Max Jeffery has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The Cambridge bike bandit emerged. I watched the rough, smiling face of the old man who came slowly from his bungalow and urged me to join him around the back; he didn’t look like a thief. We entered his grassless yard filled with bikes, tyres and tools. ‘This Raleigh, £80,’ he said, withdrawing a creaky frame from the pile. ‘I just changed the tyre. You see? Not heavy. Made in England. Nottingham. You can try a little bit. Try it for ten minutes. I don’t mind.’
A source had told me about the bandit, a man who openly shifted stolen bikes from a suburban Cambridge home, so bad and unpoliced has bike theft become in the city. I had got the outlaw’s phone number and arranged to meet him under the guise of making a purchase.
Around 1,200 bikes were reported stolen in Cambridge last year, six times the number in places of comparable size such as Ipswich or Blackpool. I had arrived into the city at Cambridge North station, which has a bike rack surrounded by nine CCTV cameras, and which last year the British Transport Police said had the highest rate of bike theft of any train station in the country. ‘We take cycle security very seriously,’ said a spokesman for Greater Anglia, the firm that operates Cambridge North.
I returned the Raleigh to the bandit after a short test ride in his cul de sac. Try another, he suggested. ‘More expensive? Cheaper?’ The bandit was accommodating, relaxed – he held an enviable position in Cambridge’s criminal economy.
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