Salvage

Ferris & Son takes about eleven hundred vehicles a year, of which perhaps four hundred are insurance write-offs and the rest are end-of-life.

The work is straightforward. Drain the fluids, take the battery, take the catalytic converter, strip anything with a part number worth listing, and put what is left through the baler.

Marek has run the yard since his father died in 2009 and has been in it since he was eleven.

The two kinds

An end-of-life car arrives on its own wheels or on a flatbed, and it is dirty, and there are usually things in it — a phone charger, a child's shoe, four hundred receipts in the door pocket — and Marek's father taught him to bag those and hold them for thirty days, which no regulation requires and which the yard has always done.

An insurance write-off arrives on a low-loader.

Some of them arrive with the roof cut off.

On the roof

When the fire service cuts a person out of a vehicle, they very often take the roof off entirely — cut the pillars, fold it back or lift it clear — because it is the fastest way to get a spinal board in.

A car with its roof cut off has been in a collision that somebody had to be cut out of.

That is all it tells you. It does not tell you whether they lived.

What Marek does

He does not look them up.

This is a rule and he made it in 2011 after he looked one up, and it took him about eleven days to come back to normal, and he has not done it since in fourteen years.

The rule is not squeamishness. He has been in the yard since he was eleven and he is not squeamish. The rule is that there are about forty of them a year, and forty a year across fourteen years is five hundred and sixty, and no one person can carry that as information rather than as work.

So they are work. They come in, he strips them, they go through the baler.

What he does instead

The bags.

The thirty-day rule applies to everything, including the roofless ones, and the insurers do not ask for it and the families almost never do, and so about twice a month Marek bags up the contents of a car in which somebody was very badly hurt and puts it on the shelf in the office and waits thirty days.

He has been doing this since 2009 and in that time he has been contacted eleven times.

Eleven out of, he estimates, five hundred and sixty.

The eleven

They are, without exception, the worst part of the job, and he would not give any of them up.

They ring, or more often they turn up, and they are apologetic in a way that is very hard to be in a room with, and what they are looking for is never anything you would guess.

A woman in 2013 wanted a pair of sunglasses. Not a keepsake — she needed to know whether they were in the car, because if they were in the car then her mother had been wearing them, and if her mother had been wearing them then she had been driving into the sun, and the woman had a thing in her head about that which she needed to close.

They were in the door pocket. Marek gave them to her and she stood in the office and cried for a long time and then said thank you and went, and he has thought about her about four times a year ever since.

A man in 2019 wanted a CD.

A boy of about seventeen in 2022 wanted nothing at all. He wanted to see the car. Marek said no, because the car was in the baled stack, and then he went and got the bag instead and let the boy go through it on the counter, and the boy took a parking permit and left everything else.

The one he broke the rule for

March this year.

A saloon on a low-loader, roof off, front end back to the bulkhead.

He bagged the contents. A phone, a wallet, a lanyard, a plastic tub with a sandwich in it, and a birthday card, unopened, in an envelope with a name on it in a child's handwriting.

The thirty days ran out in April.

Marek did not put it through with the other unclaimed items.

He put it in his own desk, and in May he did the thing he has not done since 2011, which is that he looked it up.

What he found

The driver survived.

He was in hospital for nine weeks and there is a fundraising page with a photograph on it and a very long update from his sister, and Marek read all of it standing in the yard office at seven in the morning.

The card in the bag was from a daughter, aged about six by the handwriting, and the birthday it was for was the day of the crash.

What he did

He posted it.

There is no procedure for this and it is arguably a breach of about four things. He wrote no covering note because he tried nine times and every version was worse than nothing.

He put the card in a padded envelope and sent it to the address on the fundraising page, and then he had a very bad fortnight waiting to find out whether he had done something unforgivable.

In June a woman rang the yard.

She did not say much. She said the card had arrived and that her husband had opened it in the rehabilitation unit, and that their daughter had been told it was lost in the crash, and that she had been told this in February and had accepted it, and that she had not accepted it at all.

Then she said: "How did you know?"

And Marek, who had rehearsed several answers, said the true one, which was: "I didn't. I just had it."