Demon kids.
We knew that the kids who lived in the house next door when I was a teenager were ill-disciplined, and so it didn't take the deductive powers of Poirot to work out, when the cat turned up with a dart from an airgun sticking out of his hind leg, who'd pulled the trigger.

Their mother did nothing, and their step-father was too limp to do anything.

The kids had been left in while their mother and step-dad went out for the evening. We didn't know this, but we learned.

The fireworks started going off at around nine o'clock. We thought this idiotic, but didn't really think about it much more. Shortly afterwards, there was an almighty THUMP coming from next door.

Then another
and another
and another.

There was quite possibly someone getting murdered in there. We thought we might have heard the sound of furniture breaking. It was now approaching 10 o'clock and my Dad decided that he'd go and see what was happening. He rang the doorbell, but there was no reply. Just more thumping. More faint sounds of woodwork breaking. No lights.

Eventually, we discovered what had happened. The internal doors in the house were sturdy solid wood things, and each of them had a lock. The kids had somehow managed to lock themselves in a bedroom. Instead of sticking their heads out of the window to call for help, they'd had the bright idea of shooting fireworks out instead. (What kind of kid has fireworks under the bed?) Because they were the spawn of Satan, they'd been ignored by everyone living nearby.

So their next trick was to set about the interal door with a baseball bat. By the time their parents got home, they'd managed to knock a foot-wide hole in it.

The response of the step-father, whose house it was? Absolutely nothing. The weak-willed tosser.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Wed 7 Oct 2009, 11:12, Reply)