I disturb a burglar

Thank God for those night-time pees. On returning to bed around 3am this morning after one such visit, I heard a strange tapping sound. Now this old house has a variety of creaks, pops, murmurs and whistles that took quite a lot of getting used to when we first moved in, but this was a noise I hadn't heard before. I pricked up my ears and lay there in the dark, listening.

Tap, tap. Pause. Tap. Pause. Weird. I thought at first it was the cat flap, but it's never that loud, or that persistent. Then I wondered whether it was the high wind we'd had last night. Everything went quiet for a time, so I turned over. Tap, tap. And then another noise. Louder this time and even more unusual. No, something definitely needed investigating.

I stopped by the spare bedroom to see if I could see anything outside that could be causing the noise, but all appeared normal so I proceeded downstairs in the dark. The memory of this gives me shivers now. Not only would I not have been able to see any potential attacker very clearly, but worse, I was only wearing a pyjama top. Mind you, that would have been enough to scare them off! Anyway I peeked into the kitchen (nothing) and the lounge and dining room (nothing - although I wasn't expecting to find anything in there - if they'd tried to go in they'd have tripped the alarm). It was then I noticed the downstairs toilet door was open and there was a helluva draft coming through it. Sure enough the leaded window had been removed from the frame. The tapping I'd heard had been the chiselling away of the putty.

Whoever it was, and they must have been very small and skinny to get through that window, can literally only have been in the house a few seconds. When they heard me coming downstairs I presume they dived back out of the window so I never actually had to confront them. My initial scouting having revealed no missing property, the only other thing worrying my "3am I've just woken up" head was how to secure the house and get back to bed. I rooted out and fitted two strong bolts to the inside of the loo door, fastened them, and decided to leave the rest until a more reasonable hour (i.e. after daybreak).

Who was I kidding? Nikki and I lay there for almost an hour talking about whatifs and whatdowedonows so finally around 4.30am we got up and made ourselves a pot of coffee. It wasn't until we were on our way back upstairs with our coffees that I noticed all the keys on the keyrack were missing. When Nikki checked her purse, all her cash had been taken too.

All things considered though, we were lucky. When you realise what had not been taken that probably would have been if I hadn't disturbed them. Even my car keys were still lying on the hall table undisturbed, although the police later told us that was probably because the perp was too young to drive!

Still, it's bad enough. We have to have all the locks changed and so do the owners of the other sets of keys. Plus boarding up of the window in advance of getting a more secure unit made and fitted. And of course, when you take into consideration the insurance excess, loss of NCD and increased premiums, in the end it's probably not going to be worth putting in a claim.

When the police arrived to "take down our particulars" they asked if there's any CCTV footage. The answer, sadly, is no although I've since considered fitting it. In the end though, does that send out the wrong message? With the outside of the property bristling with cameras doesn't it simply say "there's summat here worth nicking"? A colleague of mine suffered a spate of burglaries over 2-3 years and each time he increased his security measures they managed to defeat them. He ended up with a full alarm system, CCTV, bars on all the downstairs windows and reinforced doors, and they still got in. I reckon all you can do is secure the perimeter (the window they took out was the only one without a sensor) and hope it's enough discouragement.

Something the SOCO man said as he was dusting for prints (as predicted, they wore gloves), is it was probably a kid sent in by older scrotes specifically to collect keys so they can come back later and do a proper job. I think that's the scariest part of all.