Every drop of diesel in a depot is accounted for, because diesel is the biggest bill after wages. The pumps log every fill with the fleet number keyed in and the litres. Every night at two a fill is logged from pump three, which was removed when the forecourt was rebuilt, into fleet number 231, which was scrapped the same year, for two hundred litres, and the tank gauge drops by two hundred litres.
I am the fuel and fleet administrator at a bus depot and the diesel reconciliation is the first thing I do every morning.
The system.
An underground tank, three pumps, a keypad on each. A driver keys in the fleet number and the pump releases and logs the litres against that bus. The tank has a gauge. Every morning the fills should add up to what the gauge says has gone, to within a few litres, and if they do not, somebody is stealing diesel, and that has happened, and that is why I check.
Every morning they add up. Because every night at two there is a fill from pump three.
Pump three.
There were three pumps until 2011, when the forecourt was rebuilt and the layout changed and three was taken out. There are two pumps. Where three stood is concrete. The system was told there were two pumps in 2011 and it has logged fills from three ever since, at two in the morning, and nobody read the log closely enough to see it for the first ten years because the totals added up.
Fleet 231. A double decker, on the fleet list until 2011, scrapped, and its number was retired, because we do not reuse them. Two hundred litres, which is about what a double decker took after a long day.
The tank goes down by two hundred litres. The diesel is gone.
What has been checked.
The system, by the supplier, who said pump three does not exist in the configuration and could not log a fill and then watched it log one at two.
The concrete, at two, by me, with a torch. It is concrete. At two the concrete is wet. A patch, where the nozzle would have been, a spreading dark patch, and the smell of diesel, strong, the smell of a fill in progress, and the sound, which anybody who has worked a forecourt knows, of the pump running and the nozzle in the tank and the fuel going in, and it goes in for the time two hundred litres takes, and stops, and there is the clunk of a nozzle going back on a hook that is not there, and the patch dries.
Nothing is there. Nothing was filled. The tank is down two hundred.
Whose fill.
The drivers who were here in 2011 remember 231. They remember who drove it, mostly, a man who had it for years, who would not drive anything else, who fuelled it himself every night at the end of his shift, at pump three, because three was nearest his bay, and who had died in the winter of 2010, in the cab, at pump three, with the nozzle in, of his heart, and had been found by the night engineer with the pump still running and the tank overflowing onto the concrete.
They took 231 off the road after that because nobody would drive it. They took pump three out when the forecourt was done because nobody would use it.
He is still filling up. Every night. Two hundred litres. And the tank goes down because the diesel goes into a bus that is not there, and I do not know where it goes after that.
What is done about it.
The two hundred litres is on the reconciliation every morning as a fill to 231 and the finance office has 231 as a live cost centre with a fuel spend of about seventy thousand pounds a year, and I have been asked to close it, and I have tried, and the system will not close a cost centre with activity on it, and the activity is every night.
What I do.
I do the reconciliation.
I have stopped trying to close 231. I have done the opposite. I have put it back on the fleet list, as a non operational vehicle, which is a category we have, with a note in the file that says, retained, and nobody has asked me what for.
I go out at two. I stand by the concrete with the torch. When the sound of the fill stops and the nozzle clunks onto the hook that is not there, I say what the night engineer used to say to the last driver in, which is, that's the lot, get yourself home. And the patch dries, and the log says two hundred litres to 231, and the finance office pays it, and I think that is about what it costs, in the end, to keep a man from being found at a pump every night for fifteen years with nobody to tell him he is done.