The Best Of Times

by Penny Vincenzi

  William stood, frozen with horror now, hearing the scene as well as watching it-the dreadful noise, blaring horns, and crunching metal and raw, dreadful shouting and screaming-and aware too of the dreadfully dangerous smell of burning rubber.

  Instinct told him to go down to the road; common sense told him not to. He could be of no use, would add to the chaos; he reached in the pocket of his jeans for his mobile, remembered he had left it in the tractor on the other side of the fence, and started to run, waving his arms at the scene in a futile gesture, as if anyone seeing him would have understood what he was going to do.

  CHAPTER 10

  For just a second, Jonathan was tempted to drive on, remove himself from the horror and the carnage, get to London swiftly and safely, rid himself of Abi. If he went on, he had a chance of disentangling his life; if he stayed, he had none.

  He stopped the car and left his former life forever…

  The car immediately ahead of him was driving steadily on as if nothing had happened; other cars coming from behind him were slewing into one another, gradually coming to a halt. Jonathan sat, fighting for breath, leaning on the steering wheel, recovering from the shock, hauling himself under control together with the car; the road ahead emptied now as the traffic went on forwards, vanishing into the haze of the heat, caught up in the doctrine of the motorway, of pushing on, of getting there, of never looking back, not getting involved, leaving him behind: and he would have given in that moment all he had to be one of them…

  He opened the door, slowly and very cautiously, started to get out, and then found his legs wouldn’t hold him; he felt sick and dizzy and sat down again, his head dropping weakly onto the steering wheel.

  He looked at Abi; she was green-white, staring at him, her eyes huge with fright: there was an ugly gash on the side of her head. “What happened?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I couldn’t see; the lorry seemed to lose control. Your head all right?”

  She felt the gash, looked at the blood on her hand. “Yes, I think so. I’ve got some tissues somewhere; I’ll just-”

  “Give me my mobile.”

  “I can’t find it-I dropped it.”

  “Well, give me yours then.”

  He took it, dialled 999. Asked for the police and gave them the whereabouts.

  “Yes, thank you, we’ve got that one,” the voice said. “Several people calling in. They’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Jonathan looked at the great mass of traffic gathering, stretching in both directions. “I hope so,” he said. “It’s pretty bad.” And then watched, disbelieving, as first one car, then another and then another, moved onto the westbound hard shoulder, accelerating and driving away.

  “Stupid fucking bastards,” he said; and then got out of the car and began to walk slowly, almost against his will, towards the lorry.

  ***

  It was a hideous sight. A minibus had gone straight into it, under its wheels, and had crumpled up like so much paper, and from it he could hear the hideous sound of children screaming; a Golf, desperate to avoid it, had first turned, then skidded a hundred and eighty degrees into the traffic in the middle lane; a larger car-a big Ford-had managed to miss it, but driven into the barrier and swung round before it stopped, facing the wrong way… A man was climbing out of it, shaking his head oddly, as if to rid it of what he had just seen and done; his windscreen was shattered, and blood was running down his face.

  Jonathan realised the Golf’s engine was still running; turning it off seemed suddenly the most urgent thing. He scrambled over the barrier, ran to the car. The window had shattered with the impact, as had the windscreen. Jonathan looked down and into it: at a girl, or all he could see of her, a mass of long blond hair and blood, a bare brown arm with a white watch-odd how one noticed these things-flung out towards the windscreen as if warding it off; and yes, the engine still switched on. Jonathan reached in, turned the key, and then very gently lifted the arm, felt for the pulse. And found nothing.

  He straightened up and found himself staring into the shocked, puzzled eyes of the driver of the Ford, and simply nodded at him, confirming the girl’s death, unable to speak.

  “Oh, God,” said the man, staring round him at the carnage, “what did it… How did it happen?”

  “Christ knows. You OK?”

  “Seem to be. Yeah. Can’t think how. Arm hurts a bit.”

  Jonathan looked at his arm; it was hanging oddly.

  “Looks like it’s broken. I’ll check it later.”

  They stood there for a moment, looking up at the lorry from the driver’s side; the cab was astonishingly intact. They walked round it, and as they reached the near side, they saw the door was open, and a girl was standing on the step. She jumped to the ground.

  “You OK?” said Jonathan, and then, “You weren’t in there, were you?”

  She stared at them both, her expression totally blank, then shook her head, turned her back on them, and vomited rather neatly onto the road. She was very young, and very pretty, Jonathan noticed; after a moment she walked, slowly but quite steadily, towards the hard shoulder, where she sat down and put her head in her arms.

  “Shocked,” said Jonathan, “but she seems OK. Extraordinary.”

  “She can’t have been in there, can she? Or climbed up to have a look?”

  “God knows. Look-I’m going up into the cab. Make sure the engine’s turned off there. It could explode any moment.”

  ***

  Oddly, he didn’t feel frightened, wasn’t aware of being brave; just knew it had to be done.

  Constable Robbie Macyntyre had been dreading his first big crash. He just didn’t know how he would deal with it. He wasn’t exactly squeamish, and of course they had spelt out to them in training that things like severed limbs and worse were inevitable and shown them DVDs. It wasn’t that; more the thought of people in terrible pain, crying out, begging for help.

  The first calls had come in five minutes ago; hundreds more would follow. Already two cars had left the depot, and he was in the third, with his colleague Greg Dixon. Robbie was intensely grateful that this was not Greg’s first big crash, or even his hundred and first. “Been doing this for ten years,” he’d said to Robbie when he joined the unit. “Got pretty bloody used to it. Bloody being the word, if you get my meaning.”

  As far as they had been able to establish, the congestion on the road was already severe in both directions.

  The main priority now, apart from clearing a way for the emergency services to get through, was to garner information and communicate it to the control room: how many casualties, how many ambulances would be required, whether the fire brigade would be needed to cut people out.

  Robbie kept remembering his superintendent’s words: Gridlock on the motorway takes seconds: you’ll have a mile tailback inside a minute.

  One of the main problems subsequent to a crash, he’d been told-although it didn’t sound as if it would be today-was rubbernecking. “You can get an incident entirely on one carriageway and the traffic comes to a standstill on the other,” Greg Dixon said. “Just because people slow down, even crash into the car in front at times, just to have a gawp. Good old Joe Public.”

  He didn’t take a very rosy view of Joe Public; Robbie was swiftly coming to realise why.

  ***

  Jonathan slithered down from the lorry’s cab; the Ford driver was still there.

  “OK?”

  “Yes, the engine was off. Hell of a mess up there. Windscreen’s shattered, blood everywhere. Poor bugger driving it’s not too good, though.”

  “I bet he’s not. Is he… alive?”

  “Just. Maybe not for long.”

  “Should we get him out?”

  “Christ, no.” He glanced over at the hard shoulder. “That girl OK?”

  “She’s disappeared,” said the man. “She was still sitting on the hard shoulder last time I looked. Nobody with her. But she’s not there n
ow.”

  “Wandered down the road, I suppose. She seemed very shocked. Oh, well. She’s the least of our worries, I have to say…”

  A man was walking towards them, holding a small boy by the hand; he was crying and saying, “Mummy… Mummy…”

  “Is he all right?” Jonathan said.

  “He’s all right,” said the man, and he spoke so casually it was as if he was discussing the weather. “His mother’s not, though.”

  He nodded in the direction of a large black car behind him; its windscreen was shattered and there was a woman lying on the road; she had clearly come through the windscreen.

  “She just undid her belt, just for a second,” the man said, “to give the little fellow a drink. And she… she…”

  He shook his head, turned away from them.

  “I’m a doctor,” said Jonathan gently. “Would you like me to come and see her?” He knew it would be futile, but it needed to be done. The man nodded. “If you wouldn’t mind.” The man with the broken arm looked after them. “Poor bugger,” he said, “poor, poor bugger.”

  ***

  Emma had just finished eating a rather dodgy BLT when the news came through: of a major crash on the M4, of a jackknifed lorry, a crushed minibus, road blocked in both directions, almost certain fatalities. And by some grisly coincidence, there was a second accident farther down the road, a continental truck with a blowout had slewed across the exit road of the next junction. Nobody was hurt there, but there was a mass of traffic behind it, and an obvious route for the emergency services to the crash, travelling the wrong way up the motorway, was temporarily, at least, out of the question.

  She half ran into A &E and put in the trauma calls, the special unmistakable bleep, summoning people to A &E, removing them from their day-to-day work and rosters; she would need, she reckoned, an orthopaedist, a cardio thoracic surgeon, two general surgeons, two anaesthetists, a general surgical registrar, and ATL-hospital shorthand for advanced trauma and life support. Plus at least ten nurses.

  They stood together in A &E. a group of people, some of whom knew one another only slightly, working as they did in totally different departments of the hospital, others who were in daily contact. There was a minute of formalities, of handshaking, name giving.

  Alex Pritchard appeared; half an hour earlier he’d waved to her across reception, off on a clear weekend.

  “Thought I’d better come back, see if I could be useful.”

  Apart from the surgical registrar and Alex, there was just one other properly familiar face: Mark Collins, a young orthopaedic registrar she’d worked with a few months earlier on a ghastly multiple motorbike crash. He had been great then, calm and tireless.

  “Hi, Emma. This sounds like a big one. Worse than the bikers, I fear. OK. Who’s going to be team leader?”

  That had surprised Emma, on her first big incident. Somehow she’d thought everyone would just know what to do anyway. But it was essential, she had discovered, to establish a chain of control-for order and swift delegation, and to cut through the chaos and any panic; the first thing ambulance crews always asked on arrival was, “Who’s team leader?”

  “You, Alex?” she said now to Pritchard.

  “OK. All right with everyone? What news, Emma?”

  “Well, it’s pretty bad. Jackknifed lorry, trailer on its side, driver trapped, several cars, minibus-three lanes blocked, in both directions, several fatalities. And someone just rang to say people are driving down the hard shoulder in the westward direction, so the road could be impassable pretty soon.”

  “Is the driver of the truck alive?”

  “So far. Amazingly, there’s a doctor right on the scene. He rang to report that the bloke was completely trapped, steering column embedded in his chest, just about conscious, pulse very weak, but definitely alive-Excuse me.” Her phone had rung-it was the first of the ambulances. “Hi. Yes. We have a full team ready. Good luck.”

  ***

  Jonathan had turned his attention to the minibus; the driver’s door was jammed shut, but the one at the rear opened fairly easily. There were eight small boys inside, all miraculously unhurt, but the driver was dead, hideously so. He was about to climb in when he heard Abi’s voice: “Jonathan, what can I do?”

  She was still white, but very calm; he felt a reluctant thud of admiration for her.

  “Help me get these chaps out. Don’t look at the front.” She undid their seat belts, took their small hands, led them, talking encouragingly, shepherding them past the worst of it, trying to distract them from the girl in the Golf. They were dazed, obedient with shock, all white faced and shaking, many of them weeping: but astonishingly unhurt.

  There was another man in the van, neatly strapped into his seat, as the boys had all been; he was staring in front of him, also unhurt, but apparently reluctant to leave the van. Jonathan urged him out onto the grass verge, where he sat down obediently, then buried his head in his arms. Post-traumatic shock, Jonathan decided, and felt at once sympathy and a totally unreasonable irritability. He could have done with some help with these poor little buggers from someone who knew them.

  ***

  “Tobes,” said Barney. “Tobes, are you OK?”

  He felt odd, disoriented; his ears seemed to be blocked, sound muffled. He shook his head and looked sideways out of the window, the fog of shock clearing, and saw a surreal landscape of cars, many, like them, come to rest against fridges and washing machines, others at a right angle to the crash barrier, some facing completely the wrong way. At first, as he looked, the landscape was quite still; then, like some gradually speeded-up film, it came to life as people began to climb out of cars, peer into others, clearly fearful of what they might see, talked on their mobiles, approached one another, united as survivors, members of a blessedly elite club.

  And then he realised that there had been no answer from Toby, not even a groan or a grunt, and turned very slowly to look at him, frightened beyond anything.

  He was lying over the steering wheel, one arm holding it, his face turned to Barney, apart from a flow of blood down his face from a head wound, utterly still. And then Barney realised that there was a far worse injury to Toby than his head; the car below the steering wheel was crumpled, collapsed inwards, and Toby’s right leg below the knee appeared crushed by the interior of the car. There was a great deal of blood flowing from it.

  Slow with terror, he reached for Toby’s wrist, pushed up the new white cuff, felt for his pulse. And for an age he sat there, looking at him, just waiting for something to happen, for him to move, make a noise, groan even, for Christ’s sake. But… there was nothing.

  “Oh, Tobes,” he said aloud, his thumb moving first gently, then desperately up and down Toby’s wrist. “Tobes, don’t, please… You can’t-shit, where is it-oh, God-”

  And then he started to weep.

  ***

  “There you are,” Jonathan said to the last little boy settling him on the grass verge. “You’re fine. What’s your name?”

  “Shaun,” he said, and then, “I’m ever so thirsty.”

  “I’ll get you…” said Jonathan, and then realised he couldn’t get him a drink; he and Abi between them had finished the one bottle of water he’d had in the car. And Christ, it was hot; he could have done with another litre of the stuff himself.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, reflecting with a sort of detached surprise on the fact that here, on a three-lane motorway in the twenty-first century in one of the most highly developed countries in the world, a thirsty child in blistering heat could not have a drink, and probably would not be able to for some considerable time.

  He could hear a phone ringing somewhere, and wondered where it was; by the time he’d realised it was his own it had stopped. He was obviously not functioning as well as he might be; he’d better be careful.

  Abi had briefly disappeared; he looked round for her, saw her scrambling over the barrier. He called her name; she turned round, scowled at him, and c
ontinued down the bank, out of sight. Where was the silly bitch going; what was she doing?

  He looked rather vaguely for the girl in the cab; there was no sign of her either. Maybe Abi had seen her; maybe that was where she was going…

  He looked at the missed call register; it had been Laura. Again. She must be very worried, but he couldn’t ring her back yet; he didn’t have the strength either to talk to her or even begin to think about what he might say. The extent of his own predicament was beginning to hit him: being on the wrong motorway, in very much the wrong company. How was he going to explain that, for Christ’s sake? But he was unable even to think about it yet…