A glass of water
Authors: R. Bayliss
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2003)

My wife and I live on the top floor of a house in Onslow Square, London. We have a neighbour, a friend of the same age as me, across the hall. At half-past-six one evening, he rang our front-door bell.

‘This young man,’ he said nicely, holding the arm of a presentable not over-weight man of about 35, ‘has come to inspect our electricity. He'll tell you all about it’. The neighbour, who is shy at the best of times, withdrew and closed his front door. The young man fingered the London Electricity Board identity badge pinned to the lapel of his jacket. ‘Johnstone,’ he said, ‘from the LEB. I've come to check your power.’

‘Our what?’ I asked incredulously.

‘Your power. They're laying a new underground electricity cable round the corner from you and they may have connected it to two houses instead of four. That'll mean you'll get more power than you should and your electricity bill will go shooting up.’

I had noticed that a new cable was being laid but I didn't understand how too much ‘power’ could come our way. Electrically what he said just didn't make sense. ‘I don't understand,’ I said. ‘D'you mean voltage?’

‘I've got to test the power of all your outlet sockets,’ he repeated and fingered his badge again. We let him in, and he asked my wife if she'd show him where the electric meter was. She got a torch and shone it into the cupboard where the meter lay.

‘Would you, please, keep an eye on that red needle,’ he pointed to one of the dials, ‘and as soon the needle moves from nought to one, give me a shout.’ Having got rid of my wife, he joined me in the sitting room where he knelt down and pulled a plug out of its socket and inserted a screwdriver, the handle of which lit up on making contact. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Now I must test all the others.’

‘But if that one's okay, so'll be all the rest of 'em,’ I remonstrated.

‘Must be sure. If it's wrong, it'll cost you a lot of money’. With that he tested the other sockets in the sitting room and then disappeared to the bedroom, my study and the dining room. When he came back, he asked me to turn off the television set in the dining room. I did as he asked, leaving him alone in the sitting room.

When I came back he was sweating profusely and asked if he might have a glass of water. I got him one from the kitchen and dropped in a cube of ice. He drank it down in a single gulp. ‘Just had triple by-pass surgery,’ he said, unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a mid-sternal scar of recent origin. ‘And they did this too,’ he pulled up his left trouser leg to show the scar of a removed saphenous vein. ‘Hereditary,’ he added.

‘Where was it done?’ I asked out of interest.

‘King Edward VII Hospital at Midhurst,’ he answered, and I believed him.

Not until the next day did I discover that my wallet was missing from the inside of my blazer hanging on the back of a chair in the sitting-room—and with it all my credit cards, my driving licence and £110 in cash. And where the hell was my mobile? That too had disappeared. ‘What are all these paper-clips doing on the floor here in your study?’ asked my wife. Because the lovely Jacobean tobacco box, given me forty years ago by a grateful patient with pancreatitis, had also been stolen. Over further days other losses became apparent, all small objects d'art that you could slip quickly and easily into your jacket pocket—a miniature carriage clock, a small sculpture by a renowned Belgian artist of a pony owned by my wife's grandfather, a little silver frog and so on.

I had been suspicious, but to have been so conned was nonetheless mortifying. The police came and took my statement. I gave them one piece of what proved invaluable advice. ‘Get on to King Edward VII Hospital at Midhurst and ask them for the names and addresses of those male patients, aged under 40, who have had bypass coronary artery surgery in the last 18 months. There won't be many.’ There were four. The police watched them. Three left home every morning at a fixed hour to go to work and returned at a set hour every evening. The fourth seemed to have no regular employment or occupation. Armed with a search warrant they entered his house and, according to the police report, ‘found a treasure-trove of silver-ware.’

I should have added that the glass showed the man's fingerprints and his DNA—information provided not by the police but by a civilian working for a commercial firm that keeps all the fingerprints and the DNA results. Did you know that?