Licence revoked

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Someone out there is pretending to be me.

Back in July, when we finally moved into our home, I sent my driver’s licence and V5 car registration documentation off the umpteenth time.  Since moving to London, this is my seventh address - including the couple of months we were homeless and I transferred it back to my parents’ house, and fourth from which editions of David Marston Writes have been sent out from.  Sorting out the DVLA is just another part of the standard routine for laying down roots, as much as sorting out the electric, gas and internet, figuring out where the nearest place to buy milk from is and what the closest pub has in terms of bitter on tap.  It’s just another chore to do, only this time it went a bit wrong.

Moving in meant we needed new furniture and fittings as we revert many of the modernisations made by the previous owners.  My fiancée is determined to restore the house’s character and so took to ebay with gusto looking for authentic thirties fixtures of fittings.  She quickly sourced a mantelpiece to go with the fireplace we were planning to put back into the lounge. 

‘It’s nearby,’ she said enthusiastically, ‘we can go and pick it up.’

‘How big is it?’ I asked.

The dimensions were almost exactly the same as the back of the car with the seats down.  Of course, this meant we could only be certain it could be manoeuvred around the various plastic fittings and other obstacles around the boot entrance by actually trying to fit it in.

Surprisingly it fit, although only just and at an awkward angle.  The wooden u was twisting slightly.  If the traffic was slow it might have caused a permanent warp or even snapped and so my fiancée opted to sit with her arms stretched behind her, supporting it in place.  All very uncomfortable, but not dangerous and it was only a short journey.

Out on the south circular, accelerating up the hill from the roundabout with the A20, the angle of the car shifts the mantelpiece.  The movement drops the weight onto my fiancée’s arms.  She squeals in pain.  I glance over to look at her.  Making sure she’s okay takes longer than I would normally have my eyes off the road for.  I look back too late.  The lights have just changed to red.  There are no pedestrians waiting to cross, the traffic from the side road is still stationary.  I dither for a second, worried about slamming the brakes on and hurting her further.  In that micro-moment, I’ve sailed through the red light and – quite rightly – incurred points and a fine due to the fixed camera.

I know what’s happened.  I am cross with myself for the hesitancy and incurring the fine, but I was completely in the wrong.  It’s only when the official notice arrives that I realise my driver’s licence hasn’t returned from the DVLA.  My V5 is back but not my licence.  I leave it a few more days, hoping each evening I return from work it’ll be on the mat.  It isn’t.

Eventually I ring them.  I was posted several weeks before, but clearly it hasn’t reached me.  They issue a new one, which does turn up and is immediately sent off to be marked with its crime, but this doesn’t answer the question of what happened to the first?

I assume that envelopes marked with the DVLA have some sort of value to them.  Identification papers, even if not a passport, must surely be worth something to the right person.  Most likely they were popped through the wrong letterbox, maybe next door while it was empty and then hovered up with all the pizza, nanny, roofing and estate agent leaflets into the recycling bin, but possibly not. 

 

In a week when the news around the missing Malaysian airlines flight is focussing on the two passengers using stolen passports, it seems intriguing to reflect on what someone could do with my identification.  Have they got their hair cut in a dishevelled spiky mess, bought themselves a pair of fake glasses and are currently masquerading as me?  What can a photo-id with your address on it get you?  The DVLA says it cancelled the serial number on the licence, but no-one actually checks those when you hire a vehicle.  They just glance at the likeness and ask how many points you’ve got.  I could be accumulating stolen Hertz cars around the country.  With a bit of creative fibbing to utility companies they could probably open a bank account in my name and drain the overdraft.

There comes a point where they could be more me than I am.

Alice Kendrick had been a detective for too long.  She’d spent too many nights in bad bars regretting the darkness in humanity which was they gave her cases like this.  She’d been spared the worst of the P&O bombings.  It hadn’t been her or anyone on her team who’d been pulling mangled bodies out the Dover docks, trying to distinguish burnt, twisted metal from torso remains.  She’d managed to avoid the crematorium smoke taste to the morning air, the grinding of the ferry’s skeleton breaking up in the tinted sea and the smell of doused fire lingering on the dawn. 

She may well have avoided the full sensory experience, but those who’d got the complete works also got to leave it behind.  Provided they could.  At least they had some sort of chance.  Alice Kendrick, though, had to look at the photos of four hundred bodies and twelve bodies every day until she managed to unpick what happened. 

The fact that this prospect didn’t fill her with dread was when she knew she’d been a detective too long.

She wished they still let you smoke in the workplace.

Dover hadn’t had an incident room large enough for her team’s needs so they’d commandeered the basement.  No natural light, a dank odour, stark concrete walls made it appropriately bleak.  They’d decorated, but only by tacking images of each and every victim to the wall.  A before and after shot to remind them that they’d been alive once.

She’d sent the rest of them back to their hotels.  It was late, not that you could tell in the windowless confines underneath the street.  They’d been working solid for almost three weeks, tracking down potential connections, trying to figure out who, the why would fall into place on its own.  The water had played havoc with any results they would normally have expected from forensics, ballistics and all the other scientific back-up modern policing received.  They were working in the past.

She’d sent the others back to the hotel, but she knew they’d be doing exactly the same thing as she was: thinking, unable to let it go.

Alice’s mobile rang.  The display said Hopkins, her number two.

‘What have you got, Paul?’

‘I think we’ve found something,’ he exhaled slowly.  Alice could picture his nervous hands toying with a pen, rolling it between his fingers in want of a cigarette.  ‘I’ve been going over the CCTV footage.  I’m looking at a guy boarding. I think he’s our man.  He’s nervous, keeps checking over his shoulder, adjusting his position in the seat.  No-one checks his car, but you can see the way it’s sitting on the suspension there’s something heavy on in the boot.’

‘So he just drove the bomb on board?’

‘Incredible, yeah, I think he did.’

‘Sometime simple works better than some over-complex conspiracy thriller plot.’  Alice paced the room, her fingers drifting across the photos tacked to the walls.  ‘Any leads on the car?’

‘Yeah, registration and licence documents are in the name of a David Marston.  Lives in Lewisham, London.’

‘Pick him up,’ she said.  ‘Let’s bring him in, find out what he knows.’      

Just a bad fiction thought.