It Niggled at Me for Months, 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.”

Beyond the kerb, the land dropped away, about twenty feet. Into the darkness. A sea of silver birches swayed in the wind.

“Have you searched down there?”

The traffic cop had a powerful Maglite torch. He’d walked the 100 yards up the road and back down again, concentrating his torch on the forest floor and found nothing.

I wandered up the side of the road too, looking, listening and also nothing, other than an odour of petrol. We went back to look at the evidence again.

This time I went to the entrance to the roundabout and followed the line of the tyre tracks. The line matched the tracks on the flowerbed and the ones on the kerb.

I didn’t get it. The car must be in the wood.

That damage to the kerb doesn’t happen unless you hit it with a compelling force. A wrecking ball would have caused less damage. The car couldn’t have stopped, it had to have gone into the trees.

I walked the line. From the entrance to the roundabout, across the flowerbed and stood on the damaged kerb looking into the thick woods.

Then I spotted it.

A broken branch. Not on the floor of the forest but at my eye level. Then another behind it. I grabbed the torch and pointed it straight ahead, into the canopy. There were several broken branches and then a flash of silver, not from a tree but the back end of a car.

We clambered down the bank and walked into the forest. Above us was a silver Vauxhall, suspended in the trees. It had lodged itself between two larger trees and the others had sprung back to conceal it.

Shit, that thing must have been travelling.

“Hello,” I shouted, “Is there anyone in there?”

“Yes,” a male voice.

The traffic officer and I shared another glance, eyes wide.

“Is there anyone else in the car?”

“No.”

“Are you hurt,” I asked.

“No, I’m fine.”

And to prove it, he opened his door, squeezed out and dropped to the ground. He brushed himself down and gave us a shrug. A guy about forty, smart suit trousers, collared shirt and burgundy jumper. Neither up nor down.

“I’m sorry, Sir,” said the traffic cop pointing to the guy’s car, “you can’t park there.”

The three of us burst out laughing, out of relief as much as at the joke.

I called an ambulance, as a precaution. Got the driver to sit in my car while we waited. Asked him what happened.

“I was out for a drive and didn’t see the roundabout, next thing I’m in the trees.”

“You must have been going at some speed to end up there?”

He kinda nodded and hung his head. I presumed he wasn't keen to incriminate himself. There was damage to the kerb, so it was a reportable accident but nobody would bother about it — the council didn’t actually fix it for years.

We got him to blow into a breathalyser and he got a green light. He didn’t seem high or spaced out. He seemed like a decent guy. He had a driving licence and insurance. His car had an MOT and it was taxed. He wasn’t on our records, not even a speeding charge to his name.

He said he was a salesman, that was about it. He was reluctant to talk about himself, which I took to be through embarrassment. The ambulance arrived and the paramedics gave him a clean bill of health.

Before the traffic cop left, I asked him to mention it to his day-shift sergeant and see if an accident investigator could have a look. I only wanted an estimate of the speed the guy was doing. I didn’t need a full accident investigation, there was no point. I was just curious.

“If they are busy, don’t worry about it.”

I went back to rubbing my eyes in my office, in between writing the nightshift log and checking reports.

It was four weeks on the rota before I was back working the night shift. I’d thought about the guy and his flying car many times. Something niggled in the back of my head.

The guy was local, so he must have known the road. He would know there was a roundabout there. Had he fallen asleep and slammed on his accelerator? He never said why he was out driving at that time of the morning. An affair, maybe?

How the hell were they going to recover his car? It wasn’t my problem, that was up to his insurance company, but I still wondered. I went out for a drive and stopped at the roundabout. The car was still there, lodged securely in the trees. Clearly, the company given the job of recovering it weren’t sure how they were going to extricate it either.

Six months later, the traffic cop knocked on my office door.

“Remember the car in the trees, Inspector?”

“How could I forget? Did we ever get an estimate of its speed?”

“Yeah, our sergeant had a look and guessed he must have been doing anywhere between 110 and 130.”

“Wow! That guy is lucky to be alive.”

“That’s why I popped in, Inspector. He isn’t lucky anymore. His wife found him hanging from his attic this morning. He’s dead.”