by Darren Young
She tried to drag her body forward but the pain from her torso was too much to bear and she had lost all feeling in her legs. She lay back against what remained of the driver’s seat and cried for a few seconds, unable to think of anything else she could do.
It was then that she smelt it.
Smoke.
Despite the rain coming in through the broken windows and the car sitting in almost a foot of water at the bottom of the ravine, something was burning; the acrid smell of smoke was filling her nostrils, making her cough and begin to lose consciousness. Smoke was suddenly all around her and she made out the unmistakable sound of flames, licking as they took hold of the flammable fuel around it, coming from what felt like somewhere behind her, and getting closer. She looked up again at her crushed legs and didn’t bother to try to find out what was on fire but breathed in the toxic fumes quickly, sucking them into her mouth and nose as much as possible.
Patricia Edwards closed her eyes, gripped the seat and prayed the end would be quick.
Then the car exploded.
4 | Danni
‘She’ll have stayed at the shop to help them tidy up.’
Danni watched her father as he paced up and down impatiently. He didn’t appear to hear what she said but she knew he had and had chosen to ignore it. She also knew he didn’t like any mention of the shop.
He’d never liked her working there. He saw himself as breadwinner and didn’t care that it might be an old-fashioned approach to life; although Danni teased her parents about it endlessly, saying they were a throwback to married life in the fifties. He earned enough as a writer for her mother to not have to think about working. He’d become very accomplished, first with a popular magazine and then, when he could afford to go it alone, as a freelancer, writing for several publications and part-time ghost-writing for people who wanted to write but couldn’t. It paid well, they lived very comfortably, and he had encouraged his wife to take up hobbies to fill her time.
But she wasn’t built that way.
Patricia had tried everything from gardening to cycling but nothing had caught her imagination or kept her occupied enough. It wasn’t that she needed to work; she wanted to work, and, by chance, she had found what she was looking for.
She had done a spring clean that had cleared the house of all the clothes they no longer wore, and she ended up with a car boot full of bags, which she took to the local charity shop in the village. As she had stood in a long queue, the one member of staff rushed off her feet dealing with everyone, she saw a poster pinned to the counter asking for volunteers to work there, and by the end of that week she was a new member of the team. Her husband had been horrified at the time.
‘Why isn’t she answering her phone?’ Danni’s father said, looking out of the window.
‘If she’s driving, you know she won’t pick up.’
Her father continued pacing. Danni smiled to herself because he was always like this when her mother was back a little later than usual: acting as if the world was about to stop because the woman of the house wasn’t there to put his dinner in the oven. The truth, uncomfortable as Thomas found it, was that his wife loved working at the shop and would have done more hours if she didn’t think it would cause such a rift between them; she already did as many as she could get away with. When the shop had joined a nationwide appeal to raise money for a water crisis in Africa, they had set up a fundraising function with the help of the local MP, and Patricia had offered to work late until the function finished. Because the MP had arrived late, and the event had also attracted a lot of people, the function had extended into the early evening and they had done very well. Danni had received a text message from her mother earlier in the day to tell her how successful it looked like being, and it was just a shame that it had coincided with the worst weather they had seen that year, otherwise there would have been even more people there.
But it also meant that it was much later, and dark, when Patricia was due to set off, and the rain was falling heavily as the skies darkened. With thick black thunderclouds rolling in off the sea and the odd bolt of lightning in the distance but getting closer, Danni and her father watched the clock and the sky with concern. What was a fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive on a good day could be at least double that on a night like this.
When the clock reached half-past six, Danni became more concerned. Her mother would normally call ahead if she was going to be this late. She let another fifteen minutes pass and then she left a message and sent a text, but neither received a reply.
‘I told you, she must be in the car.’ Danni tried to sound reassuring, but she could hear in her own voice that she wasn’t as sure as she had been, and after another quarter of an hour she was as worried as her father.
All the time, the weather had been worsening. The lightning bolts lit up the sky every few minutes, while a deep growl of thunder followed each one quickly, telling them the storm was now directly above them. Thomas left his wife a third voicemail.
As the minutes ticked by, Danni realised that she didn’t have any telephone numbers on her mobile phone for the shop or any of her mother’s colleagues. She found the shop’s number on the internet but, when she called, the out-of-hours message clicked straight in, so she ended the call and thought about what to do next.
Then she remembered something.
She went into the hall. There was an antique wooden console table with a handset on top for the home phone, which only her father used, and then only to say no, thanks to nuisance callers. Underneath was a large wooden drawer: her mother’s drawer, full of useless items that only Patricia ever got around to sorting out, usually once every two years or so.
Neither Danni nor her father had any reason to go in there, but a few months ago Danni had looked in it for a takeaway menu, and she recalled seeing her mother’s old address book.
She opened the drawer and began taking things out until she found it, with its leather-effect red cover and gold lettering, sitting at the back underneath a two-year-old pizzeria menu and one for a Chinese takeaway that had since closed down and reopened as something else. She swept some of the dust off and opened it at the first page, with A on the left-hand side and B on the right. She turned over the page and scanned the names under the letter D, quickly finding Dot, a retired lady who volunteered three days a week at the shop and someone her mother had always talked of fondly. She dialled her number, a landline.
Dot answered the phone and was concerned when Danni explained why she was calling. She had said goodbye to Patricia at a quarter to six and they had both headed for their cars. The weather and the roads were not good, Dot said, but she had still got home in well under thirty minutes.
Even allowing for them living a mile further out of the village than Dot, and the road conditions, the journey should never take more than an half an hour. Danni made sure her father couldn’t hear her and made a discreet call to the local hospital, but they weren’t aware of any accidents and hadn’t admitted anyone in the last hour.
She took the address book and made room at the back of the drawer to put it back as she found it, but, as she forced it in, the back cover began to bend: it was being pushed against an object she couldn’t see. It became wedged against the top of the table and she pulled it back towards her to try again.
A folded A4 leaflet, stuck inside the back like a bookmark, fell into the open drawer. Danni was too concerned about her mother to take much notice of it, but, as she straightened the address book’s spine and back cover, something made her look at it.
It was a very faded information sheet from a charity. A missing persons charity, with contact telephone numbers. From its condition, Danni guessed it was several years old, and noted there was no internet address on it, which gave a further clue to its age. On the front were three photographs: a teenage boy, a woman in her late twenties, Danni estimated, and in the middle of them the standout image. A young, pretty blonde girl. She was smiling and probably about two years old, with a
caption below that read:
MISSING: JESSICA PRESTON
Danni put out her bottom lip, staring at the girl’s face. Then she folded the leaflet back up, placed it back inside the address book, and pushed it as best she could back into the drawer.
When she went back into the living room, her father was dressed in waterproofs. ‘I’m going to look for her.’
Danni quickly scooped up his car keys off the sideboard and tucked them into her pocket. She looked at the rain-lashed window as another forked prong lit the sky and the whole room. ‘You can’t go out in this.’
‘Your mother’s out in it!’
The only roads in and out of the village were narrow and winding, and not the kinds of roads you drove on at night when the weather was like this.
‘She’s probably waiting for the rain to ease.’
‘She would have called.’
‘The storm might be affecting the signal. Or the mast might be down again.’
Danni was clutching at straws and knew it. The last time the mobile phone mast on the hill had stopped working was three years ago, and in a storm much more ferocious than this one. But Thomas did listen to his daughter’s cautionary warning and they waited, sitting in near darkness except for when the lightning struck and illuminated the room, until the storm began to ease off and eventually, after another twenty-five minutes, finally stopped.
‘We need to call the police,’ Danni said as her father put his jacket and boots back on, but, as he was heading to the door, there was a loud knock on it and they looked at each other.
The next twenty minutes were a blur. Two police officers, soaked to the skin even in heavy-duty raincoats, came in and talked to them. They explained what had happened but shock hit Danni long before they finished. She only heard their first few words.
Her mother was dead.
If she had listened as her father did, she would have learned that a sharp-eyed motorist had spotted one of the roadside barriers missing on the clifftop and had called the police to notify them. When a patrol car had gone to investigate, they had seen the remains of the Ford estate car at the bottom of the ravine.
It had taken another thirty-five minutes for more police to arrive and make their way down to the wreckage, identify the car and its owner from the numberplate and find the remains of a body inside, and only after that were they able to dispatch officers to the house.
Danni couldn’t recall the police leaving, or the following day when her father had to collect her mother’s items, or when they went to the Chapel of Rest the next morning. She only remembered they had both fallen apart, and she had no idea how they got through those next seventy-two hours.
But somehow they must have.
And after that, her father disappeared to his study and the next time she saw him, for longer than five minutes, was at the funeral.
5 | Danni
‘Bye, Mum.’
Danni mumbled the words through heavy lips and moved to her left so that her father could throw down the single rose he had been holding all morning. As he did so, he stood looking down at the hole in the ground, utterly bewildered, and Danni steadied him with a hand on his forearm because she was worried he might topple or, worse, jump into it. There was no knowing what he might do.
He had been that way pretty much since the car crash had happened two weeks ago, and Danni had tried her hardest to break down the barriers he had erected, to grieve with him; but he had spurned her efforts every time and retreated to his study in a way that made her worry if he would even make it out of there for the funeral at all. It was one of the few reasons to be grateful for the delay that had been created so that the police could finish their extensive enquiries and the coroner could record his verdict of accidental death. A tragic waste of a life on a country road in hazardous conditions, the coroner had written in his report, and the time he took to reach that conclusion had given Danni and her father a little more time to come to terms with their loss.
So Thomas had made it to the funeral and displayed a convincing stiff upper lip as her mother’s friends and colleagues had come to the house in the late morning to follow the cars to the church. Danni had watched as he stood stoically, back straight, and sang the hymns she had chosen and listened to the prayers. Danni had even read a verse from a song by her mother’s favourite singer.
As she finished the last line, her father had smiled and nodded appreciatively at Danni as she sat back down. It was the first time since the accident that he had made any real attempt to communicate with her, and she hoped that the funeral, as hard as it was, represented a form of closure; or at least the opportunity for them to begin taking tiny steps forward.
She couldn’t bear another two weeks like they’d had, anyway. Not only had her father locked himself away but he had put on a ridiculous front, one of a man who was wondering what all the fuss was about. I’m fine was all he said to her when she enquired through the study door as to how he was, and he had tried to convince her that he was busy with his work and glad of the distraction. Yet she heard him sobbing late at night on more than one occasion.
Danni had reminded herself that he was an intensely private man, even at the best of times, and they had never enjoyed that close father-daughter relationship the way others did. From what her mother had told her, his parents – both long dead – hadn’t showered their only child with love and attention either. He seemed like a throwback to a time where fathers played with their children for one hour a week, usually at the weekend. So she wasn’t surprised that he chose to grieve alone, away from fuss and well-meant sympathy.
She knew he’d have struggled to cope with it too. She had taken on the tasks that needed doing, including the funeral arrangements and little things such as cancelling her mother’s hair appointment and informing the bank and local council. Everyone had been so nice, so helpful and so bloody understanding, she thought, that she had wanted to run as far from them as possible. There had been a limit to the number of pitying looks and condolences she could take, and she had reached that limit surprisingly quickly.
But she had never felt lonelier in her life. She had told her friend Sam, in a call the previous evening, that it almost felt as though she had lost both of them, not just her mother. She wanted to share her pain with her father and, although she was an adult, she still needed his support. This was the first significant loss she ever had to deal with, and she had hoped that, after losing the most important person in her life, the second most important would be there for her.
But she realised it just wasn’t going to be like that.
He could be a difficult man, she thought. Her mother had always brought out the best in him; she had been a warm person, not afraid to show emotion, and she had helped her husband to stop hiding behind his seemingly cold and unfriendly exterior; within the marriage, he was a warmer, more approachable person.
Until the argument the night before her mother died, Danni had always believed her parents’ marriage had been near-perfect and thought that he was a great husband.
He had also been a great father too. He might not have known how to give her a hug at just the right moment, or tell her he loved her, but he had been supportive in whatever she did, and protective too.
And she hadn’t ever wanted for anything. But Danni was worried, now, that her mother had been the glue that had held it all together; without her, she was concerned what might happen to them.
Yet at the funeral he had rallied a little, finding strength or at least putting on the bravest of faces. At the cemetery, Danni had been surprised at how well he had coped, shaking hands with sympathetic attendees and even engaging in brief conversation with some of them. It seemed as if half of the village had turned up, and Danni would never have managed to speak to most of them without her father’s help. She hoped that he had just needed these two weeks of solitude to be able to do this. But when the congregation had drifted away and left him standing with her at the graveside, looking into the abyss,
that little-boy-lost expression had quickly returned.
Danni hugged him, pulling him close, an unspoken It’s OK, Dad. We can get through this together. But the embrace felt awkward and she could feel his body trying to escape her clutches; and, when he did, he closed back up for the rest of the day. He didn’t say more than a few words at the wake, preferring to stand in the corner, looking out of the window in a pose that said leave me alone to anyone who thought about approaching. He left Danni to thank people for attending, while he disappeared back to the sanctuary of his study as soon as he felt he’d shown his face for long enough.
Danni watched him go, and knew all she could do was be there for him, until he was ready to open up or until he needed her as much as she needed him.
It was what her mother would have wanted.
6 | Danni
‘How you holding up?’
The question made Danni jump even though she knew who it was asking it. She had retreated to the kitchen to begin loading some of the dirty plates into the dishwasher so that there was less to do when everyone had gone. There were just a few people left now, in the living room finishing off the last of the buffet and recounting tales about Patricia.
‘Euan,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
She knew she sounded disappointed he was there, and wished she had concealed it a little better. She’d thought he had already left; a discussion with him was the last thing she wanted now.
‘I know you don’t want to see me, but I couldn’t just leave without at least saying hello,’ he said from the doorway, where his six-foot frame filled most of the space. ‘And I really liked your mum, Dan.’
Danni bristled. Only her best friend had permission to call her that and she hated it when anyone else did, but she was too tired to say. Neither did she say that her mother had never liked him back, and her father even less so.