CONSTABLE IN DISGUISE a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain's best-loved authors (Constable Nick Mystery Book 9) by NICHOLAS RHEA

Author:NICHOLAS RHEA [RHEA, NICHOLAS]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Joffe Books cozy crime and mystery
Published: 2020-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting

what I think is a cheat.

SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709—84

ONE OF THE CRIMES which puzzled, and probably still puzzles, the general public was that of taking and driving away a motor vehicle without having either the consent of the owner or other lawful authority. This bafflement has arisen because this is not the same crime as stealing a motor vehicle. The two are quite distinct, and the essential difference is that stealing entails the intention of permanently depriving the owner of his property, while the unauthorised borrower has no such intention. He takes a vehicle for a joy-ride, and youths would take cars simply to get them home after a night out, after which they would abandon them with little thought of the owners’ anguish or little anxiety about the damage and expense they had caused the unfortunate owner. Almost without exception, the cars were found by the police and restored to their owners.

For some years, this unlawful taking of motor vehicles was not a crime, simply because it had not been considered when the early definitions of larceny were compiled. To prosecute the ‘takers’ for something, they were occasionally charged with stealing the petrol they had consumed. This smacked of desperation, but what else could be done by the police?

Later, because an increasing number of cars were being ‘borrowed’ illicitly, the offence was written into the law, albeit not as part of the law on stealing but as part of the 1930’s road traffic law. It was another thirty years or so before the law realised that other forms of conveyance were also borrowed without lawful authority and that no statute catered for them. They included bikes, hang-gliders, aircraft, boats, trains and roller-skates — in fact, it now includes anything constructed or adapted for the carriage of persons by land, water or air, whether or not such a thing has an engine fitted. However, it does not include things which are pedestrian-controlled, such as prams and lawnmowers. This long-overdue 1968 law did, of course, continue to include cars, lorries, buses and other such means of transport.

The unlawful borrowing of that mass of other conveyances was not written into the Theft Act until 1968, and so, when I was a young constable and an Aide to CID, I was not concerned with the unauthorised taking of all conveyances but merely with those which fell into the definition of motor vehicles. But we were heavily into the popular crime of Taking Without Consent, as we called it in long-hand, or TWOC as we abbreviated it. We pronounced it TWOCK.

There was no crime of TWOCing a pedal cycle, however (there is now), and so lots of illicit bike-borrowers were never prosecuted simply because they had committed no criminal offence. Now, a bike is within the meaning of a conveyance, and so illegal borrowers can be prosecuted.

One of the more popular crimes when I was an Aide to CID was the relay TWOC. A man would

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