We spent an hour in the Garda station trying to explain ourselves to a flame-haired police lady.
She sat with her pen poised over a statement pad on the desk in the interview room. Her uniform was extremely smart and emblazoned with gold emblems. At least the police dress nicely here, I thought.
The builder boyfriend shifted uncomfortably in his seat in the claustrophobic room and started explaining that he really didn’t want to press charges.
But many weeks on from a crash in which a young driver crossed a solid white line to speed down the wrong side of the road and plough into the BB’s truck head on, demolishing it and his own car, the boy still hasn’t filled in any of the insurance forms admitting liability.
The police lady dealing with it kept telling us what a lovely boy he is, and what a lovely family he comes from. I assume she didn’t want to press charges, evidenced by the fact that, following his admission of dangerous driving at the roadside, she didn’t press charges.
When it turned out that he was driving home in a trade car from the garage he works for, on a policy he later produced showing he was only insured for business use, not social or commuting, she said that she was sure it was fine.
She didn’t want to press charges, and after a while it became clear that the boy and his boss at the garage didn’t want to fill out any forms so we could claim on the insurance, either.
The police lady kept telling us what a lovely boy he is, and what a lovely family he comes from
We had to get a lawyer, and he insisted we demand to go to the local police station with a view to making a statement and asking the police to press charges.
So we did. The police lady showed us into the interview room and sat us down. We told her we agreed that this boy was a lovely, lovely boy. But the lovely boy was ruining our lives. Liability hangs over the BB all the while the lovely boy and his lovely boss won’t fill out the forms. How, I asked the Garda, can the lovely boy not admit he was at fault when he admitted it to her in a statement at the roadside and she wrote it all down in her pad?
She said she really did not understand it. He really was lovely and the garage owner he worked for who held the policy was lovely. Really, really lovely. I’m sure, I said. Only he had not been so lovely to us. He told me to get lost when I went to the garage to ask for his insurance details.
‘I hope you can see that we have no option but to ask you to press charges,’ I said. Her pen hovered. The BB shifted. Then he said: ‘Look, shall we give him another week? If he fills the forms out by the end of this week, that’s fine.’
She exhaled heavily and smiled. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘That’s a good idea!’ And she assured us she would ring the garage owner again and really lay it on the line to him how important it was that he and the boy fill out those forms honestly and as quickly as possible.
We got up to leave, the BB chatting small talk with her, and I thought: ‘We’re so screwed.’ I turned to him as we left the station and said: ‘You do realise we’ll have to come back here in a week when those forms have not been filled out, don’t you?’
When his phone rang later that evening and Lamb Man came up on the screen, I rushed it out to him in the woodshed, where he was chopping, because I felt we needed some input from a sympathetic local, and there’s no one around here more sympathetic to us than the man we buy whole butchered sheep from for the chest freezer.
Lamb Man laughed when the BB told him what was going on and said it would be the same if the boy had hit him. Nothing personal. Nothing to do with us being English. The BB found this reassuring, but I felt it was a moot point.
We got up to leave, the BB chatting small talk, and I thought: ‘We’re so screwed’
‘The main thing is, they’ll be told they’ve got a week or we press charges. So what other possible choice do they have?’ I said. Surely there was no other option left but for the garage owner to do the right thing?
But over the next few days, there was no sign of completed forms, and we remained in deadlock.
A week later, in the dead of the night, the dogs started barking. It wasn’t until the next morning when he went out to do the horses that the BB saw what had happened.
The small stone wall around the grass verge bordering our stable yard had been smashed to smithereens. Skid marks denoted where a vehicle had hit a patch of ice, come off the road, collided with our wall, and dragged the whole thing down as it surfed over the top, most likely wrecking its undercarriage and becoming a write-off in the process.
As the BB was clearing the rubble, he found a bash plate with a maker’s mark from the underside of a pick-up truck, the same make and model, as it happened, as his poor old truck which was sitting wrecked in our yard, not even assessed by the loss adjusters because of the garage owner’s refusal to co-operate.
It is a small world round here. We’ve never seen more than two of those trucks locally, and we knew where the other one was. It took us five minutes to drive in my car down the lane and find the house with the truck of that make and model dumped in a field behind a hedge.
I stood there with my mouth open. The BB blew his cheeks out. ‘I’m sure it’s possible,’ I said, ‘that another truck of that make drove from somewhere else in the night down our back lane for some reason and hit our wall. Maybe matey here has just separately put his truck in his field behind a hedge for another reason…’
But I could see what we were both silently thinking. It all depends on whether you think God has a terrific sense of humour.
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