It took a couple of hours before my parents realised they’d been burgled. We’d been at my niece’s fourth birthday party in a local church hall, an afternoon orgy of caterpillar cake and balloons, though it had been touch and go for a while whether the party would go ahead. The church people had called my brother-in-law the week before to cancel, because: “The Queen is dead?” He’d heard, actually. They agreed eventually to consult with the elders and finally rung back to say the party could happen, but only if all the children were sure to remain respectfully quiet throughout. “No problem!” everybody lied.
I’ve always been typically eye-rolling about those dystopian doorbell cameras. Quite aside from the way they seem to be Pied Pipering home-owners into a suburban surveillance state and the fact that they’re creating a world where we are all adjusting to lives lived under a camera’s gaze, all of the time, and sharing the data with the police and Amazon (a software engineer for whom wrote to management explaining their Ring doorbells were “simply not compatible with a free society”), the ring itself – three atonal dongs – is offensive in the extreme. A kid doing jazz. A pan falling into a sinkhole. Horrible. I will not start on the “dogs barking” ring option, because life is short and death is long, and that sound, of dogs getting excited in a faraway universe made of steel and robots, has not earned its space in the world’s oldest Sunday paper. Anyway, my parents have one. Which is how, the evening of my niece’s party, my mum (having realised her laptop was missing) and my dad (having found the toilet enthusiastically filled by bowels that were not his own) were able to send me the footage from that afternoon.
In anger and curiosity, and irritation at the power of the sentient doorbell, I pressed play. It begins with a curtain of pink as a man reaches over to cover the camera, but only briefly – he’s distracted by his girlfriend, and after a second removes his hand, holding it behind his back like a waiter. I took a deep breath. These were the criminals. These were the burglars, preying on strangers in their 70s – they must have been watching the house, waiting two minutes after seeing my parents drive away before approaching the door. These were my enemies. Today’s enemies, anyway.
The video is annoyingly clear. He is in his 30s, wearing a grey T-shirt and those Topman jeans that narrow cruelly at the calf; she’s in a striped vest, arms bared, a sunken sort of glamour. She looks older than him, with long dark hair and eyeliner like mine. She’s carrying a plastic shopping bag, arms crossed. Both are nervous. “What do you think?” she says. “What do you think?” They move around the doorstep like pigeons, shoulders up, propelled by something large and dark and heavier than choice. He shoves the door, looks through the letterbox. “Not much in there,” she notes rudely, looking through the window. As he steps back to investigate the front of the house, she rocks slightly, hiding from the street – and that’s where I pressed pause.
My fury had dissolved somewhere around the 30-second mark, I realised, and had been replaced with a less comfortable feeling, some cold, blue mix of pity and sadness and dread. These were not the career criminals I’d expected, there were no balaclavas, not even a pair of gloves. These were just… people. Desperate people. I remembered a recent news story – a national strategy paper, written in the summer, said police were concerned that “economic turmoil and financial instability” and “prolonged and painful economic pressure” had the “potential to drive increases in particular crime types”, including “acquisitive” offences, such as burglary, as well as more insidious crimes, like sexual exploitation. Victims of domestic abuse, it warned, will become less likely to report their abuser because of an increased reliance on them. It’s obvious, really, but it hit differently when I saw that desperation in action, on video: the adrenaline, the fear, the need.
The second video, 15 minutes later, shows the couple leaving quickly. This would have been around the time my niece’s nursery-mates were bowling into the church hall, popping every single balloon before they’d even taken off their cardigans. The man exited first with the wheelie suitcase that I’d recently borrowed for a holiday, and the woman followed. She looked different now; it took a moment for me to realise she’d put her hair up, with one of my mum’s chunky crocodile clips and she was wearing my mum’s black coat, too. I called my parents after our second viewing. They were deliberating over whether to bother the police, and wondering how the cats had felt, and then, how to clean the toilet. We were just hanging up when I asked, “Why do you think she took your coat?” Did it have a wallet in the pocket? Was the coat valuable? No, said my mum, “I think she was just cold.”
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
