A car park counts. The barrier counts every car in and every car out, and the sign at the entrance shows what is left. Every night, after the last car leaves and the count reads zero, the count on level four reads one. The camera on level four shows a car, in a bay that is not on the plan, that was not there at close.
I run a multi storey car park in a town centre, nights, and the count is my job.
How it counts.
A loop in the road at the entrance barrier and one at the exit. Car in, one off the total. Car out, one on. The sign at the entrance shows spaces left. Each level has its own loop on the ramp, so I can see how many are on each floor, and at close I go round with a torch and check that the count is right, because somebody asleep in a car on level six is a problem.
At close, the count is zero. Every level zero. I have walked it.
At about one in the morning, level four goes to one.
The camera on level four.
Level four has two cameras, one at each end. At about one, on the camera at the far end, there is a car. It is parked nose in, in the corner, against the wall, where there is no bay. The bays stop two metres short of that wall because of a pillar, and the car is parked in the gap, which a car does not fit in, and it fits.
It is an old car. A saloon, dark, the shape they were forty years ago. No plate that the camera can read. Lights off. Nobody in it.
It is not there at half past twelve. It is there at one. It does not drive up the ramp: the ramp camera and the ramp loop see nothing. It is not there, and then it is.
What has been checked.
The loops. Recalibrated. The count on level four goes to one.
The camera. Replaced. The car is on it.
Level four, by me, on foot, at one in the morning, with the torch. The corner is empty. The count reads one. The camera in my office, which I can see on my phone, shows the car in the corner and shows me standing next to it with my torch, and the torch, on the camera, lights the car's side, and the car's side, on the camera, has my shadow on it.
The car.
I looked up the model, from the shape. It was common once. I asked the man who ran the car park before me, who is retired, and he said that a car like that had been on level four for eleven weeks in the eighties before anybody looked in it, because the car park was pay and display then and nobody counted, and it had a man in it who had been there for most of the eleven weeks, and that after that the council put the loops in.
He said the corner by the pillar was where it was. He said they took the bay out afterwards and painted the wall.
What is done about it.
The count is one on level four from one until about five, and then it is zero. The sign at the entrance, which is total spaces less the count, is out by one for those four hours, and I have a note in the log every night that says level four loop fault, and the council has a job number for it, and the job has been closed twice as no fault found.
What I do.
I run it at night.
The exit barrier opens for a car on the way out. It has a loop on the approach and when a car is on the loop the barrier lifts, and at about five, every morning, when level four goes back to zero, the exit barrier lifts. The loop reads a car. The camera on the exit shows the barrier up and nothing under it. The barrier waits the time it waits for a car to clear and comes down.
It leaves. Every morning at five it leaves, and every night at one it comes back and parks in the corner where the bay used to be, and I have started to think that the eleven weeks were the problem, that nobody came, and that what it is doing now is the opposite, and that I am the one who counts.
I have painted the bay back in. White lines, in the corner, the width of a car, against the wall. It was not on the plan and the council will ask. It parks in it now, straight, and the count on level four is still one, and I have stopped writing loop fault in the log and started writing one vehicle, level four, overnight, known, and the council has not asked what that means.