Morning all. Happy Tuesday. The coffee is brewing and it is time to start the morning prompt. Set your timers for fifteen minutes if you are joining in. Lets wake up the brains.
I kind of like the idea of someone going in knowing it is a set up.
Wednesday, June 11th: It was crumpled.
It was crumples. He picked it up and smoothed it out, his hands working while he surveyed the scene. It was a mess. Clearly an argument had gone on, a violent one. ‘Or had it?’
He took in the details. Files opened and their contents thrown across the room like fallen leaves. Drawers hanging open. From where he stood he could see that even though papers and files had been removed, some were pulled upwards, their tags several inches above the rest of the others still in the drawer. It practically invited him to read the labels, see what someone was looking for.
He shifted his attention from the papers and files to the furniture. The room looked, upon first glance like someone stormed in knocked things over and then went in search of the files. His eyes could follow the path of destruction from the hall to the home office. There was more as the destruction continued into the living room and out of the back door.
Yet it was off, just slightly. If someone came in the front and went out the back then the destruction would start with the paper following. The pages would be on top of the fallen furniture. Jim could see that it wasn’t. Furniture was placed on top of the fallen pages. Whoever completed the destruction did so after the pages were scattered.
‘And only cheap stuff is broken.’ There were a few broken glass panes and small ornaments, but the expensive stuff was neatly laid down. Antique furniture, even where it landed on its corners, was not dinged, but carefully set against the floor. A vase he knew from his art history days had to be worth more than his car was not only on the floor but shifted out of the traffic path and braced to stay there by a folder. If the stand it was on had toppled as it seemed, the vase would have smashed to pieces and been located at least a foot to the left.
Instead of seeming like a violent damage inducing theft everything about this place seemed staged. He glanced at the priceless paintings on the walls. All original pieces. Whoever did the damage consented to shift one of them slightly askew but didn’t touch the rest. There was no real damage.
‘And there are those files standing up so prettily.’
He knew he was meant to go over and look at them. So see what the thieves really came for. He didn’t really need to walk over. He suspected that they were part of the Gregson files. The court ordered them turned over. The deadline for them to make their court debut was looming. He knew when he walked over they would be empty and that one the papers were gathered from the floor and looked through, those were the pages that would be missing.
He looked away, heard the voices from the other room. His sergeant’s calm and steady rumble as he took the housekeeper through the events. The slightly panicked voice of the housekeeper. It was at least two octaves higher than usual and tense as a wire. Her son played baseball with his nephew and they met on many occasions.
Ten til Midnight 