Unexpected Returns

Marion Bowman & Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mr. Thom # 17, 1990

Can anyone help us to establish the legendary status of two stories which have in common the fact that a unexpectedly early return leads to the discovery of a crime? The first appeared in a letter to a popular magazine (My Weekly, 3 September 1988, p55):

My daughter-in-law’s friends were going on holiday and took a taxi to the airport. At the check-in they discovered they’d left their flight tickets at home. There was nothing for it but to go back for them, so the husband took a taxi home. Arriving at his house, he was puzzled to see another taxi parked outside. The house door was open and they caught their earlier taxi driver robbing the house. He already had the TV, video and several other items in his taxi. The police were called and the thief detained. But what if the people hadn’t forgotten their tickets?

The second story has been told in two different versions in the West of Scotland:

A woman leaves her car in Lewis’s car park in Glasgow. She forgets something so has to come back to the car almost immediately, only to discover the car gone. She rushes to the car park attendant who tells her that a man came with his seriously ill daughter . He couldn’t get his own car to start, but since his was the same make as her car, he tried the keys and found they fitted, so he rushed off to hospital with his daughter and will return the car as soon as possible. The woman is irate and dissatisfied, and rushes off to find a policeman. When they get back to the car park, the woman’s car is there, and the car park attendant goes through the story again . Somewhat mollified, the woman says she is furious, but probably won’t take the matter further.

In version 1, the story ends thus:

The policeman asks her is she sure the car is exactly as she left it. A quick inspection reveals four bald tyres instead of new ones. The car park attendant is charged with running a tyre racket.

In version 2, there are two policeman, one old, one young:

The older policeman says that although it was wrong to take the car, it was obviously an emergency, so he suggests the woman drops the matter. However, the young policeman asks her to check the car and the tyre switch is discovered. The older policeman and the car park attendant are eventually charged.

Perhaps significantly, the second version has supposedly been told by a private detective!

We cannot recall having seen these stories dealt with in any work on contemporary legend. Somewhat similar to the car park story is “Make sure you lock your car!” to be found in Paul Smith’s The Bool of Nastier legends (London: Routledge, 1986, p 37). It is a rather simpler narrative, in that the car owner merely returns to discover the car engine being removed. However, it might well have been an “ancestor” to the one we have quoted.