What was meant to be a victory holiday on board Mike Lynch's luxury yacht, celebrating his recent acquittal in the US courts, is turning out to be more of a nightmare as each hour passes. 

Along with Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, four of his high-powered City guests are also still missing and presumed dead. 

On board the yacht the Bayesian with Lynch and his family – his wife Angela Bacares has been rescued – were Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International and his wife, and Christopher Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, and his wife, Nada. 

Both Bloomer and Morvillo were closely involved in Lynch's fraud case. 

They were on the Bayesian as thanks for their help during his three-month trial after he was cleared of fraud charges after US giant Hewlett Packard bought the FTSE 100-listed Autonomy, his data analysis firm, for $11billion. 

Bloomer, a former Hiscox chairman and Prudential chief, gave evidence during the San Francisco trial as he had led the audit committee at Autonomy while Morvillo represented him. 

Yet there is another peculiar twist of fate to this tale of horror which tests the realms of probability. 

Only two days before the Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday, Stephen Chamberlain, the former vice-president of finance at Autonomy and co-defendant in the fraud case, was hit by a car while jogging near his home in Cambridgeshire.

Chamberlain, who also worked at another Lynch-backed company, Darktrace, the cyber-security specialists, was put on life support after the accident but died soon afterwards in hospital. 

As one Cambridge colleague of Lynch and Chamberlain told me, the likelihood of these tragedies coming so close – and so soon after they were both acquitted – is nothing short of extraordinary. 

So it is no surprise the Silicon Fen community is buzzing with conspiracy theories. The coincidence is so weird that you can't blame them. Some say that they were hit-jobs. Or that the US secret service alphabet men were involved. 

Conspiracies aside, the double tragedies have left the City reeling with horror and sadness for all those involved. 

As you can also expect, the mood in Cambridge – where Lynch studied and founded so many tech companies – is sombre as the many colleagues he worked with and supported mourn the loss of a great friend but also his brilliance. 

Questions are also being asked about what happens to Invoke Capital, the $1billion venture fund he set up after selling Autonomy to invest in fast-growing companies in the UK and across Europe. Working closely with Cambridge University, Invoke specialised in the field of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.

Lynch's ambition was to provide – alongside the funds – proper expertise so they could scale-up into global businesses, often perceived as the weakness of so many dynamic young UK companies that miss the big time. 

He hasn't done too badly. Invoke's most successful companies include Darktrace, which employs 1,500 people and worth around £1billion and Luminance, an award-winning machine learning platform for the legal industry. 

Another high performing Lynch investment is the pioneering AI fraud-detection engine, Featurespace, run by Martina King, which is going great guns helping companies track down everything from money laundering to the theft of credit cards. 

Featurespace is a classic example of the sort of venture that Lynch was so good at spotting – and one that was supported early on by the incredibly tight and brainy Cambridge network. 

Founded in 2008 by David Excell, an Australian academic, and the late Bill Fitzgerald, a Cambridge professor and expert in Bayesian statistics – and a mentor to Lynch at Cambridge – its expertise lies in adaptive behavioural analytics. 

This is a form of artificial intelligence that predicts human intention by analysing online data, making it possible to crackdown on fraudsters in any online scenario from gambling to rogue trading. 

Lynch was a significant investor. When I interviewed King some years ago, it was natural to ask her what she thought about the allegations against Lynch. 

All she would say is: 'The man's a genius.' That's not a bad legacy.