At around two in the morning, on the local road between Ilinden and Miladinovci, near the Brest police base by Skopje airport, an Opel Corsa with Kumanovo plates and a Hyundai with Skopje plates collided head-on. Of the five people in the two vehicles, two died on the spot - the driver of the Hyundai and his son. The other three are fighting for their lives at Mother Teresa hospital.

One family. One car. Father and son together in the same vehicle, in the same second. Three others are seriously injured - the two nineteen-year-olds from the Corsa and the daughter from the Hyundai.

And here comes the detail that says more than it looks. In the police statement the driver's passenger is described as seventeen years old; in the Public Prosecutor's information it is an eighteen-year-old son and an eighteen-year-old daughter. A difference of one year, and a difference in who exactly was in the car. When two institutions describe the same event with different data on the same day, that is no longer a technical slip - that is the point at which a family is handed two versions of the worst night of its life.

What the inspection shows, and what it does not

The prosecutor ordered an autopsy, the bodies were handed to Forensic Medicine, steps are being taken to establish the causes. The wording is accurate and entirely predictable. What appears in none of the statements is the thing every driver on that road knows: what that road is like at night, how well lit it is, how wide it is, how many crashes like this have happened on the same stretch.

The Ilinden - Miladinovci local road is neither a motorway nor a city street. It is the category of road where statistics are kept but rarely read out loud. Five people in two cars on a stretch like that at two in the morning - and by the afternoon at the latest the case is already "in proceedings".

Will anyone ask what the inspection shows about the stretch itself, and not only about the drivers? Or will this crash too end up as a figure in the monthly review, while three young people lie in life-threatening condition?