As mysteries go it was something of an open-and-shut case. Or rather, a reverse-and-leave case.
When Alice Tyler left work on 27 May last year to find her locked road bike twisted and mangled against a stand she quickly surmised assumed something heavy must have struck it. Enquiries to the office block adjoining the bike stand found a helpful security guard who uncovered the relevant CCTV footage.
It’s fair to say the footage is pretty definitive in discovering who is to blame. It shows a truck in the livery of UK Mail, a privately-owned postal service, attempt a three-point turn to get out of the dead-end street in Shoreditch, east London.
The road is narrow and the rear of the truck pushes hard against the stand and against Tyler’s blue Norco road bike, easy to spot with its orange saddle cover. The truck pauses, as if the driver realises they have hit something. Then, alarmingly, they reverse much further, pushing back the bike and the stand at a heavy angle.
The driver gives up the attempt to turn and, after a pause, they reverse down the street. The truck is out of shot for a period so we can’t tell if the driver gets out of the cab to see what they’ve hit. But if they do, they never approach the bikes to inspect the damage, let alone own up.
Tyler, 29, who works for a tech company, saw the bent handlebars and mangled gear shifters and took the bike to a shop. It took more than two weeks for all the damage, much of it hidden, to be repaired, including new forks, at a total cost of just under £470.
Given the CCTV footage, and a witness who saw the incident and passed their details to the same office security staff, Tyler assumed it would a straightforward process to get UK Mail to pay for the repairs, and for the cost of commuting while her bike was out of action, a grand total of just over £550.
She was wrong.
Contact was swiftly made with UK Mail via Twitter and Tyler was passed on to the customer service department and then a local depot. But once the matter reached UK Mail’s legal team it seemed to disappear. Even calls to the company’s insurers – who, conveniently, only answer the phone between 2pm and 5pm – have brought nothing.
Getting on for eight months later and Tyler is, understandably, baffled:
I still don’t know if UK Mail haven’t done anything because the information hasn’t got to the right person, or if because they’ve chosen not to do anything.
In retrospect, it was very much the wrong decision not to use my own insurers. But it seemed so clear cut all I’d need to do is contact them and they should just pay me for the damage without any fuss.
She is also alarmed at what she say on the CCTV footage:
I thought, ‘It’s so obvious you’ve hit something and you don’t even go and check to see what it was.’ They didn’t even check it was a person, or damage to something that could cause someone else harm. It made me very much doubt the personality of the person driving that vehicle.
I got in touch with UK Mail’s external PR company, and sure enough within a couple of days there was some action. A statement from UK Mail said:
We can confirm that Alice contacted us on Twitter back in May and this incident was reported to our insurers.
We are now investigating into why this case has taken so long, but in the meantime, we will pay out the costs, as it is clearly our fault.
We will just require proof of the costs from Alice, but she will be contacted directly about this.
Alice says she has now received an email from the insurers admitting liability. It’s a shame it took almost eight months and a call from a newspaper for this to happen.
