did some online investigation.
After about half an hour I had found the name of the man in question and the house where he lived, which, unsurprisingly, was the house we had just been looking at.
I had a shower and a think, and at a quarter past six in the morning I rang them up.
I spoke to his mother, who was depressingly unsurprised to be dragged out of bed to hear about her son’s misdemeanours before it was even daylight.
She promised me that she would find out, and then hung up, because the son, who must have buzzed off after we had seen him, was bashing on the doors demanding to be let back in.
By eight o’ clock she was on our doorstep with a bag of Mark’s clothes.
There were jumpers, and a flat cap, and our Barbour jackets, and the bag that the tweed jacket had been in, but no tweed jackets, and no dressing gown.
She did not know what he had done with them.
We thought that he must have taken them somewhere in between us seeing him, and her finding the rest.
We fell asleep.
When we got up we followed the little cycle paths and hidden footpaths between the camper van and their house and hunted for hidden things. Then we knocked on their door to return a couple of their things that we had found in the van.
We talked to the boy’s mother for ages.
You will not be astonished to learn that he has got mental health issues, and that she was at the end of her tether with him. He was not really a boy, he was in his twenties and big, and in a state of anxious depression.
She promised that she would look for Mark’s jackets.
When we got home I rang the police, and a police answering person told me that she did not care what we had found out because Cumbria Police were busy with more important things.
She really said that. She said that on the scale of important police matters our stolen clothes did not rank very highly so would we please buzz off.
I was surprised to hear that Cumbria is a hotbed of serious crime. We encouraged Lucy to go elsewhere because we had thought that Cumbria would be a very dull place to be chasing criminals.
I said, snootily, that I was fully aware of the issues facing the police because of having a daughter who was a police officer, and that I wanted our stuff back.
I was pleased to have an opportunity to drop that in, how satisfying.
In the end she promised that she would ask the investigating officer to give me a ring when his shift started.
He did.
He was jolly helpful.
In the end he went around to the young man’s house. The young man was not there, but he spoke to his mother.
He told her that he would be back tomorrow night at six. He said that the young man had jolly well better be there, with all of our stuff, or Serious Charges would follow.
He said that if we got all of our stuff back then he would not lock the young man up, but if he didn’t…
I think we have got a jolly good chance of getting it all back. I think that the young man has taken it round to somebody else’s house, and hidden it there.
We have got our fingers crossed.
Just so you know, we are not cross with him. Clearly he is quite unbalanced.
We have been wondering about it all. He has got a little dog, and the other chap said that he had taken it in the van with him.
Do you remember a time a few weeks ago when the police called me out to the van because of a mysterious dog barking inside it?
We think that perhaps he has been creeping into the camper van and sitting there, quietly, for weeks. We have never noticed anything that has moved, or smelled cigarettes, or thought anything might have disappeared, but once Mark found a door unlocked that he thought he had locked.
The window locks are forty years old and not difficult to force, the catches are not terribly efficient. He could have been in and we might not have known.
We think perhaps things started to go wrong when the second chap joined him. That is when the mess started, the dreadful spoiling of things, the living there together instead of just one man hiding there, silently and alone, in the dark.
We think that is terribly sad.
