Over the Edge Read Free Page B

people driving round in cars that don’t belong to them. They are stolen to order and passed on at about a tenth of their true value. They steal, say, a black BMW series 3 – it’s usually an upmarket car – and sit at the roadside watching, or wander round supermarket car parks until they find a similar vehicle. They note the number and have identical registration plates made for the stolen one. That’s it. Any perfunctory enquiry from a passing policeman shows it to be what it says it is, and his suspicions are alleviated. The owner of the original vehicle knows nothing about this, except that he receives the occasional summons for speeding in an area where he never goes, or a fixed penalty ticket for driving in theLondon congestion charge zone, although he avoids driving in London like a giraffe avoids overhead power-lines.
    Scarborough rang back to say that Mr Smith was alive and well, but we’d already discovered that the crashed car was a ringer. The VIN number didn’t tally with the DVLA records. It had been stolen three weeks earlier, from a house in Leeds. Burglars had broken in, found the keys and driven it away. Nothing else was taken. Nowadays, with all the sophisticated alarms and immobilisers on new cars, using the keys is just about the only way of stealing one.
    We don’t mourn when a car thief kills himself. Truth is, we all feel a little glow of satisfaction, happy that they haven’t taken anybody else with them. Priority now was his identity, so his next of kin could be informed and the newspapers could announce to the world that justice had been done and the streets were that little bit safer. He’d be buried with all the pomp of a Third World dictator and the Personal column would have messages from all his friends and relatives saying what a kind, loving person he’d been. They’d make pilgrimages to the spot where he discovered that VW Golfs can’t fly, and leave extravagant floral tributes and soft toys, to help him in the afterlife. Rodger asked if he could stay with it because he smelt something big underneath it all.I was happy to close the case and concentrate on the burglaries that make up our daily bread, but I said OK.
    Saturday morning the report came through identifying him. He hadn’t been carrying a passport, driver’s licence or utility bill, so DNA samples and fingerprints were taken and sent for comparison with the databases. Two hits confirmed him to be Dale Dobson, a 26-year-old thug with a record of football violence, racial attacks and ABH. I tried ringing Gareth Adey, my uniformed counterpart, to dump it on him, but he wasn’t answering. The sun was shining, it was Saturday morning and no grieving family had reported him missing. Gareth was probably wearing silly trousers and thrashing a small white ball around a big field, so I slid the report into my Pending tray and went home.
     
    Many years ago I graduated from art college, with honours, for what it’s worth. As well as strenuous activities like rugby, karate and scuba diving, we have policemen who write poetry and short stories, several who do watercolours, and I’ve heard it said that there’s a sergeant in Barnsley who is a dab hand with the crocheting hook. But as far as I know I’m the only cop in the firm who knocks up the occasional abstract-impressionist work of art. I’d had a couple on display at the Heckley gala andthey’d attracted quite a bit of serious attention, as well as the expected hoots of derision from my colleagues. But a local gallery owner – a man of taste and sophistication – had admired them and offered to show a couple in an exhibition he was organising in the autumn.
    So that’s why I spent Saturday afternoon on the roof of the garage, dropping blobs of red paint on to a six-by-four sheet of hardboard.
    ‘What the chuff are you playing at?’ a voice said somewhere below me.
    I peered over the edge. ‘Look out,’ I warned, ‘or you’ll get splodged.’ It was Dave