Someone pays €80 a month for a van they never collect

On Thursday at ten past nine, Bruno Egea dropped a list of sixty-one vehicles and a red marker on Ruth Anglada's desk.

—Cross off the ones that leave —he said—. The new company takes over on 14 October and these sixty-one cannot still be here. Every vehicle left behind costs us two hundred and forty euros to move.

Ruth was twenty-two and had been three weeks at the municipal vehicle pound in Rabasa, Alicante: front desk, payments, releases and phone. A contract until 31 October, a room in Carolinas for three hundred and forty euros a month, and a renewal that depended — Bruno had said it without decorating it — on that list ending up clean. Bruno was the yard manager, fifty-one, eleven years there, and he wanted the same thing she did for a different reason: the moving costs came out of his budget.

The yard held four hundred and twelve vehicles in fourteen rows, licence plates written on the windscreens in wax pencil. Most lasted three days: the owner turned up, paid the tow and the storage, signed and drove off swearing. The ones at the back had been there for years. Cars sink slowly back there: the tyres go down, the plastics turn white, pigeons get in through the door seals.

Bay 214 was a white Citroën Berlingo with the refrigeration unit still fitted and a faded fish sticker on the side door. Plate 4471 KDR. It came in on 3 July 2023. When Ruth opened the file to cross it off, the screen gave her a set of figures she had not seen on any other vehicle on the list.

Storage: 1,158 days at 6.10 euros a day. Seven thousand and sixty-three euros eighty. Tow-away fee: one hundred and twenty-one. Total accrued: 7,184.80 euros. Payments on account: thirty-seven. Balance: 4,224.80 euros.

Ruth opened the detail. Thirty-seven payments, all identical: eighty euros, always on the 3rd, always cash, always at the branch across the street, with the file number handwritten on the slip and the payer's box left blank. The first one was dated 3 August 2023.

—That's the eighty-euro van —said Chelo Marimón from the far end of the counter, without looking up from her receipt book.

Chelo was fifty-eight and had nineteen years in the job. She had worked the morning shift since before the software Ruth was staring at existed.

—So why does nobody come for it?

—Because getting it out costs four thousand two hundred and twenty-four euros eighty —said Chelo—. And because whoever pays doesn't want to get it out. They want it to stay right there.

She explained it with the regulations open in front of her, in the tone you use to read the temperature of a cold room. A vehicle goes to waste treatment, which in the yard everyone calls the crusher, once it has spent two months in the pound with no movement on the file. A payment on account is movement. Eighty euros on the 3rd kept the Berlingo officially alive.

—Then it's cheap —said Ruth.

—It is not cheap. Storage runs at six ten a day: one hundred and eighty-five euros a month. Whoever pays eighty owes one hundred and five more every time they pay. They have spent three years paying in order to owe more.

There was a phone number on the file. Ruth dialled it twice and twice got the same recorded voice: number not in service. The registered keeper was Óscar Pomares Gil, address in Novelda, and there was a notice returned in October 2023 stamped absent. Nothing else. Not an appeal, not a call, not a single visit logged in three years.

In the notes box, in round handwriting and blue ballpoint, someone had written a long time ago: payment on account on the 3rd, check before writing off.

—Did you put this here? —Ruth asked.

—I put it there —said Chelo—. And now you have a list and a marker. That's how this works.

At eleven forty the bank alert landed in the pound's inbox. Cash deposit. Eighty euros. File 214/2023. The balance dropped to four thousand one hundred and forty-four euros eighty.

Ruth looked at the time on the screen and then at the list, still without a single line through it. It was the 3rd. Someone had just paid instalment number thirty-eight on a van that, according to the sheet in front of her, was going to the crusher in forty-one days. And that someone had been, at eleven forty that morning, sixty metres from her window.

Ruth crossed the street. At the branch they showed her the part of the slip they were allowed to show her: file number, amount, time. Not the payer's name.

—Is it always the same person? —she asked.

—Always on the 3rd —said the cashier—. And today, before paying, she asked whether the van was still there.