A Dark Night In Ushaw Moor

 

Here’s a story for you.  

On a Saturday morning back in February of 2024, my neighbour, Billy, told me he had seen someone mooching about the back lane, trying garage doors and cars, so I checked my car to find it had been unlocked and my guitar amp and bag of pedals with assorted gubbins had been removed from the boot.

I usually parked the car with the boot right up against the garage where it couldn’t be opened but had left it in a different spot that night, never thinking about the stuff stashed inside.  

I reported it to the police and started seeing all these Facebook posts of other stories of similar things happening all over the village that night, along with camera footage.  They were using some kind of electronic relay device which can create a link between your car and key fob if the two are close enough which can unlock your car as easily as with the key.

That Saturday night, there had been a load of police sirens late on, about midnight, and Sunday morning there was a police car stationed outside the pizza shop.  The shopfront was now heavily decorated with police tape and the glass door smashed in.   The scene was still the same by Monday morning. 

It turned out there was a break-in, a stabbing and a hostage situation, the perpetrators arrested and some poor guy in hospital.  Once forensics had been in, my neighbour down the road got the job of clearing the flat - house clearing being one of his many sidelines, and low and behold, among the blood splatters and everything else, he finds my Marshall amplifier and a big bag of guitar pedals stashed behind a couch, which are now in my possession.  

It would be reasonable to question the integrity of a police forensic investigation not finding them first, but I was more than happy with the outcome.  The only thing that was missing was a battered old M&Ms tin, probably because it had some loose change in it, about 3 quid at the most. 

They likely had little idea they were in possession of around £1600 worth of gear and even less idea how to sell it.  A pair of absolute idiots on an all-night thieving rampage in their own village, taking all the stolen gear back to their own flat, then get wasted out of their nappers the next night and coerce someone back to their flat, tie up and torture the poor guy for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They are now well on their way to lengthy jail time – not their first offences by far as it had transpired, and I shall never leave anything in my car again.  Life lessons; ignore them at your peril.