Looking for White Van Man

 

In court, the Crown's 'witnesses' claimed that a van, a white one, perhaps belonging to the Gas Board, had broken down at the locus of the incident.
They made no mention of any patrol car or recovery vehicle in attendance.
The Crown used the 'white van' to account for my alleged swerve into the path of Peter Carnegie's Astra.
In so doing, it inextricably linked the location of the broken-down van with the location of the incident.

The van was not mentioned in either of the 2 witness statements taken by PC Bell, nor was it mentioned in the sole Precognition Statement, given by MacGregor.
The first the defence knew of it was at noon the day before the trial, when the Procurator Fiscal Depute phoned my solicitor with an outline of her evidence against me.
I knew there hadn't been a van obstructing the road when I'd passed and became rather interested in its origin.
At first though, I assumed it was just another invention, one the Crown hoped would add credibility to its case.
After the trial, I wrote to Betty Bott, the Procurator Fiscal, asking when she first became aware of the van.
She did not bother replying.
The Gas Board were more helpful, though. They told me their vans are blue, not white. So, it was the Crown's carefully constructed red herring.
I next asked Tayside’s Chief Constable if there was a record of a broken-down white van about 400 yards from Myrekirk Rd, and was astonished to get a phone call from an Inspector Gordon Taylor, head of the Divisional Road Policing Unit.
Reading from a Patrol Log, he said there was a report of just such a vehicle 'causing an obstruction' at 18:10 hours on 15 June 2004. The report said a breakdown truck was standing by and the road was reopened at 18:27 hours.
I asked Taylor for a copy of the Log, but was told it was 'an operational matter': I could not have one.
I asked for a registration number and if the patrol officer could provide more details of the breakdown.
But Taylor said the officer's name was not in the report. And the registration had not been recorded. Months later, I read a newspaper story about the Freedom of Information Act. Inspector Taylor was wrong: operational matter or not, I was entitled to a copy of the Log. So I applied  and was eventually 

sent a redacted version of the Log.
It recorded the following: the police were notified of a broken down vehicle causing an obstruction on the A90 Kingsway West at 18:08; a Recovery vehicle was already in attendance when the patrol car arrived at 18:11; all vehicles had left the scene by 18:27.
The type, colour and registration of the vehicle were not mentioned and there was no description of where the breakdown had occurred.
But the Log did give a grid reference: 334616 730797. This converts to a latitude / longitude of 56°27'53.1"N 3°03'45.8"W, which happens to be the exact centre of the Swallow roundabout, which is almost a mile to the west of the locus given in court by the prosecution.
When I asked Taylor about the discrepancy, he wrote: "The grid reference allocated to incidents, particularly referring to a stretch of road as in this case, cannot be relied upon as being where an actual event occurred. A90 Kingsway West as you are aware forms part of the trunk road round Dundee and several grid references can be attributed to it".
So Taylor had gone from confirming the breakdown location as 400 yards from the Myrekirk Road roundabout to saying it could have been almost anywhere on Kingsway West.

Still, the fact that the stated grid reference placed the patrol car in the middle of a roundabout suggests that it was an indicative reference only, thereby supporting Taylor's claim.
Kingsway West has 4 or 5 other major junctions, which would also have grid references allocated for indicative reasons.
Police Control would then know which of its patrol cars was nearest to a reported incident.
This suggests that our patrol car must have been in the vicinity of the Swallow roundabout when it was asked to attend the broken down van.
Providing further support, the Log gives the beat assigned to the patrol as C27. This beat, known as Menzieshill, is bordered on its west by the section of the A90 between Riverside Avenue at the Swallow roundabout and the Myrekirk Road roundabout.
By contrast, the section of the A90 between Myrekirk Road and Liff Road (near the locus of the alleged incident) comes under a different beat, Charleston (C22).
Although our patrol car could have crossed into neighbouring beat C22, I would suggest that it was more likely than not to have been in its own beat, C27, when attending the breakdown, which must, therefore, have happened  near the Swallow roundabout.

I saw that the patrol officer was named in the Log (as CT14). I asked for him to be interviewed.
Perhaps it was a lot to expect of a police officer - to recall an unremarkable event that had taken place more than 2 years earlier.
I was not surprised to be told he could remember nothing about the breakdown.

So what had I learned from the Incident Log?
*That just about the only thing Insp Taylor got right when he contacted me was that no registration number was recorded for the broken down vehicle.
*That the vehicle was almost certainly the alleged white van (no other breakdowns were reported around that time).
*That it probably broke down close to the Swallow roundabout.
*That it was first recorded 38 minutes after I had passed - quite some time after the Crown claimed the alleged incident had taken place.

I contacted a local paper, the Dundee Courier, hoping to exchange notes with the reporter who had been present at the trial.
I got no help from the editor or his staff.
Even so, I placed an advert in the rag, asking for the driver of the van to come forward, offering a reward. 

 
There were no takers.

I also contacted several local garages that operate recovery services but found none that had attended the breakdown.

I wondered if Carnegie had learned of the van from one of his police contacts (such as his daughter's step-father, a police officer).
Alternatively, I thought he might have driven past it on his way home to 29 Dalgetty Court, Muirhead that evening - one of his routes takes him through Liff via the Swallow roundabout.

But in my view the most likely explanation is that Catherine MacGregor, having left her office at Rossleigh Jaguar in Perth 30 to 45 minutes after her motorcyclist boyfriend, remembered seeing the van stranded by the roadside and mentioned it to Moir, who decided it was worth incorporating into the fake account.
The van would have to be teleported back in time to another location, but what the hell - no one in authority would bother checking.
And so it proved.