Read Online Others by James Herbert - Free Book Online

meant catching the train to London. I wanted him to pay a call on the General Registrar Office, where there should be a record of baby Ripstone/ Teasdale’s birth, as temporary as that condition might have been.
    As I hit the first cigarette of the day I thought of the baby’s mother, Shelly Ripstone, and wondered why she was so positive her son was still alive. Just on the word of a possibly fake clairvoyant? Didn’t make sense. And something else that didn’t make sense was why I shared the same intuition.

6
    I was on my second repo of the day when I got the call from Philo on my mobile.
    The first of the two vehicle repossessions had been for a BMW, which unfortunately was parked in the driveway of an upmarket residence situated in a plusher part of Brighton’s suburbia. The car’s owner - or non-owner, because he hadn’t kept up his payments - was one of those flash businessmen who knew all the answers, someone who did well by living on his wits and running up debts. He was aware of his rights and was only too pleased to inform me of them when I rang his doorbell and showed him the letter of authorization from the credit company that empowered me to take the BMW away. With a self-satisfied grin he’d snatched the letter from me and torn it to pieces (that was okay, I had three photocopies, two of them in my briefcase). Standing on his doorstep, he towered over me, yet still he stretched himself to full height (I could see him pivoting on the balls of his feet) in an effort to intimidate me even more. I got that kind of thing all the time: people either patronized me, letting me know my deformities meant nothing at all to them, that I was just one of the chaps, or they got nasty and made the most of what they considered my shortcomings. Either way, it made no difference to me: I was there to do a job, that’s all there was to it.
    This debtor had been expecting my call, no doubt forewarned by a prior visit from the finance company’s own man, and his only surprise was my appearance itself. He hadn’t bothered to lie by telling me the cheque was in the post, or that the lender and he had come to some agreement about the unpaid sums only an hour or so before I’d arrived; no, he didn’t bother because he knew that legally I couldn’t touch the BMW while it was on private property, i.e. his own driveway. If I tried to repossess, I’d be guilty of taking and driving away without consent, and the police held a dim view of auto theft, whatever the circumstances. However, in such cases there is an answer as far as the poor old repossessor who, after all, is only trying to do his job, is concerned: you turned the tables, reversed the situation. I stuck a copy of the authorization letter under the windscreen wiper and informed the defaulter, who remained on the doorstep, hands in pockets, grin mouldering into a scowl, that the vehicle had been officially repossessed by the finance company and that if he took it out on the public highway (my address was as formal as this) it would constitute an arrestable offence because he was no longer the legal owner. The police would be informed and if he were to be stopped by them, he, himself, would be charged with taking away and driving without the owner’s consent.
    That ruse hadn’t pleased him one bit, but I knew as he slammed his front door on me that by the time I returned next day he would have seen sense and given in to the inevitable. He might throw the keys at me, but at least I’d be able to drive the BMW away.
    My second ‘bust’ that day was a lot easier. The car was a Golf GTi and I had expected some trouble: you can usually tell by the vehicle the kind of person the driver is likely to be and a sports model invariably meant ‘aggressive’. So I was delighted that the GTi was parked in the roadway and even more delighted that when I knocked on the debtor’s front door, there was nobody in. Pushing the authorization letter through the letterbox, I went back