The sniper

Disgruntled, disillusioned, fed up, Tom was really feeling the tension build in him whenever he saw things that annoyed him. Yesterday, he was walking to work, the daily grind, and saw the familiar pile of shattered car window on the footpath that told the tale of yet another car break-in and probable theft of the car radio-CD system. It was really hacking him off. Every day things were going wrong for all sorts of people and no one was doing anything about it. These little piles of glass were to be found in any street and in any town.

Tom really wanted to do something about this. And as he walked he thought it through. This particular short road was overlooked from the end of the street by an old flat above a newsagents’ shop. The grubby windows up there would be a good place to keep watch on the street and catch the thieves at it. He could not understand why the police did not routinely do this kind of thing. Presumably, they didn’t care about such small crimes. What other explanation could there be? After all, he knew from his own experience with the police that they need do very little to apprehend criminals as most of them are so stupid they will eventually screw up so badly that even an ill-equipped police force with no one on the street cannot but catch them. And when they do, they can mop up their statistics by persuading the apprehended villain to ask to have a hundred other similar offences “taken in to consideration” which means that they villain admits to them, and the police can claim that they have solved all of them. A neat trick for all concerned, except, of course, the punter whose car was broken into and the radio nicked.

He walked on to work still mulling over the existence of the crummy old flat above the newsagents with such a clear view over the scene of so many petty crimes. This might have been an end of it, but something else happened to him that day that really pulled him up sharp. Chatting to a colleague, he learned of a new mail order scam. A villain had made a habit of walking along a particular street at the same hour each day for several weeks, and the postman thought this guy lived there. They struck up a passing friendship, greeting each other every morning. The postman had never noticed that the fellow was only ever on the street, never emerging from a house. But the fellow had taken to asking if there was anything for number 34. Naturally, the postman handed over whatever it was each time. In this way, over a period of weeks, the villain had collected quite a number of small parcels containing books, CDs, electronic equipment, none of which the real resident missed as they had not been ordered by him, but by the villain who had conjured up a false persona, based on the credit card details of the man at number 34, who did not know what was going on until the credit card company called. The villain had been filtering the mail, and not passing on the credit card bills. He passed on sufficient bona fide mail for the innocent man not to realise that the mail was being intercepted. By the time the credit card company phoned, the villain had simply disappeared. But the postman was really in trouble!

This tale excited Tom. He quietly absorbed the details and salted them away, thinking that there was something extremely useful about this, but not knowing quite what it was. But on the way to work a couple of days later, he noticed that the graffiti was getting worse, and again wondered why on earth no one ever did anything about it. The bus shelter round the corner from his house had been kicked in, so was surrounded in heaps of smashed glass. The side walls of some houses were covered in brightly coloured cartoon writing that seemed to make no sense, but presumably passed for some kind of name or identifiable signature of the graffitists. He hated them. They made him angry and he didn’t like being made to feel angry as he was a nice person. The bus shelter was overlooked by a number of houses. Did the people who lived there see or hear nothing? The houses, while terraced, were fairly well to do, and he couldn’t believe they would want to cover up this kind of perpetual vandalism and petty crime. There was a gun maker’s shop on this road, the only one he had ever seen, and it just happened to be on his route to work. He did not understand how there could be a gun maker in this quiet backwater, in a residential area. Who would buy guns around here and for what? It must be legitimate, though, as it was clearly a long-established business. You rarely saw any customers coming and going, though.

But the association of ideas was finally complete: recurring crimes, discrete windows in rarely visited flats and guns. Tom decided that he wanted to be a sniper.