Member-only story
The Mystery Behind a Car Crash
It niggled at my mind for months, and my jaw dropped when I found out why
“Inspector, could you come out to my location, please.”
I checked my watch, it was 4 am. I rubbed my tired eyes and reached for my jacket.
Our city by-pass is a long straight road with a roundabout near the south side. A traffic cop had spotted tyre marks on the middle of the roundabout, he’d passed there about an hour before and felt sure they weren’t there then. So, it can’t have long happened.
The roundabout had a raised bed, flowers in its centre. The tracks entered at 7 o’clock and exited at 11 o’clock — straight out the other side. A car had left the two-mile stretch of straight road without any deviation.
“Okay, so we’ve got a car that ran over a flowerbed.”
The traffic cop pointed out there were no skid marks leading up to the roundabout. Then he dragged me to the opposite side. A kerb ran around the circumference.
This time there were tyre marks, two short black marks where the car had struck the kerb and crumbled it to rubble. I looked at the traffic cop and he looked at me. He said what I was thinking, “It must have been travelling at a hell of a rate of knots.”
