Nathan Trentham: The Stolen Car
The call came at 07:12 on a wet Tuesday. A 2019 Audi A6, midnight blue, had vanished from a locked garage on Meanwood Road. Owner: Derek Hallam, mid-level accounts manager, recently divorced, recently promoted. Hallam insisted the car was “the last decent thing I had left.”
Trentham arrived before eight. The garage door showed no forced entry. The alarm log (Hallam had given him the app password) showed it had been disarmed with the correct code at 02:47 and re-armed at 02:51. No cameras covered the alley.
Trentham walked the route a thief would take. Two streets over he found a faint scrape of midnight-blue paint on a low brick wall and a discarded energy-drink can still cold. He bagged it.
By noon he had the CCTV from a nearby petrol station. A man in a grey hoodie and baseball cap filled a jerry can at 02:31, paid cash, then walked toward Meanwood. The cap hid most of the face, but the walk was familiar: slightly pigeon-toed, left shoulder higher.
Trentham pulled Hallam’s divorce file from the public records he still knew how to search. The ex-wife, Claire, had been awarded the house but not the car. She had a younger brother, Liam, who lived three miles away and had a conviction for taking vehicles without consent in 2018.
Trentham found Liam at a lock-up behind a row of terraces. The Audi was inside, plates already swapped. Liam claimed Claire had given him the code “because Derek was going to sell it out from under her.” Claire, when confronted, denied it for twenty minutes, then admitted she had texted the code in anger the night before.
Trentham called the police, handed over the can and the footage, and wrote his invoice. Hallam paid in cash and asked if Trentham thought people ever really changed.
“Not in my notebooks,” Trentham said, and limped back to the kebab shop.
