I caught up with Mrs Barney this morning. Rather, it was she who caught up with me. Regular readers, no doubt, will recognise her immediately as the wife of my prankster friend Barney. Upon seeing me she lapsed into a hysterical fit. So hysterical in fact that at first I thought it had to be something about me.

For one brief nanosecond, the alarming thought flashed through my mind that I’d left home, absent-mindedly, with yet another tea towel draped over my shoulder. That wasn’t the case, thankfully. However, because the nature of hysteria is such that at first one isn’t sure if the person is truly crying or laughing, I waited politely for her to sit. I was, as readers would guess, seated at my favourite mall table with a cup of coffee.

When she was able to dry her eyes and re-discover her voice, she said, “There’s been an ‘incident’.” She even did the ‘inverted commas’ thing with her fingers. The very mention of ‘incident’ cracked her up again and as is known by those who’ve shared space with one suffused by hysteria, it’s easy to get drawn in, too, even without knowing why.

I felt helium bubbles of laughter building in my own chest for no apparent reason.

“Oh, dear,” she said, surfacing, “shots were fired last night, do you know? In the park, just behind the house.”

Well, that statement knocked the burgeoning laughter right out of me. PDQ, as they say in modern abbreviated speech. Pretty Damn Quick. ‘Alarm’ must have been written in large red letters across my features, but Mrs Barney defused things by saying, “No one was killed. But it’s kind of scary, isn’t it? Especially when you think that Barney and I slept through the whole thing.”

It turns out their first inkling that an ‘incident’ had occurred was when they were woken up to a knocking on the door. It was 2.30 in the morning and it was the police. Three of them, two in uniform. They’d noticed that Barney had installed cameras on his house, covering various angles, including the parkland behind the house. They wanted his permission to look at recent footage.

Barney, ever keen to be at the centre of an unfolding drama, offered them chairs, ordered Mrs Barney to make rounds of Nespresso from their newly-purchased machine, and settled down with the officers to ‘peruse’ the security footage.

“Go back about two hours,” said the officer in plain clothes. Barney obliged. And the tape started spooling. Minute after minute of blackness mostly, alternating between the six cameras.

One of the cameras (Camera 3) facing not the parkland but adjacent to it, showed the neighbour’s sidewalk. The first time it flashed up on the screen, Barney did a half lurch in his chair. Mrs Barney recalls that quite clearly. It was as though he’d seen something. But he held his silence. The next time Camera 3 flashed its footage, Barney sat up straighter, leaned forward as though to verify what he was seeing, then turned and glanced at the policemen. They appeared unconcerned. Barney frowned. Was it only he that could see something amiss?

Still, rather than tell the cops how to do their job he held his counsel. When they were finished, the officers rose to thank him and apologise for getting the Barney’s out of bed.

“So, you’ve got some conclusive evidence?” Barney asked. They shook their heads, admitting, “Just too dark.” “What about the two people standing on the kerb just outside my neighbour’s place? They were standing there for hours. They must know something,” Barney informed them.

The cops looked at him and asked, “What people?”

Barney re-wound the images, pointing as the figures emerged, “There!” and “There! See them? Haven’t moved.”

The cops looked at Barney in amazement before breaking into volleys of laughter. “Those aren’t people, mate. Those are the neighbour’s wheelie bins,” they said.

And Mrs Barney’s eyes, in the retelling, are streaming rivers once more.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.