“Twocking,” Oliver replied.
I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. And that sounded a whole lot like a joke. “What the hell are you on about?”
“Taking without owner’s consent. Or just taking without consent, or simply twocking. If the car is damaged, it could be aggravated twocking.”
If our kid hadn’t been missing, I’d have had something to say about how weird it was that we gave crimes such cutesy names in this country. But time was of the essence, so I pulled out my phone and tried calling Jaz.
And I heard a ringing.
From the dining table. Where Oliver had left her phone after he confiscated it.
“Fuck.”
I really needed Oliver to be calm right then, and he was.Perturbed, but calm. “Then I suppose,” he said, “we try the police and cross the twocking bridge when we come to it.”
Only we didn’t, because his phone rang before we got the chance.
“This is probably mixed news,” he said, answering it. Then there was a “Yes” and then a “Was there by any chance a teenage girl with the car?” followed by a long silence and then “Her name is Jasmine Johnson, she has a right to the presence of an appropriate adult; my partner and I are her legal guardians.”
“Let me guess,” I said, once he’d hung up. “Twocking.”
Oliver nodded gravely. “Possibly aggravated twocking.”
“Fuck.”
He went back to his phone. “I’ll get a taxi. We need to be in Dagenham.”
* * *
Just-long-enough-to-change-out-of-pyjamas later, the taxi arrived. And, barely twenty minutes after that, we were getting out in front of a squat brick building that looked so much like the first thing you’d imagine when you heard the phrase “a police station in Dagenham” that I was briefly worried the driver had dropped us off there from sheer power of suggestion. Fortunately, it turned out some places are exactly what they look like. We hurried inside, and behind the desk, we found a duty officer whose boredom and tiredness were fighting for control of his face, with no clear winner.
“I’m Oliver Blackwood,” said Oliver. “I’m here for my car, and to speak with Jasmine Johnson.”
The duty officer spoke into an intercom. “Blackwood, here for the twocker.”
“Alleged twocker,” Oliver corrected. Then he followed up with, “I’ll need a room where we can speak privately.”
That seemed like a stretch to me, and it must have seemed like astretch to the officer, too, because he gave Oliver a shifty look. “Not sure we can do that.”
“You have a legal obligation to,” Oliver told him. Because of course he did. Oliver wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise.
“Says who?”
“Your code of practice under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984,” replied Oliver smoothly.
I’d seen this a few times now, and it never stopped feeling like magic. There was just something about a well-dressed man confidently citing legislation that made people in general and the police in particular get very compliant, very quickly.
Not long after, we were sitting in a spare interview room, completely unsupervised, with Jaz. And this time she wasn’t even in handcuffs. Although shewasglaring at us both like she actively resented our being in the same room, building, city, country, or planet as her.
“Have they explained your rights?” Oliver asked.
Jaz shrugged.
“Jaz”—I still wasn’t wild about Oliver doing his I’m-being-calm-and-in-control tone with Jaz, but at least he’d stopped calling her Jasmine—“I know we’ve had an argument, and I do apologise for my part in it, but right now, it’s very important that you listen to me.”
She shrugged again.
“Have they tried to photograph or fingerprint you?”
