The cameras at our barriers read number plates, so a car that comes in is matched to the same car going out and charged for the time between. Every morning at ten past five the exit camera reads a plate, matches it to nothing, and lifts the barrier anyway, which it is not built to do. The plate belongs to a car that was crushed thirty years ago.
I run the number plate system at a multi storey car park, which is two cameras and a database and a great deal of telephone time.
How it works.
Camera at the entrance reads the plate, starts a session. Camera at the exit reads the plate, ends the session, and the barrier lifts when the session is paid. A plate the exit camera does not have a session for is a car that got in without being read, and for those the barrier stays down and the help point gets pressed and I sort it out.
At ten past five every morning the exit camera reads a plate with no session, and the barrier lifts.
The plate.
An old format, the kind with the year letter on the end. I ran it. The vehicle was a saloon, dark blue, first registered 1978, and the record ends in 1994 with a certificate of destruction from a yard that is no longer there. It was scrapped. It has not been on a road in thirty years.
It leaves my car park every morning.
What has been checked.
The exit camera. It has a photo of every read. The photo at ten past five shows the barrier, the lane, the wall, the painted arrow on the floor. There is no car in it. The software has drawn its green box round the place where the plate was read, at the height a plate is, over empty tarmac, and in the box it has written the plate, and a confidence of ninety eight per cent.
The barrier. Its log says it lifted on a paid exit. The session it was paid for does not exist in the database and the payment it is paid by does not exist either. The barrier is a simple thing. It lifts when it is told to. Something tells it.
The entrance camera. Never once. Whatever leaves every morning does not come in past the camera, or comes in by some way a camera does not see.
Where it comes from.
I walked the levels at five one morning, from the top, with the exit on my phone. Nothing on six, five, four. On three there was a smell of exhaust, old exhaust, the leaded kind that you do not smell any more, and the smell was strongest at the ramp down to two, and on two it was at the ramp down to one, and on one it was on the lane to the exit, and as I came round the last pillar the barrier was up and the exit camera's photo on my phone had the green box on empty tarmac and the smell was in the lane and going out of it, into the street, and the street at that hour was empty, and I stood in the smell until it had gone.
The yard.
I found the man who ran the scrapyard, through his son. He was old and happy to talk and he remembered the car, because it had come to him from the police, and because it had been the car in the thing at the car park, the man who had been found in it on level four after eleven weeks, and he had crushed it himself, and he said it had not wanted to go in the press, which is a thing scrap men say, and he said it as a joke, and then he asked why I was asking, and I told him, and he was not joking after that.
What is done about it.
The exit at ten past five is logged as a free exit, no session, camera fault, and the revenue loss is one overnight stay a day, which finance have, and which nobody has multiplied by the years.
What I do.
I run the cameras.
I have stopped trying to make the barrier stay down. I tried, once, with the software, and the camera read the plate at ten past five and the barrier stayed down, and the barrier arm, on the exit camera's photos, one a second, bent. Upwards. A steel arm a car cannot lift, bent to the angle it opens to, by nothing, and held there for the time a car takes to pass, and came down, and it is bent still, and I have not replaced it.
It has been trying to leave since 1989. Every morning it gets as far as the street. And every morning, because there is no entry record, the system has no idea how long it has been here, and I am the only one who does, and I have not got the heart to put it in.