People hardly ever come to the hotel without having made a booking, but expensive bags and new leather jackets gave the impression that the two men had money. My little dial-up unit for checking credit cards had cleared the one they proffered as valid. Nothing about them made me suspicious. The police would no doubt check and discover that the credit card had been stolen, and that the names and addresses they gave were false. A few hundred pounds' worth of damage was unlikely to merit much of an investigation. Like the men who had abused Darren, they would go unpunished, free to gloat over their actions.
Two officers arrived an hour and a half later, a man and a woman. They spent about twenty minutes in the hotel examining the wreckage and making a few notes. Having a police car outside and officers in the hotel was not likely to encourage business, and at first they put me on edge by looking at the rack of leaflets and cards for gay clubs and organisations in the hall. The female officer asked with what looked to be a forced smile how many people had been staying last night, and if the hotel guests were exclusively male. At first I feared prejudice and was expecting hostile questions about the nature of the business, but she reassured me by saying that the hotel was in the right area, in easy reach of quite a few gay pubs and clubs.
The male officer used his radio to check the credit card number and the address the two vandals had given, and minutes later received confirmation that they were fraudulent. They asked me not to clean any glass surfaces, cups or similar objects until the fingerprint specialist had come, and said they would send me a letter with an incident number for my insurers as proof that the crime had been reported.
After the police left, the prospect of going back up to the vandalised room for a fourth time that day was too unpleasant. The best thing would have been for me to have gone out for an hour to walk in the park or do some shopping, but as the fingerprint expert was on his way I had to wait in. As the cleaner was off duty his chores fell to me, but unable to face doing the rooms I moped around in the kitchen.
The fingerprint specialist arrived shortly before mid-day with his little case of equipment, but he found no prints that could definitely be identified as belonging to the wreckers. Presumably thinking already of another more important case, as he was leaving he asked if any cars had been stolen in the area recently, giving me the impression there was little chance of my pair of vandals ever being caught.