Trudi rang off.

She was relentless! She had probably worked all this out and decided to do the aforementioned upcoming housebreaking even before he’d made his phone call.

She would be out in the street in a minute or two, and it would not take long to spot the first temporarily unoccuppied house, as soon as she started walking along the footpath. Once she’d broken in, she had most of the day to turn the place over in search of him. He could  think of only one place that she would be most likely to miss. He turned the phone onto its side on the charger cradle, removed the back cover, and pulled out the batteries. He had climbed a power cord to the table in order to make the telephone call, and remembered that there was a waste paper bin full of screwed up paper and other rubbish beside the table.

Murray rolled the batteries off the table, and watched as they fell into the bin. Just as he’d hoped for, they sank between the balls of paper, weighing more, and having room to move. Neither battery was visible. He then climbed into the battery compartment of the phone, pulled the cover back onto it, and shook himself a little, causing the phone to lose the balance of its precarious position and fall back into place on the charger.

A few minutes later he heard footsteps on the gravel driveway outside. If it was the owner coming back to largely work from home, he would have heard the car pull in. It had to be Trudi.

A minute after that, he heard the living room window smashing, and then the door latch being unlocked. He could not see anything from within the phone battery compartment, but he heard occasional sounds for the next hour or so, as Trudi systematically searched the entire house. Then he felt the phone being picked up and heard her pressing buttons with her thumb.

“It’s dead,” he heard her say, “Either it hasn’t been on the charger for long, or she’s used up the batteries. He can’t have called me from this place. Still I have two more likely options just down the street. First I’d better leave a little cash to cover the breakages, and an anonymous letter on her own stationery. I can’t see any paper. I’ll have to use the back of something from the bin.”

His heart sank, as he heard her pick a piece of paper out of the waste paper bin and unfold it from its scrunched up state. The batteries must have gone right to the bottom of the bin. So the paper ball that she’d retrieved from the top of the bin wouldn’t have disclosed the batteries.

He knew that she had placed the seemingly useless phone back on the cradle, and waited until he heard her walking along the gravel driveway again. Then he pushed and shook and shuffled around, but found that he could not move the phone.