Read Online Come Clean (1989) by Bill James - Free Book Online Page A

doing a bit of updating, and a modern lightweight ply door and nonsense
lock had replaced the solid timber and iron bolt which must originally have been in place here. Harpur applied some concentrated leaning, repeatedly ramming his weight against the lock. Soon, he
heard the fragile wood of the frame rip and he gently pushed the door wide.
    He felt much better now. For him, it had always been one of the brightest pleasures in police work to enter someone’s property on the quiet and look at gear and possessions, trying to sort
out a story from them. It fiercely excited Harpur to break down privacy, gave him a sense of intimacy with the target, and occasionally a sense of power over him, sometimes even her. A long time
ago he used to consider the pleasure that came from these invasions as like the thinking of cannibals: they wanted to absorb the strengths and virtues of the people they ate, and he wanted to take
over for a while the personalities of the suspects who lived in these entered places, so he could know them thoroughly. That was rubbish, really – just a high-flown, fanciful excuse for
poking his police nose into someone else’s property, often illicitly. A similar sort of eyewash had surfaced recently in a Sidney Lumet film on television,
The Anderson Tapes
, where
Sean Connery, as a big-time burglar, compared the joys of opening a safe with those in seducing a woman. These were evasions, sloppy efforts to romanticize or intellectualize what you would do,
anyway. And what Harpur meant to do, and continue doing, was to pick thoroughly, secretly and skilfully through a possible villain’s private things, hunting a revelation, spinning his
drum.
    There had been little pleasure just now in the garden, encircled by muck and debris, badgered by train noise. No matter how close to a property, outside was no fun: more laughs on a rubbish tip.
But actually to penetrate a house, to break through a portal and get within somebody else’s four walls and rooms, reading signs, imagining the life lived there – that thrilled him. At
these times he knew he had picked the right job. He loved the finds, the intrusiveness, the risk. If he had not been a cop, he might, indeed, have fancied burglary, like Connery’s Duke
Anderson; same techniques, same addictive tension. Or maybe psychoanalysis was another possibility, a game where you broke into people’s minds not their homes, and shattered cherished, undue
privacy that way.
    He put on no lights yet but could see more clearly now that he had been right and the kitchen was a wreck. As well as the utensils and smashed crockery, a lot of loose tea, cornflakes and the
contents of a cutlery drawer littered the floor. The sink was full of broken crockery, too, as if the cupboard above it had been simply cleared with a few sweeps of the hand. Another cupboard had
obviously been sharply tilted forward for a moment so that everything in it fell out and lay on the tiles; an old pair of scales, baking tins, earthenware casserole dishes and jars. It was probably
crazy to try to read the message of this shambles but he still felt it looked more like a search than simple vandalism. No aerosol trog-speak defaced the walls, and he could not smell or see urine,
or worse. He thought these cupboards had been cleared not just for the sake of destruction but to reveal what might have been hidden in them behind the routine items. The tea had been tipped out of
a tin in case it covered something, and the cereal box emptied for the same reason.
    He went along the little corridor to the living room. This, too, had been thoroughly knocked about, or so he thought at first. Then he suddenly realized that, in fact, the damage was confined
almost exactly to about one half of the room, the half nearer him. The far side seemed to have escaped. Had the searcher suddenly despaired of finding whatever it was? Or had he been
interrupted?
    The furniture was all cheap and modern and must have