First of all, if a couple of upbeat ladies approach one asking for €0.01 in return for a carnation because there's a fiesta on the next block this afternoon, it's probably a good idea to take a photo of them. It saves time going through the mug shots at the police station when you report the theft. I was searching for the 1 Euro cent (not something that comes in very handy here, as you may be aware, though it is still tendered in change).
The older woman suddenly had her hand in my purse while the younger one distracted the Clingon. Neither I, nor the stranger with her hand in my purse, could find the cent, so the women snatched back the carnations they'd foisted on us, and disappeared.
The Clingon wondered if they were the pickpockets we'd been warned about. I suddenly wondered that too, and looked in my purse for the €120 that I'd last seen while searching for the 1 cent coin 30 seconds earlier. But you know the story.
We spent a couple of hours at the police station. First I took a number, and made a statement over the phone to a national policing centre. Meanwhile, the Clingon was out traversing Plaza de España looking for the two perps. I went into the waiting room, and cooled my heels with twenty other people, all waiting for their numbers to come up. The Clingon arrived and then a young policeman took us in to sign the statement which I'd given the man on the phone. The statement was in Spanish; the Clingon translated as best as he could, and I put my name to something which may or may not have been exactly what I said.
After that we went back to the waiting room, and I played Sudoku on my phone, while the Clingon's belly rumbled. Finally a young woman in jeans (she looked like one of Charlie's angels) called my name and we followed her to a small, grimy office in which a couple of plain-clothes policemen showed us photos and we tried to identify the women from the park. We did finally identify two women, and, in fact the women we reluctantly identified were known to work the carnation scam as a team. If I had to bet my life on our identification, though, I would not do it. I had to sign my name across the faces of the photographs of the two women, got my signed and stamped police statement, and now I'll wait until the Allianz phone line for claims opens again in a couple of hours to start the insurance ball rolling.
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Location:Calle Gran Vía,Madrid,Spain
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