“I really like that painting of the drowned lady,” said one of the four visitors to my studio last Thursday afternoon. He had a strong Liverpudlian accent.

He was no connoisseur of art, or women, come to that – the painting in question depicted a mermaid! In fact he was not even a guest. Just minutes earlier I had been lost in my own little world of painting whilst listening to an audio book when I had been startled by a girl, accompanied by three boys, knocking on the glass door to my studio.

“What are they doing down here?” I thought to myself (my studio is thirty-eight steps down from the main road… and they were strangers!).

“Can I use your phone to call my mother? We’ve been attacked by a gang of older boys,” said the girl (a sullen blonde of around fourteen years old).

No sooner had I nodded than the oldest boy (perhaps fourteen but younger looking than the girl) opened wide my door and the four barged into my studio. The boy who liked “the drowned lady” was twelve or thirteen and had big ears, which looked rather prominent owing to his new ‘short back and sides’ haircut; the older lad, too, sported a similar new haircut. The youngest, a boy of eleven, wore round tortoiseshell spectacles – he put me in mind of “Piggy” from “Lord of the Flies”, but he wasn’t fat.

According to the gang of four in my studio they were on holiday staying at a local caravan site and, having been down the town to have their haircuts, on their way back to the camp site they were assailed by twenty-one sixteen year old schoolboys…. at five-thirty… in dear little old Dawlish town! Apparently yesterday it was even worse – the older boys had been kicked and punched to the ground… and not a mark on them!

They asked several inane questions, and some searching ones, and the oldest boy clearly wished to enter the main body of our house – I had to close the door he had opened. At length the girl spoke to her mother who agreed to come and pick them up and my Chris came into the studio.

“I’m going to start locking my door from the inside,” I said to Chris upon returning from the roadside, “let’s be very vigilant for a while.”

As much as I didn’t trust the kids, I thought their main purpose was to con the girl’s mother into giving them a lift.

Whilst gardening the following afternoon I noticed that our two bikes, normally chained together, had been separated. I assumed that Chris had unlocked them in order to oil them before taking them out cycling, therefore I didn’t bother to mention the uncoupling to Chris.

Yesterday afternoon, upon arriving back from shopping, Chris discovered that his bike was gone. The “Golden Sands Holiday Park” is as big as a town. We didn’t locate the bike, the mother’s car or the band of accomplished lock pickers.

The police informed us later that there has been a spate of similar crimes in our area during the last few days. On the basis that neither we, nor the police, ever expect to see Chris’s bike again, we went out this morning to find a new one. My mum accompanied us and kindly insisted on buying her son-in-law a beautiful blue bike with butterfly handlebars, so now Chris is quite pleased with the outcome and we plan to register particulars about our bikes with the police.

On our way home we called into my niece’s place for a family lunch and we related the tale of the missing bike and the most likely culprits.

“I had heard about some recent incidents,” said Lizzie (whose husband Martin is a police officer), “in fact, one of my friends who has a hairdressing salon in the town told me that, on Thursday, a couple of boys ran off without paying for their haircuts!”

It’s a small world and Dawlish is a pretty small place.

“The Drowned Lady” – unfinished.