Читать книгу Cops and Robbers - Ant Anstead - Страница 32

There’s nothing an area car driver likes more than to borrow a Traffic car if theirs is in the workshops for some reason. And there’s nothing a traffic cop hates more than having to lend one of ‘their’ cars out to a lowly area car driver, especially if they return it dirty or with no fuel in it.

Within my office, despite our best efforts to deny our area car colleagues the loan of our cars, we were told in no uncertain terms by the white shirts that the cars were in fact a force resource and not our own personal transport. So it was one wet wintry evening that the phone rang. It was the area car crew from Havant nick with the question that I didn’t really want to answer: Could they borrow a car for the night shift as theirs was off the road? We ran a 50/50 fleet of BMW 525i saloons and Mk2 Vauxhall Senator 3.0i 24-valve cars at the time and I told them to take the oldest car on the fleet; a K-reg Senator. After giving them the usual lecture about fuel and washing it down before returning it, I went home.

The next morning as I sat in the kitchen eating my breakfast, I switched on the local radio station to listen to the news. It was the main headline, ‘Police car explodes into flames in Havant after crashing into a gas main but thankfully with no injuries!’ A wry smile came over my face but it was immediately wiped off when a local resident was interviewed and stated that it was ‘one of them motorway cars’.

It transpired that the area car crew were on a shout, in the wet, and as they negotiated a right-hand bend they lost it, over-corrected it, entered the forecourt of a local house and collided with a cast-iron box about two feet square that contained the mains gas pipe to the house. The Senator landed on top of the box and as the escaping gas met the exhaust manifold … boom, up it went. That same local resident went on to say that the 20-foot-high flame coming through the bonnet resembled one of those Bunsen burners we used at school! Needless to say, we didn’t get the Senator back and the area car crew never asked us for another one!