In almost every profession there are occasions when some spectre from the past surfaces unexpectedly. Sometimes it’s a pleasant memory, but more often than not it’s the reverse. Something that went wrong or that failed to work. The kind of bad memory that most people actively try to forget, usually unsuccessfully.
For Hubert Jefferies the spectre was really neither of these. It was just a telephone call from another biochemist, a man he’d never worked with although he knew his name on a professional basis. The caller wanted to discuss a classified scientific trial that Jefferies had been involved in some years earlier.
One question the caller asked had seemed unusual, and over the following days he occasionally wondered about it. A characteristic exhibited by people who enter any of the scientific disciplines is curiosity, and the subject of the call niggled at Jefferies. One evening he decided to take a look through some of his old records. That didn’t tell him what he wanted to know, so the next day he used the secure computer system in his laboratory to search a database of archived files on a closed intranet.
What he found came as a complete surprise. The files were as he remembered, but somebody had changed the way the database worked, and that worried him for several reasons. He made some changes of his own to the database, and then rang the scientist who had called him to explain what he’d found and what he’d done.
And then he basically forgot about it.
Three days later, as Jefferies accelerated his Vauxhall Corsa down Long Road on his way to work in his Cambridge University laboratory, a black 4x4 truck – possibly a Nissan or maybe a Toyota according to the few witnesses who saw the incident – fitted with smoked windows and windscreen and a heavy bull bar at the front, shot out of one of the side turnings on the road, accelerated as if to overtake the Vauxhall, then steered at speed into the right-hand side of the car and carried it straight across the pavement and into a substantial brick wall surrounding a house. The crash bent the Corsa into a curve, the point of impact the driver’s side door. Moments later, the apparently undamaged 4x4 reversed away from the wrecked Vauxhall, then accelerated hard into the badly-damaged car again before driving away.
Several emergency calls were made by witnesses, an ambulance appeared about ten minutes later and a fire engine and two police cars just over five minutes after that. The paramedics immediately tried to stabilise the driver who was trapped in the wreckage and clearly very seriously injured. The fire crews used cutting equipment to free the roof and provide space to lift out the driver, but they all knew they were fighting a losing battle. Jefferies was pronounced dead on arrival at Addenbrooke’s Hospital near the junction of Long Road with Hills Road, just a few minutes away from the crash scene.
Three hours later, fire crews were called to a vehicle fire just off the A1307 main road on Wormwood Hill, to the south-east of the city. When the flames were extinguished, they found themselves looking at a virtually unrecognisable smoking black wreck. Whoever had torched the vehicle had used at least ten gallons of petrol, according to a later report by a fire investigator. What they could confirm was that it was a Toyota Hi-Lux, with an unusually strong bull bar bolted to the front of the chassis.
The police investigation got nowhere. The VIN – Vehicle Identification Number – allowed them to trace the registered keeper of the Toyota. He had reported it stolen from his home in Royston, a few miles south of Cambridge, the previous day, and the fire had removed even the slightest possibility of gleaning any forensic evidence from the vehicle that could indicate the identity of the driver. The best guess by the police was that it had been a teenage joyrider who’d stolen the truck the previous afternoon and who’d then lost control of the heavy vehicle at speed. They assumed that the three witnesses who’d described the Toyota driver deliberately slamming the truck into the side of the car second time, after the crash had happened, had been mistaken.
The only two oddities were that the owner of the Hi-Lux claimed it had never been fitted with a bull bar of any sort. And, despite what two of the eyewitnesses stated, he was also adamant that neither the side windows nor the windscreen had been fitted with tinted glass, apart from a narrow strip along the top of the windscreen to act as a sunshade, and that had been installed by the manufacturer when the Toyota was built. The logical presumption was that whoever had taken the truck had applied a tinted film to the windows to avoid being identified, which most teenage joyriders wouldn’t bother doing. If, that is, the witnesses had been correct, and with the vehicle reduced to a burnt-out wreck, there was no possibility of establishing the truth. The addition of the bull bar to the vehicle remained unexplained.
The accident was essentially written off as a TWOC – Taking Without Owner’s Consent, police shorthand for stealing a car – and a hit and run crash that had gone very badly wrong.
But actually, it was rather more than that.