Butterfly on the Storm

by Walter Lucius

  ‘It’s not your fault, Farah. I saw what happened. It’s not your fault.’

  She realized what must have happened. It had been too much. While she’d managed to stand up to the Russian’s physical powers, she couldn’t fight a force that was so much more intense and treacherous. The Russian woman’s hatred had penetrated her emotional defences, and had sparked an uncontrollable fury in her.

  She knew how important it was to check her temper, even in the most difficult situations. Self-control had saved her life on more than one occasion. Yet tonight of all nights she’d lost that control. For only a few seconds, but in those seconds she might have fatally injured another woman.

  She rarely lost herself in rage during a fight. It was a lot more common in love, where she’d left a trail of victims. But they always lived to tell the tale – with or without a broken heart – whereas the woman who’d faced her in the ring this evening might not.

  She heard the door opening. While the uproar out in the corridor came blasting in and her coach was having a whispered conversation with an official, Farah tried to find the silence inside her head.

  She heard her coach approach with a heavy tread, pause right behind her and wait until she was ready to hear the outcome. She could hear him breathing. Tears trickled down her cheeks. Father, where are you? When she’d finally calmed her breathing, she got up, turned around and saw the composure in her coach’s eyes … the reassurance. ‘It’s not too bad.’

  Barely fifteen minutes later, Farah eased her black Porsche Carrera into the car park underneath the Waterland Medical Centre. She parked it close to the staircase and quickly ran up to the Emergency Department.

  The receptionist looked at her with tired eyes that were devoid of all empathy. Farah told her that she was here for the woman who’d just been brought in with two broken ribs and a concussion.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘The woman who did that to her,’ Farah replied.

  The receptionist looked shocked. Just then, a few doctors and nurses stormed into the corridor. They ran past the reception desk in the direction of an ambulance which had just arrived out front with its sirens wailing.

  Farah saw a seriously injured girl being wheeled in on a stretcher. The shredded, colourful fabric covering her had once been a traditional robe. The girl was draped in jewellery and little bells that made a sound each time the stretcher shifted. Amidst the apparent chaos of doctors and nurses yelling at each other, Farah was transfixed by the girl’s eyes. They were filled with terror. She also noticed the bluish lips moving slowly and noiselessly, trying to form a word.

  Nobody seemed to see or hear this. And even if someone had heard, they probably wouldn’t have understood, because it was said in a language that wasn’t all that common here. But Farah had used that same word in her dressing room earlier in the evening. It had remained unspoken then, merely a thought.

  ‘Padar.’ Father.

  She squeezed past the trauma specialists and bent over the girl on the stretcher. She spoke to her in Dari. ‘Relax, sweetheart. He’ll be here soon.’

  The blonde doctor in the orange ambulance uniform looked up in surprise.

  ‘Are you a relative?’

  ‘No, but she asked for her father.’

  ‘It’s not a she. It’s a boy.’

  A little boy, in these garments, wearing jewellery and make-up … Farah understood in a flash. It had never occurred to her that this age-old tradition from her native country could crop up in a Western country. But the evidence lay bleeding on the stretcher in front of her.

  ‘Is there an interpreter?’ Farah asked.

  ‘We’re trying to contact one,’ the blonde doctor said, raising her arm to stop Farah as the boy was wheeled into the trauma room.

  ‘I can interpret!’ Farah exclaimed as she watched how the boy was transferred, spinal board and all, to the operating table. She also heard the nervous tone of the consultations. She worked out that the doctor was refusing to surrender the boy to the care of the trauma team. Suddenly the woman gestured to Farah.

  ‘Ask him who his father is,’ she said as she began to cut the remaining clothes from the boy’s body. Meanwhile two nurses removed all the jewellery and put it in a transparent plastic bag which they tied under the stretcher.

  Farah approached the boy. She took him to be seven, eight at most. She began talking to him, softly, telling him that he was safe now, that he had to hang in there. She would stay with him.

  When she gently took his hand in hers, the boy clutched her fingers.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  He looked at her, bewildered, as if she came from another planet.

  ‘Namet chist?’ What’s your name? She held her ear close to his mouth, but amidst the many loud instructions she couldn’t hear, let alone understand his whispers.

  She overheard the blonde doctor telephoning to say that a ‘Priority 1’ patient was coming through. At that moment a nurse rushed in, shouting. ‘The surgeon is on his way.’

  ‘I’m going to operate,’ the doctor said, quite unperturbed, as she inserted a drain into the boy’s chest cavity. Farah nearly passed out at the sight. She turned back to the boy and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Ma Farah astom, to ki hasti?’ I’m Farah, who are you?

  She saw the tears rolling down his cheeks and felt an immense need to give free rein to her own tears, but she held them back and merely whispered some clichés.

  ‘I’m here. I won’t leave you.’

  ‘Have you found out anything more about him?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Not yet. By the way, where did you find him?’

  ‘In the woods, the Amsterdamse Bos. A hit-and-run.’ Farah picked up on the anger in her terse answer. The doctor immediately turned back to the nursing staff. ‘Listen, everyone. We’ve got an open-book fracture and a femur fracture. Most likely internal bleeding in the abdomen and possibly in the skull as well. The boy’s going to the OR. The fractures need to be stabilized or else he’ll bleed to death. Then we’re sending him for a CT scan. Is that clear?’

  The boy was wheeled out of the trauma room. Farah walked beside him, still holding his hand. The doctor approached her as the lift doors opened.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked once they were in the lift.

  ‘Farah.’

  ‘Listen, Farah, you can’t go into the OR.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning to.’

  ‘But please leave your name and number at the desk.’

  ‘I’ll keep in touch,’ Farah said. ‘Who do I ask for if I want to speak to you?’

  ‘For Danielle. Danielle Bernson.’

  The boy groaned. Farah stroked his hair while keeping hold of his hand. ‘You’re going to go to sleep soon,’ she whispered. ‘Then all the pain will be gone. And when you wake up, I’ll be here again.’

  He looked at her with something like resignation.

  The lift doors slid open. They walked through an empty corridor and stopped in front of OR 12.

  ‘Here we are,’ Danielle said.

  Farah held her head very close to that of the boy.

  ‘The doctor’s going to look after you now. I’ll be here, waiting for you. All right?’

  She caught a glint of mild despair in his eyes. Farah pressed a kiss on his cheek and gently released his hand.

  ‘Thank you, Farah,’ Danielle said as she wheeled the boy in.

  Farah barely heard her. Once the boy had disappeared behind the slamming doors, all she could hear was the violent pounding of her own heart. She paced up and down the empty corridor for a while before coming to a decision.

  4

  At the exit for the woods, Farah slammed on the brakes and swerved off the A9. While carefully negotiating the bends in the increasingly ill-lit road, she realized she was doing something she’d long ago decided never to do again: she was acting on impulse.

  What had drawn her to this place? The boy’s eyes? His terror? Or was it his despair, which
in that single whispered word had sounded like an echo from her past?

  She slowed to a halt and parked the car by the side of the road with the engine idling. Her pulse was racing. She closed her eyes and tried to regulate her breathing.

  ‘Padar.’

  Farah had often heard the Dari word for father in her thoughts, in the silence that accompanies the dead. This evening the boy and his whispering had suddenly broken that long-standing silence. She had a suspicion that something had happened here this evening that was to have a far greater impact on her life than she could foresee. The thought scared her, but she was determined to trust her intuition this time around. Strangely enough, the decision to retrace the boy’s route caused her pulse to gradually slow.

  She saw emergency lights approaching from behind and refracting sharp blue lines among the trees. Soon afterwards, the shiny red metal of a fire engine whizzed past with clanging sirens. Without hesitation, she accelerated and pursued the fire engine. She stepped on her brakes when it turned left on to a narrow path. From there she could see flames shooting up into the sky, some hundred yards into the woods. A crash, at such a remote location? Unlikely. She decided not to check it out, but to keep going along the paved road. A couple of minutes later she was proven right. Two forensics officers were crouching down on the road, going about their business in the light of some big work lamps.

  Farah got out of her car and paused in front of the red-and-white tape stretched across the road. That’s when she realized that she wasn’t dressed for the occasion. Not in the slightest. Her clothes had been chosen for tonight’s festive closing gala: leather sandals with block heels under black trousers, loosely rolled up to just above the ankle. She’d left the second-hand, glossy black Versace jacket on the back seat. In her fitted, metallic shirt and with her tousled hair she looked like a dazed fashion model who’d been abandoned by the rest of the crew halfway through a shoot.

  A little unnerved, she watched as one of the officers highlighted skid marks some thirty yards further up on her side of the road. The tracks swerved to the right, off into the verge. A few yards away, still in the right lane, someone had used white chalk to trace the contours of a small body in a bizarre pose.

  The skid marks were probably from the car that had hit the boy. Farah saw there was quite a distance between the spot where the boy had been lying and where the marks shot off into the verge. It suggested that the boy had been hit so hard he’d been thrown some distance by the impact. The other option was that the car had actually tried to avoid the boy and had not hit him: the driver had slammed on the brakes, yanked on the wheel and come to a halt against a tree. In that case the boy hadn’t been standing there – he’d already been lying there.

  In the left lane, level with the chalk drawing, Farah saw the second forensic scientist working on another set of skid marks. She slipped under the tape and walked towards him. He was young and completely focused on the wet tarmac, so it took him a while to notice her. He looked up in surprise.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you. I live nearby,’ Farah said in her friendliest voice. ‘Do you have any idea what happened here?’

  The young officer glanced at her and then pointed at something behind her. ‘Is that yours?’

  ‘The Carrera?’ Farah asked, turning around. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Three-point-two litre rear-drive engine, 230 bhp, turbo body, lowered chassis and gas shock absorbers. You don’t just want to drive it, you want to live in it,’ the officer said with the admiring glance of an expert. ‘And I bet it goes from zero to a hundred in less than six seconds.’

  ‘I’ve never tried,’ Farah said. ‘It’s from 1987, and I take really good care of it.’ Sensing that she’d made it through his initial screening with some success, she decided to press him for more information. She gestured towards the shattered glass of a headlight. ‘How fast was this car going?’

  ‘My guesstimate: around eighty. Slammed on the brakes. You can tell by those thick marks over here.’ He pointed at the tip of the skid marks, where the tyre print was most clearly visible.

  ‘The boy was lying over there,’ Farah said, indicating the chalk drawing. ‘Is it possible that he was hit by this car?’ It was out before she realized it and the man in front of her was immediately on his guard.

  ‘The boy?’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ Farah owned up straightaway. ‘I’m trying to find out who’s responsible.’

  ‘Do you have any ID on you?’ The young officer sounded rather tense all of a sudden. She could tell he was inexperienced and that he was trying to impress her with what little authority he had. Out of the corner of her eye Farah saw the other officer approaching them. She tried again.

  ‘Look, you’re doing your job and I’m doing mine. Are those marks on the other side of the road from the same car? What do you think?’ The other officer, who was undoubtedly in charge, was only a few yards away now. ‘I mean,’ Farah rephrased her thoughts quickly, ‘was there more than one car involved in this accident?’

  ‘Ma’am, this is a crime scene. You need to stay behind the tape.’

  Looking into the grim face of the second forensics officer, Farah realized she’d run out of credit.

  ‘Of course, officer. I beg your pardon.’ Feeling her emotions getting the better of her, she quickly turned around. As she walked away, she could hear the two men conferring with each other.

  ‘Ma’am?’ the officer in charge shouted.

  She turned around again and saw him coming towards her.

  ‘I understand you’re a reporter.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Farah said. ‘I was at the Emergency Department when they brought him in. And to leave a child for dead, here … well …’

  For a moment they stood facing each other in silence.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we’re not allowed to pass information to the press.’ The officer gave her a conspiratorial smile. ‘But you’re right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘More than one car was involved.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said hoarsely.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For your … help.’

  ‘We didn’t help anyone, ma’am. There hasn’t been anyone who’s needed it.’ He turned around. ‘Kevin, have you seen anyone around here in the past five minutes who wanted to know anything?’

  The younger officer shook his head and smiled.

  Farah got into her car, did a U-turn and drove to the spot where she’d seen the fire engine turn into the woodland path. Meanwhile she tried to make sense of what she’d just seen and heard. Skid marks on both sides of the road, from opposite directions. Two cars. At more or less the same time, in the same spot. And what linked them was the boy. Three pieces of what remained, for the time being, a sinister puzzle.

  When she got to the woodland path, she looked over and there were those flames again. Could the fire have had anything to do with the accident? She was going on intuition now, and her intuition told her to find out.

  5

  It felt like driving into a tree-lined inferno. But it wasn’t the fire or chaos that drew her in. More than anything, it was the growing awareness that what had taken place here might have something to do with what had happened to the boy not far from here.

  As she approached a police officer who gestured for her to stop, she flashed her press pass from the driver’s side in the hope of being mistaken for a detective, and accelerated without waiting for his response. She pulled up right behind a fire engine, opened her car door and hurried around to the clearing where helmeted firefighters were spraying white layers of foam on to the smouldering shell of a station wagon. Sudden shouting. She realized too late that she’d strayed within the reach of a water cannon used to keep the surrounding trees wet. Before she could jump out of the way, she was blown off her feet by the impact of hundreds of litres of water.

  When, dazed and drenched, she tried to scramble up again, a stranger’s hand quickly pulled her to her
feet. Still tottering on her heels, she looked straight into the clear brown eyes of a young man with trendy stubble that accentuated the angular jawline of his face.

  ‘Lost?’ he yelled above the din.

  ‘More unwanted, I think,’ Farah said, while tugging at her shirt that was now stretched tightly around her body. But tug as she might, the soaked fabric slid right back around her braless breasts. She might as well have been topless.

  ‘Detective Joshua Calvino. What’s a lady like you doing in a wood like this?’ He said it so mischievously that it made her smile in spite of the circumstances.

  ‘Okay, detective, here’s the score. I was at the WMC’s Emergency Department when a seriously injured boy was brought in. He’d been hit by a car somewhere in the vicinity. And I wanted to know what had happened.’

  ‘The boy was hit further up the road. Not here.’

  ‘Hmm, I know. I’ve already been up there.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here?’

  ‘Two cars were involved. I thought maybe one of those cars was torched here.’

  He took another good look at her. She could tell he was trying hard not to look at her breasts.

  ‘You don’t seem like the type who goes wandering around the woods at some ungodly hour just for fun. So what is it?’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ Farah said and showed him her ID. Meanwhile they’d reached the clearing where the burnt-out car was, covered in foam. The ground was squelchy and the air thick with greasy smoke. Amidst the chaos of firefighters walking to and fro with their endless hoses, Farah noticed a somewhat older man, who was gesticulating angrily and having a go at their commander.

  ‘My partner,’ Joshua said, frowning at the scene. ‘He’s getting all worked up because those guys with their extinguishers and waders have probably wiped out all the prints. Most likely destroyed any evidence we might have had.’

  ‘Any idea what caused the fire?’ Farah asked tentatively.

  ‘The car was doused in petrol and then … whoosh!’ Joshua simulated striking a match and flinging it away.