Garden crime scene

I wandered into the garden this morning to do some pottering and came across a crime scene:

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Someone, or something, had thrown a huge pile of debris, including bits of stone, glass and decaying hardboard, across the paving stones in front of my shed. At first I thought something had fallen off the top of the shed, or perhaps a neighbour had flung it over the hedge, but that seemed extreme and most unlikely since my neighbours are all gentle folks who probably don’t hate me that much. I investigated further and saw what had happened:

The culprit had dug right under the shed and had flung all this stuff out while making some kind of hole or den or nest under the shed. There were various suspects. I enlisted my trusty assistant to help me investigate:

She, herself, could be ruled out as she had a perfect alibi having been asleep in the house all night.

Fortunately, in among the debris, the culprit had left an essential crime scene investigation tool:

This enabled me to assess some of the suspects. Although a known villain, this one was clearly too small to cause all that damage.

This one was too long to be captured on my measuring device, and while clearly responsible for considerable wrongdoing in the garden, probably could not have dug out all that stuff without help:

I found several possible criminal tools:

My assistant decided to explore the terrain further, looking for clues:

Meanwhile we looked to see whether there were any other known suspects on the crime database. These two have both been seen in the vicinity recently:

However, despite their clearly criminal intent, they probably wouldn’t have managed to cause quite so much chaos as the crime scene suggested. For the moment my prime suspect is one of these regular visitors to the garden:

Last photographed, asleep at the crime scene!

This was a year ago admittedly but it has been seen in the vicinity more recently, if not captured on camera.

The investigation continues. In the mean time, the mess has been cleared away, and, much as I love the foxy visitors, I don’t really want them choosing my shed as a new den for their offspring (if that was their intent). So the hole under the shed has been covered up with a piece of old board from a raised bed.

About the glass, in case you are wondering, I hope the culprit is ok and hasn’t been injured. Obviously I don’t routinely leave broken glass lying about in the garden. The glass and other debris belonged to previous occupants of the house and was shoved under the shed by the shed builders about fifteen years ago. I’ve tidied it all away now.

Now I can get back to what I intended to do this morning which was to plant out some tomatoes.