Sir, did you find Mohammed?

See the two dudes with the grey backpack and green bag in the photo? Those two genii, had just broken into the apartment downstairs from us and were calmly carrying their spoils down the road... with crimebuster Heike on their asses. But let me start from the top: Shayne and I returned from grocery shopping this afternoon to find these two gentlemen on our floor (3rd), looking at the apartment doors. Upon seeing us, they asked us if we knew where Mohammed lived. We said we didn’t know and they said he probably lived in the other building that faces onto our courtyard. With that, they proceeded to walk downstairs, while we unlocked our door.
No sooner had we taken off our coats (and Shayne his shoes) and put our shopping bags in the kitchen, than we heard a loud banging noise. Not unlike the sound of a door being broken open somewhere in the building. While I didn’t think anything of it, Shayne immediatly said, “That’s THEM. They’re breaking in somewhere”. He subsequently rushed out the door in his socks to investigate. I started pacing, trying to remember what country I was currently in and what the emergency police number in that country might be, when Shayne returned and said: “They’ve broken in on the second floor - I’m not going in there. We need to call the police.” At that moment, we saw them crossing the courtyard downstairs and leaving the building. I shouted: ”We have to DO something - we can’t just stand here!” and grabbed my digital camera and house keys and ran down the stairs after them. Last thing I heard was Shayne shouting: “Wait, I’m not wearing shoes!”

When I got into the street the perps were about 100m ahead of me, casually walking towards a bus stop. I assumed they were going to catch a getaway bus and silently cursed the fact that I was about to go on a crimebusting, Speed III, Nr 27 Bus adventure without a coat, metro pass or single Euro on me. Meanwhile, I started photographing them from behind, hoping to get a worthwhile profile shot. When I caught up with them, they saw me and stopped. Not knowing what else to do, but wanting to delay them I politely asked: “ So? Did you find Mohammed?” To which the short grandad replied: “Non, madame, mais c’est pas grave.” (No, Madam, but it doesn’t matter.)

Now, I knew they had stolen goods in the big green bag and they knew they had stolen goods in the big green bag. They also knew that I knew, but they were not afraid of me...so luckily, by then, Shayne came running up to us and he was in no mood for polite banter about where Mohammed might live, instead shouting: “What’s in the bag? What’s in the bag? Thieves! Police! Someone call the police!” The deft duo crossed the road to get away from us, telling us to leave them alone. People stopped and gawked, but no-one called the police as Shayne had so loudly requested. Of course, we remained on their heels and that was when Hardy (fat grandaddy) decided it was time to abandon the lucky packet of goodies. The perps started jogging (and I use that term very loosely) down the road, back in the direction of the scene of the crime (!) and Shayne told me to stay with the bag, while he ran after them. Bag of recovered goods in hand, I accosted a passer-by, who had been a stander-by through all this, and asked him to please call the police as I had left without anything on me! This man proceeded to dig around in his bag, producing endless slips of paper, a wallet, more paper, cough drops, some paper and eventually his mobile phone. I had decided that I couldn’t wait, as I had seen Shayne chase the guys down a side road, so I started running towards that road. There, I implored another young man to please call the cops. Meanwhile, the first passer-by had followed me and was holding his phone towards me saying, “You tell the police what’s going on”. I took the phone, only to find that the line was dead. We redialled the emergency line for the police and got through to an answering machine, requesting that we “please call the following 10-digit number - blah, blah, blah - goodbye” Line dead. Unbelievable.

Meanwhile, Hardy, the fat clown, was running back up the road towards us, on the opposite pavement and Shayne was chasing Laurel into the distance. I knew that if I was going to pursue this guy, I couldn’t do it with the loot! I pulled into into our local bakery, jumped the queue and shouted at one of the salesladies: “This bag comes from a robbery. Please could you keep it here for me - I will be right back for it, but I need to follow the burglar!” Without batting an eyelid, the doe-eyed baker’s assisstant took the bag and I made a dramatic dash for the door to take up the chase. I hot-footed it towards the church square, but couldn’t see klepto-grandad anywhere. I decided that this was perhaps not such a bad thing, as I had no idea what I was going to do with him if I did catch him anyway - given that Shayne had the smaller of the two geriatric genius-burglars covered and I would have been left with the much wider, heavier specimen!
So, he was gone and I was worried that I had no idea what had become of Shayne. I suddently had visions of him pinned to the ground by a hopping-mad little gray dwarf so I ran in the direction I had last seen Shayne chasing his perp. Nothing down that road. Took a right and flew into the main road when I saw a traffic police vehicle driving up towards me. I ran into the road and started blurting: “There are two thieves in the area, I have photos!” A large black man joined me at the cop’s window and said he had just tackled a guy to the ground who was spraying tear-gas at a young man and he showed us the road they were in. I ran off shouting: “That would be my boyfriend!” and came upon Shayne, sitting on gramps’ back with his arm in a vice grip. The tear gas cannister was on the ground next to them and a lanky dude with a skateboard was looking on. At that moment we heard sirens blasting and THREE cop vans pulled up, spilling about 12 cops onto the pavement.

A small shuffle ensued, as the coppers argued about whose intervention this was and who had received the call first etc. Eventually, I pointed out that while geezer nr 1 had been caught, geezer nr 2 was on the loose, so would somebody please get back in one of the many vans available and head up towards the church to find him? We showed them a picture of the ‘suspect’ (-NOT) and a group of policemen took off. Roughly three minutes later, they radioed back that they had him. Turns out that the young man I had asked to call the cops earlier, had been tracking Nifty-Fingers around the church and down side streets. The heroic young pursuer had managed to call the police station directly, bypassing the pesky answering machine on the emergeny line, and had lead them straight to our man. Our man had, however, threatened him with a pocket-knife in the process!

What followed was a police-accompanied walk to the bakery to recover the green bag containing the stolen laptop computer, mobile phone, pearl necklace and bracelet, clothing and airline tickets to Morrocco, an inspection of the crime scene with plain-clothes detectives and a siren-filled trip in the back of the police van for us. The police were very impressed with our “good citzenship” and couldn’t get over how we presented them with the spoils, photographic evidence and the perpetrators. PS Shayne’s description of what he went through is HILARIOUS. I highly recommend it.