My neighbour threw a bucket of red paint over my car at two in the morning — by breakfast there were three police cars outside her house, and an officer told me not to wash it
My neighbour threw a bucket of red paint over my car at two in the morning — by breakfast there were three police cars outside her house, and an officer told me not to wash it.
Deb Mulcahy and I had been at it about the driveway since March.
The space beside my garage is mine. It is on the deeds, it is eleven feet wide, and it has been mine since I moved into 9 Halloway Row.
Deb's position was that it was "basically shared" because the previous owner had let her use it.
Six months. Notes under the wiper. A conversation over the fence in June that got loud. Two emails from her to my solicitor.
On Tuesday the second of September I finally had her SUV towed.
She stood on her porch and shouted, "You'll regret that," and I shouted something back that I am not going to write down.
Two days later, at thirteen minutes past two in the morning, I woke up to a bang.
Metal. Loud enough that I thought something had come off the roof.
I went to the bedroom window and Deb Mulcahy was running across my lawn in a coat over her nightdress.
There was a bucket on its side by my car.
And my white SUV was red. The bonnet, the windscreen, the whole nearside, and a great deal of it down the back.
By the time I got the door open she was inside her own house with the lights off.
I had no camera on that driveway. No witness. Nothing.
I rang 101 at about twenty to three and gave a statement over the phone and named her, and the call handler was extremely nice and I came off that call absolutely certain that nothing was going to happen.
At twenty past seven the next morning somebody banged on my door.
I expected Deb.
There were three police cars in the street and two officers were in her garage and Deb Mulcahy was standing barefoot on her own front lawn in her pyjamas shouting:
"I haven't done anything."
And one of them came across to me.
A sergeant. Fifties, grey, the kind of officer who has been in one town a long time.
He said: "Morning. Is the damaged vehicle yours?"
I said yes.
And he looked at the red paint down the back of it for about four seconds and said:
"Don't wash it."
I said why.
And then a younger officer came out of Deb's garage carrying a half-empty tin of red masonry paint by the rim, with a glove on.
And I actually laughed. I said something like, "Well. There's my proof, then."
And neither of them smiled.
The sergeant looked at me in a way I did not understand at the time, and said:
"This isn't about your car."
And then: "When did you buy it?"
I said three years ago. February of 2022. Why.
He walked round the back of it and crouched down by the rear bumper.
Here is what had happened, and it is the thing that everything else comes out of.
Masonry paint has a solvent in it. It sat on that bumper for five hours and it lifted something.
There was a patch of white touch-up on the nearside rear bumper that I had never once noticed in three and a half years, because it was white on a white car and because nobody looks at the back of their own bumper.
The red had gone into it and softened it and part of it had come away.
And underneath there were letters, scratched into the plastic.
Not many. Four characters and part of a fifth.
He wiped them with his thumb, very carefully, and then he did it again.
And then he read them out to himself, twice, and stood up so fast that his knee cracked.
And he said into his radio: "Can you get me the reference for the Marden Lane job. October twenty-one."
And then, to the younger officer, and not loudly:
"Get her away from the vehicle."
And that is when I stopped being a woman in a parking dispute.
The fourteenth of October, 2021.
At about twenty to seven in the evening, on Marden Lane in Alderton, a woman called Marit Vey was hit from behind while cycling home.
She was thirty-one. The vehicle did not stop.
She has a below-knee amputation and an acquired brain injury and she is thirty-five now and she will never work again in the field she trained in for six years.
There was one witness.
A fourteen-year-old boy on the pavement called Ezra Colm.
He was about four metres away. He ran at the car as it pulled off, and he got his hand on the back of it, and he had his house key out because he was on his way home.
And he scratched the registration into the bumper.
He got four characters and part of a fifth before it accelerated away.
Then he rang 999 and sat with Marit Vey on the road for eleven minutes until the ambulance came, and he told the first officer on scene exactly what he had done.
That officer was Marco Delaine.
He is fifty-two. He took Ezra Colm's account in the back of a car on Marden Lane on the fourteenth of October, 2021, and he wrote it down and he believed it.
And then nothing.
There was a partial registration from a fourteen-year-old under enormous stress in bad light. It generated a list. Officers went to addresses. Nothing came of it.
They looked at one vehicle in particular, on the twentieth of October, 2021, and the rear bumper was clean and undamaged with no markings of any kind.
Because on the nineteenth of October, that bumper had been touched up at a body shop on Corran Road for a hundred and forty dollars, paid in cash.
The invoice describes the work as "sc. repair, n/s/r bumper, blend."
And on the twenty-fifth of October, 2021 — eleven days after the collision — that vehicle was sold through a trade auction.
Four months later I bought it from a dealer in Wexbridge for eighteen thousand four hundred dollars.
I have driven my children in it. I have had it MOT'd three times.
And the man who was driving it on the fourteenth of October, 2021, is Craig Mulcahy.
Deb's son.
And now the six months make sense, and this is the part I have not got over.
I moved into 9 Halloway Row in March of 2025 and I parked a white SUV in the space beside my garage.
Deb Mulcahy's kitchen window looks directly at that space from about thirty feet.
She recognised it.
Not the model. The car. Her son's car, which she had been in probably two hundred times, which she knew the wheels of, which had a dent in the offside sill that is still there.
And from March to September, a woman looked out of her own kitchen window every morning at her son's old car, eleven feet over the boundary, with a stranger putting shopping in the back of it.
Six months of "the parking."
Notes under the wiper. Two emails to my solicitor. A row over a fence in June.
It was never about the space. It was about getting that vehicle out of her eyeline, and she could not say one word about why, and so she did the only thing a person in that position can do, which is find an unrelated reason and pursue it until it looks unhinged.
And on the second of September I had it towed, and it came back three days later and parked in exactly the same place.
And at thirteen minutes past two on the fourth of September she came out of her house with a bucket of red masonry paint.
Everybody asks me whether she did it to destroy the evidence.
She did not. I have thought about that for a year and the police view and my view are the same.
If she had wanted that bumper gone she had four years and about a hundred and forty dollars.
She threw it because she had been towed and because she had spent six months looking at that car and because at two in the morning she had had enough.
It was rage. And it took the one piece of white touch-up between her son and a prison sentence off with it.
Four years of that paint sitting there, through three MOTs, two jet washes and a Wexbridge winter.
And it came off in five hours because of a bucket of masonry paint thrown by the mother of the man it was protecting.
What happened after.
My car was seized at about half nine that morning and I did not see it again until January. Four months.
They took the bumper off it in the first week and the rest of it sat in a compound.
I was given a hire car for eleven days and then I was on my own, and the insurance position was a nightmare that took until March to resolve, and I want that in because these stories never mention it.
The scratched characters — four and part of a fifth — matched Craig Mulcahy's registration in 2021.
On their own they would not have been enough. What made it a case was the rest of it:
The body shop invoice from the nineteenth of October, 2021.
The trade sale six days later.
And a witness statement given in 2021 by Deborah Mulcahy saying her son had been at her house from five o'clock that evening.
Craig Mulcahy was arrested on the fourth of September and charged in November.
Causing serious injury by dangerous driving, and failing to stop.
He was convicted in July and got five years and four months.
Deb pled guilty to criminal damage in the December and got a fine and a compensation order.
And then in August she was sentenced for perverting the course of justice, for the 2021 alibi, and she got twenty months.
She is fifty-eight. She served the alibi statement eleven days after a woman was left on a road, and then she made me a cup of tea across a fence in 2025 before we fell out about a driveway.
Marit Vey.
I have met her twice.
The first time was in March, at her request, and I did not want to go and I went.
She is thirty-five. She does two days a week at a college now. She was extremely straightforward with me and at one point she said, "You didn't do anything, you just bought a car," which is true and which I have not entirely managed to feel.
Because I drove that vehicle for three and a half years. To work, to my sister's, to the tip. I washed it.
And the whole time there were four letters under a patch of white paint on the back of it, about eleven inches from where I put the shopping.
I know that is not guilt and my counsellor has said so about nine times and I still have not put it down.
And Ezra Colm.
He was fourteen.
He gave an account on the night that turned out, four years later, to be completely accurate — the partial registration, the direction, the colour, all of it.
And nothing happened, and there was no arrest, and in a town of eleven thousand people that turns into something.
He has told me that between about 2022 and 2024 he was, in certain rooms, the boy who made up the thing about the car.
Nobody said it to his face. It was worse than that — it was people being kind to him about it.
He is eighteen now.
He turned up at my door on the eleventh of February.
I had not asked to meet him and I did not know he knew where I lived.
He stood on my step and said his name and then he could not say anything else for about half a minute.
And then he put his hand in his coat pocket and took out a key.
A house key, on its own, no ring. Brass, worn, with the tip of it visibly blunted and turned over on one side.
And he said: "I kept it."
Four years. In a drawer.
He said he had thought about throwing it away about eleven times and never had, because it was the only object in the world that proved he had not made it up, and because he knew that it proved it to precisely nobody.
He asked me if he could see the car.
It was on the drive. Back from the compound, with a new bumper on it, resprayed, white again.
He looked at it for a bit and then he said, "It's weird, it looks completely normal," and I said yes, it does.
And then he went home.
His mother rang me that evening to apologise for him turning up.
She was crying before she got to the end of the first sentence.
And the last thing.
Everybody wants the bucket. Two in the morning, a woman running across a lawn, three police cars by breakfast, don't wash it.
It is a very good forty seconds and I have told it at about six dinner tables.
But the thing I actually think about is the twentieth of October, 2021.
Officers went and looked at that vehicle. Six days after the collision. They had it on a list off a fourteen-year-old's partial.
And they looked at the rear bumper and it was clean, because it had been touched up the day before for a hundred and forty dollars in cash.
They were one day late.
Four years, a woman's leg, a boy growing up as a liar in his own town — all of it turns on a body shop appointment on the nineteenth of October and a police visit on the twentieth.
Twenty-four hours.
And what closed that gap, eventually, was not a detective and not forensics and not a witness coming forward.
It was a fifty-eight-year-old woman losing her temper about a parking space and throwing a bucket of masonry paint at a car at two in the morning.
The paint that hid it and the paint that found it were both put there by that family.
I keep coming back to one sentence from Marco Delaine.
I asked him, in January when I got the car back, whether he had recognised the letters straight away.
May you like
And he said: "I've had them in my head since 2021. Four and a bit. I've looked at about nine hundred number plates in this town since then and I did it without meaning to."
And then he said: "I just never expected them to be facing me on a driveway on a Thursday morning while a woman shouted at me about a parking space."
