Scene of Crime by Jill McGown

mother figure.”
    “How long have you known her?”
    “They moved in when they got married,” said Mrs. Jones. “Seven years ago, now. They’re a nice couple, really.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Well,” she said. “You know. They were. But she made his life a bit difficult—she knew she did. They almost split up at one point, but they got over that. She would come and see me when she needed to get something off her chest.”
    “Yes,” said Mr. Jones. “Like I say, they argued all the time, and then they’d make up. So that’s what I thought they were doing.”
    “But I didn’t think that was very likely,” said Mrs. Jones. “There was the breaking glass and that boy running away and everything. And even if they were doing what he thought they were doing, they could still have been broken into, I said. So eventually he phoned you.”
    “Were you at home earlier in the evening, Mrs. Jones?”
    “Yes.”
    “You didn’t notice anything today about teatime, didyou? We’ve been told that kids were making a bit of a nuisance of themselves.”
    She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’ve seen gangs of boys from the London Road estate here quite often, though. They’re a bit rowdy, and they can make a bit of a mess, but they don’t really do any harm.”
    “They’re probably the ones doing the break-ins,” said Mr. Jones. “Don’t do any harm, my foot.”
    “Would you mind letting me see the view from the back bedroom?” asked Tom, getting up.
    After a show of reluctance, Mr. Jones agreed that he didn’t mind enough actually to prohibit it. Upstairs, Tom looked out of the window, getting the lay of the land. A six-foot-high wall ran along the rear of the properties on this side of the road, punctuated along its length by wooden gates to the driveways leading to the double garages. The high hedge between the Jones’ garden and that of the Bignalls would have meant that Mr. Jones had no view of the Bignalls’ garden, or of the French windows, until he came up to this vantage point. A low wall separated the Bignalls’ garden from their neighbor’s on the other side. Bricks were piled up neatly beside it; one pile, however, lay scattered on the ground, about halfway down. The intruder could have knocked them over in his haste to leave.
    Tom could see reasonably well because now the lights at the rear were on, but that had obviously not been the case when Mr. Jones looked out of this window earlier. The back road itself was a short, unlit service road, and behind that lay a small wood, so no light was to be had there. He would have been able to see someone running through Watson’s gate two gardens away, but it washard to see how he had seen anything more definite than that on this rainy, starless, moonless night.
    “It’s very dark,” he said. “How could you be sure the boy you saw running away was black?”
    “Watson’s got one of these high-power security lights,” he said. “Goes on as soon as there’s any movement, floods the place with light. I could see that boy as clearly as if it was daylight.”
    “Can you describe him?”
    “He was black. I told you.”
    “Yes,” said Tom, his patience once again severely tested. “Anything else? What he was wearing, perhaps? Did he have short hair, or dreadlocks, or what? Was he fat, thin, tall, short … how old would you say he was?”
    “He was black,” repeated Mr. Jones, with a shrug.
    “Mr. Jones, can’t you just tell me a bit more than that?”
    Mr. Jones sighed again. “Definitely young, smallish—maybe a child, maybe a teenager. Wearing the sort of thing they wear.”
    The sort of thing who wore? Black people? Teenagers? Burglars, maybe. The newspaper cartoon image of a burglar complete with mask and striped jersey and his bag of stolen goods over his shoulder came into Tom’s mind. He frowned as he realized something.
    “You saw this boy immediately after hearing the window break?”
    “Yes.”
    Tom didn’t