A Woman Scorned – the Continuing Saga of a Fishy Car

I have to admit, we made a mistake with this car. Police detectives are taught never to take anything for granted, never make assumptions, and to instead follow the evidence. However, we are not policemen so we can perhaps be forgiven for believing what our customer 'assumed' had happened to his new girlfriend's car.

From our perspective, the story began when a customer brought us a Mini which he said they had leant to somebody and when they got it back is smelled of urine, they thought that their dog must have had an accident in the back. This gentlemen's new girlfriend found us through the internet, seen that this was the kind of clean up that we specialized in and so brought the car to us. As he was giving this Mini to her, obviously she wanted the car properly and thoroughly sanitized (and who can blame her?) but he wasn't so sure and was reluctant to pay the extra money for our specialized services, instead assuming that just shampooing the seats would probably sort out the problem.

After explaining how and why we used the methods and products that we do, the customer agreed to pay the extra money and allow us to treat the car for pet urine. This was our first mistake, we were paying attention to a reluctant customer instead of paying attention to the car. We went ahead and treated the whole interior and although the special chemicals we use were obviously having an effect, we started having doubts about the source of the smell fairly early on.

The key to treating odours is finding the source of the smell and removing it. If you don't do this and the source remains in the car, if it becomes disturbed the odour will come back again. The first thing we did was to follow our noses, and although the smell seemed to be stronger in the back of the car than the front, we couldn't really pin it down to any particular area. If you are treating a house for odours, you find out the sex of the dog, if it's male you look for the source in corners of the room, if it's female you look in the centre of the room. As this was essentially a small car we assumed that regardless of the sex of the dog, the puddle we were looking for would be on the back seat… unless it wasn't a puddle! Some dogs dribble when they get excited and we assumed this was what happened.

If you have ever seen TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, you will have seen Grissom looking for evidence with an ultraviolet torch called an ALS (alternative light source), and these are what we use to continue the search. They should show up protein stains as lighter patches – and dog urine should contain plenty of protein. However we found nothing obvious, and so we made our second wrong assumption that somebody had already had a go at cleaning up and that the source of the odour must be from within the seats.

To cut a long story short, we treated the car, we got rid of the smell, but by the time the customer came to pick up the car the smell was starting to return. So the decided to leave the car with us to allow us to work on it further and as time went on the smell got worse… it also became seemed to change in nature to become less urine-ish, and more fishy!

It's at this point that I was called in to take a look… or should I say sniff? Not only am I quite good at solving mysteries, I also have the biggest nose of anybody in the company. At this point I was working at something of a disadvantage because the chemicals we use for the treatment of odour have their own smell, but through this I was certain I could smell something fishy, but the source wasn't obvious.

"I think this car has been got at" said somebody. Considering fish seemed to be involved it seemed to be a reasonable theory. The customer said they had lent the car to somebody and it had come back with this odour. There was a possibility that there was much more to this story and obviously they wouldn't tell the hired help, so we would have to speculate… we knew that the customer was giving this car to his new girlfriend. What if he had previously given it to the old girlfriend?

We see plenty of vandalized cars in our business, usually key scratched or having things like brake fluid or fence paint poured over them. A couple of times in the past we have seen prawns concealed within a car, in the last case somebody had secreted them below the convertible hood mechanism of a Mercedes but in this case it was pretty obvious what had happened and where the smell was coming from by the time the car was brought to us.

We guessed that the fishy matter in this case was only just beginning to rot, the question was, where was it hidden. There was no obvious sign.

I decided that as it was likely that a woman was behind the attack, I would have to think like a woman. It was unlikely they would do what had happened in the case of the Mercedes and get out a tool kit and dismantle the car to hide the fish. After years in this business we know that women are most concerned about cleanliness, hygiene and they pay particular attention to fabric. So where as a man would probably hide fish up under the dashboard or even attack the air conditioning, we thought a woman would more likely attack the seats. A good sniff of the passenger seat revealed that the headrest had a faint smell, so we removed it and examined it but found nothing… but when examining the holes into which it were fitted with an ultra violet torch we could see white flecks. It was hard to see what these were but there was no doubt as to the smell!

We examined the others and found that you couldn't remove the rear headrests without lowering the rear seats, but there were faint stains around one of the rear headrests. We guessed that the saboteur had tried to remove a rear headrest, found they couldn't and so splashed around some fish juice instead.

We contacted the customer and it seems that the car had formally belonged to his wife who he was in the process of divorcing. He said, that he wasn't surprised by what we had found and luckily, he saw the funny side.

So on his word we started to dismantle the car and found about half a pound of prawns had been poked down the headrest holes and were now inside the seat. There was no mistaking the odour once they were revealed as you could smell them 20yds away. Hopefully we have now found all the prawns, only time will tell – we don't expect the customer to pay to have us dismantle the whole car on the off chance.

It's easy to see a situation where we identified a fish odour where it had been splashed around the back seat, but missed those secreted deep within the front passenger seat as despite the quantity placed down there, it really wasn't obvious that this was where the bulk of the odour was coming from. So the lesson learnt for us is that in future cases we need to ask a lot more questions and thoroughly search the car from the beginning.

The lesson for the customer… all I can say is that I hope he has a really good divorce lawyer because obviously he wife is not a lady to messed with!

Article Source: http://www.rightarticle.com

Danny Argent director of training and business development for a UK based car valeting and smart repair company.

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