by Peter James
‘So long as I pay your bill, you keep it on. That’s the deal.’
‘You’re overprotective. I might turn out to be emotionally retarded.’
‘That’s a risk I’ll have to take.’
He climbed out of the car into the rain, then held the door hesitantly. ‘You should get a life.’
‘I had one before you were born.’
He smiled before slamming the door.
She watched him walk in through the gates into the empty play area – all the other pupils had already gone inside. Every time he went out of her sight, she was scared for him. Worried about him. The only reassurance that he was OK was when she checked her own iPhone and watched his pulsing purple dot and could see where he was. Tyler was right, she was overprotective, but she couldn’t help it. She loved him desperately and, despite some of his maddening attitudes and behaviour, she knew that he loved her back, just as much.
She headed up towards Portland Road, driving faster than she should, anxious not to be late for her chiropodist. The corn was giving her grief and she did not want to miss the appointment. Nor did she want to get delayed there. She badly needed to be in the office ahead of Mr Misery and, with luck, have a few minutes to catch up with some urgent paperwork on a forthcoming hearing.
Her phone pinged with an incoming text. When she reached the junction with the main road, she glanced down at it.
I had a great time last night – wld love to see you again XXX
In your dreams, sweetheart. She shuddered at the thought of him. Dave from Preston, Lancashire. Preston Dave, she’d called him. At least she had been honest with the photograph of herself she’d put up on the dating website – well, reasonably honest! And she wasn’t looking for a Mr Universe. Just a nice guy who wasn’t 100 pounds heavier and ten years older than his photograph, and who didn’t want to spend the entire evening telling her how wonderful he was, and what a great shag women thought he was. Was that too much to ask?
Just to put the icing on the cake, the tight bastard had invited her out to dinner, to a far more expensive restaurant than she would have chosen for a first encounter, and at the end had suggested they split the bill.
Keeping her foot on the brake and leaning forward, she deleted the text, decisively, returning the phone to the hands-free cradle with no small amount of satisfaction.
Then she made a left turn, pulling out in front of a white van, and accelerated.
The van hooted and flashing its lights angrily, closed up right behind her and began tailgating her. She held up two fingers.
There were to be many times, in the days and weeks ahead, when she bitterly regretted reading and deleting that text. If she hadn’t waited at that junction for those precious seconds, fiddling with her phone, if she had made that left turn just thirty seconds earlier, everything might have been very different.
5
‘Black,’ Glenn Branson said, holding the large golf umbrella over their heads.
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace looked up at him.
‘It’s the only colour!’
At five foot, ten inches, Roy Grace was a good four inches shorter than his junior colleague and friend, and considerably less sharply dressed. Approaching his fortieth birthday, Grace was not handsome in a conventional sense. He had a kind face with a slightly misshapen nose that gave him a rugged appearance. It had been broken three times – once in a fight and twice on the rugby pitch. His fair hair was cropped short and he had clear blue eyes that his long-missing wife, Sandy, used to tell him resembled those of the actor Paul Newman.
Feeling like a child in a sweet shop, the Detective Superintendent, hands dug deeply into his anorak pockets, ran his eyes over the rows of vehicles on the Frosts’ used-car forecourt, all gleaming with polish and rainwater, and kept returning to the two-door Alfa Romeo. ‘I like silver, and dark red, and navy.’ His voice was almost drowned out by the sound of a lorry passing on the main road behind them, its air horns blaring.
He was taking advantage of the quiet week, so far, to nip out of the office. A car he’d liked the look of on the Autotrader website was at this local dealer.
Detective Sergeant Branson, wearing a cream Burberry mackintosh and shiny brown loafers, shook his head. ‘Black’s best. The most desirable colour. You’ll find that useful when you come to sell it – unless you’re planning to drive it over a cliff, like your last one.’
‘Very funny.’
Roy Grace’s previous car, his beloved maroon Alfa Romeo 147 sports saloon, had been wrecked during a police pursuit the previous autumn, and he had been wrangling with the insurance company ever since. Finally they had agreed a miserly settlement figure.
‘You need to think about these things, old-timer. Getting near retirement, you need to look after the pennies.’
‘I’m thirty-nine.’
‘Forty’s looming.’
‘Thanks for reminding me.’
‘Yeah, well, the old brain starts going at your age.’
‘Sod off! Anyhow, black’s the wrong colour for an Italian sports car.’
‘It’s the best colour for everything.’ Branson tapped his chest. ‘Look at me.’
Roy Grace stared at him. ‘Yes?’
‘What do you see?’
‘A tall, bald bloke with rubbish taste in ties.’
‘It’s Paul Smith,’ he said, looking hurt. ‘What about my colour?’
‘I’m not allowed to mention it under the Racial Equality Act.’
Branson raised his eyes. ‘Black is the colour of the future.’
‘Yep, well, as I’m so old I won’t live long enough to see it – especially standing here in the pissing rain. I’m freezing. Look, I like that one,’ he said, pointing at a red two-seater convertible.
‘In your dreams. You’re about to become a father, remember? What you need is one of those.’ Glenn Branson pointed across at a Renault Espace.
‘Thanks, I’m not into people carriers.’
‘You might be if you have enough kids.’
‘Well, so far it’s just one on the way. Anyhow, I’m not choosing anything without Cleo’s approval.’
‘Got you under her thumb, has she?’
Grace blushed coyly. ‘No.’
He took a step towards a sleek silver two-door Alfa Brera and stared at it covetously.
‘Don’t go there,’ Branson said, stepping along with him, keeping him covered with the umbrella. ‘Unless you’re a contortionist!’
‘These are really gorgeous!’
‘Two doors. How are you going to get the baby in and out of the back?’ He shook his head sadly. ‘You have to get something more practical now you’re going to be a family man.’
Grace stared at the Brera. It was one of the most beautiful cars he’d ever seen. The price tag was £9,999. Within his range – although with rather high mileage. As he took a further step towards it, his mobile phone rang.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a salesman in a sharp suit, holding up an umbrella, scurrying towards them. He glanced at his watch as he answered the phone, mindful of the time, because he was due for a meeting with his boss, the Assistant Chief Constable, in an hour’s time, at 10 a.m.
‘Roy Grace,’ he said.
It was Cleo, twenty-six weeks pregnant with their child, and she sounded terrible, as if she could barely speak.
‘Roy,’ she gasped. ‘I’m in hospital.’
6
He’d had enough of Meat Loaf. Just as the railway-crossing barrier began to rise, Stuart Ferguson switched to an Elkie Brooks album. ‘Pearl’s a Singer’ began to play. That song had been on in the pub the first time he’d gone out with Jessie.
Some women on a first date tried to distance themselves from you, until they knew you better. But they’d had six months of getting to know each other over the phone and the Internet. Jessie had been waiting tables in a truck stop just north of Edinburgh when they’d first met, late at night, and chatted for over an hour. They were bot
h going through marriage bust-ups at the time. She’d scrawled her phone number on the back of the receipt and hadn’t expected to hear from him again.
When they’d settled into the quiet side booth, on their first proper date, she’d snuggled up to him. As the song started playing, he’d slipped an arm around her shoulder, fully expecting her to flinch or pull away. Instead she’d snuggled even closer and turned her face towards him, and they’d kissed. They continued kissing, without a break, for the entire duration of the song.
He smiled as he drove forward, bumping over the rail tracks, mindful of a wobbly moped rider just in front of him, the wipers clunking. His heart was heavy with longing for Jessie, the song both beautiful and painful for him at the same time. Tonight he would be back in her arms.
‘In one hundred yards turn left,’ commanded the female voice of his satnav.
‘Yes, boss,’ he grunted, and glanced down at the left-angled arrow on the screen, directing him off Station Road and into Portland Road.
He indicated and changed down a gear, braking well in advance, careful to get the weighting of the heavy lorry stabilized before making the sharp turn on the wet road.
In the distance he saw flashing headlights. A white van, tailgating a car. Tosser, he thought.
7
‘Tosser,’ Carly said, watching the white van that filled her rear-view mirror. She kept carefully to the 30mph speed limit as she drove along the wide street, heading towards Station Road. She passed dozens of small shops, then a post office, a curry house, a halal butcher, a large red-brick church to the right, a used-car showroom.
Immediately ahead of her was a van parked outside a kitchen appliance shop, with two men unloading a crate from the rear. It was blocking her view of a side road just beyond. She clocked a lorry that was coming towards her, a few hundred yards away, but she had plenty of space. Just as she started pulling out, her phone rang.
She glanced down at the display and saw to her irritation that it was Preston Dave calling. For an instant she was tempted to answer and tell him she was surprised he hadn’t reversed the charge. But she was in no mood to speak to him. Then, as she looked back up at the road, a cyclist going hell for leather suddenly appeared out of nowhere, coming straight at her, over a pedestrian crossing on her side of the road, just as the lights turned red.
For an instant, in panic, she thought it must be her who was on the wrong side of the road. She swung the steering wheel hard to the left, stamping on the brake pedal, thumping over the kerb, missing him by inches, and skidded, wheels locked, across the wet surface.
Empty chairs and tables outside a café raced towards her as if she was on a scary funfair ride. She stared, frozen in horror, gripping the wheel, just a helpless observer as the wall of the café loomed nearer. For an instant, as she splintered a table, she thought she was going to die.
‘Oh shittttttttttt!’ she screamed as the nose of her car smashed into the wall beneath the café window and a massive explosion numbed her ears. She felt a terrible jolt on her shoulder, saw a blur of white and smelled something that reminded her of gunpowder. Then she saw glass crashing down in front of the buckled bonnet of the car.
There was a muffled barrrrrrrrrrppppppppp, accompanied by a slightly less muffled banshee siren.
‘Jesus!’ she said, panting in shock. ‘Oh, God! Oh, Jesus!’
Her ears popped and the sounds became much louder.
Cars could catch fire, she’d seen that in films. She had to get out. In wild panic, she hit the seat-belt buckle and tried to open her door. But it would not move. She tried again, harder. A baggy white cushion lay on her lap. The airbag, she realized. She wrenched the door handle, her panic increasing, and shoved the door as hard as she could. It opened and she tumbled out, her feet catching in the seat belt, tripping her, sending her sprawling painfully on to the wet pavement.
As she lay there for an instant she heard the banshee wail continue above her head. A burglar alarm. Then she could hear another wailing sound. This time it was human. A scream.
Had she hit someone? Injured someone?
Her knee and right hand were stinging like hell, but she barely noticed hauling herself to her feet, looking first at the wreckage of the café and then across the road.
She froze.
A lorry had stopped on the opposite side. A huge artic, slewed at a strange angle. The driver was clambering down from the cab. People were running into the road right behind it. Running past a mountain bike that had been twisted into an ugly shape, like an abstract sculpture, past a baseball cap and tiny bits of debris, towards what she thought at first was a roll of carpet lying further back, leaking dark fluid from one end on to the rain-lashed black tarmac.
All the traffic had stopped, and the people who had been running stopped too, suddenly, as if they had become statues. She felt she was staring at a tableau. Then she walked, stumbling, out into the road, in front of a stationary car, the high-pitched howl of the siren almost drowned out by the screams of a young woman holding an umbrella, who was standing on the far pavement, staring at that roll of carpet.
Fighting her brain, which wanted to tell her it was something different, Carly saw the laced-up trainer that was attached to one end.
And realized it wasn’t a roll of carpet. It was a severed human leg.
She vomited, the world spinning around her.
8
At 9 a.m. Phil Davidson and Vicky Donoghue, dressed in their green paramedic uniforms, sat chatting in the cab of the Mercedes Sprinter Ambulance. They were parked on a police bay opposite the taxi rank at Brighton’s Clock Tower, where they had been positioned by the dispatcher.
Government targets required that ambulances reached Category-A emergencies within eight minutes, and from this location, with a bit of aggressive driving, they could normally reach anywhere in the city of Brighton and Hove well within that time.
Ninety minutes into their twelve-hour shift, the rush-hour world passed by in front of them, blurred by the film of rain on the windscreen. Every few minutes Vicky flicked the wipers to clear their view. They watched taxis, buses, goods vehicles passing by, streams of people trudging to work, some huddled beneath umbrellas, others looking sodden and gloomy. This part of the city didn’t look great even on a sunny day; in the wet it was plain depressing.
The ambulance service was the most constantly busy of all the emergency services and they’d already attended their first call-out, a Category-B emergency shout to attend an elderly lady who had fallen in the street outside her home in Rottingdean.
The first life lesson Phil Davidson had learned, from his eight years as a paramedic, was very simple: Don’t grow old. If you have to, don’t grow old alone.
Around 90 per cent of the work of the paramedics was attending the elderly. People who had fallen, people who were having palpitations, or strokes or suspected heart attacks, people who were too frail to get a taxi to hospital. And there were plenty of wily old birds who knew how to exploit the system. Half the time, much to their irritation, the paramedics were nothing more than a free big taxi service for lazy, smelly and often grossly overweight people.
They’d delivered this particular lady, who was a sweetie, into the care of Accident and Emergency at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and were now on standby, waiting for the next call. That was the thing Phil Davidson most liked about this job, you never knew what was going to happen. The siren would sound inside the ambulance and trip that squirt of adrenalin inside him. Was it going to be a routine job or the one he would remember for years? The job’s category of emergency, ranging from A to C would appear on the screen on the console, together with the location and known facts, which would then be updated as further information came in.
He glanced down at the screen now, as if willing the next job to appear. A rainy rush hour like today often produced accidents, particularly traffic collisions, as they were now known. They were not called accidents any more, because it was always someone’s fault; th
ey were known as Road Traffic Collisions.
Phil liked attending trauma cases best. The ambulance’s lockers were packed with the latest trauma technology. Critical haemorrhage kits, Israeli military dressings, a combat application tourniquet, an ACS – Asherman Chest Seal – standard equipment for the British and US military. The benefits of war, he often thought cynically. Little did some victims of terrible accidents, who recovered thanks to the paramedics’ work at the scene, realize they owed their lives to the medical advances that came out of battlegrounds.
Vicky nipped out to have a quick pee in the Starbucks just beside them. She’d learned always to grab the opportunity to use a loo, because in this job you never knew when you were going to get busy and there might not be another chance for hours.
As she climbed back behind the wheel, her crewmate for the day was talking on his phone to his wife. This was only her second time out with Phil and she had enjoyed working with him a lot the last time. A lean wiry man in his late thirties, with his hair shaven to stubble, long sideburns and several days’ growth of beard, he had the air of a movie bad guy about him, although he was anything but. He was a big-hearted softy who doted on his family. He had a reassuring manner, a kind word for everyone he treated and a true passion for this work, which she shared with him.
Finishing his call, he looked down at the screen again.
‘Unusually quiet, so far.’
‘Not for long, I don’t expect.’
They sat in silence for a moment as the rain pattered down. During her time with the ambulance service, she’d discovered that every paramedic had his or her own particular favourite field of work and seemed by some quirk of fate to attract that particular call-out. One of her colleagues always got mentally ill patients. She herself had delivered fifteen babies over the past three years, while Phil, in all his career, had yet to deliver one.
However, in her two years since qualifying, Vicky had only attended one serious road accident, and that had been on her first ever shift, when a couple of teenage boys had accepted a lift home in Brighton from a drunk driver. He’d hit a parked car, at 80mph in the centre of town. One boy had been killed outright and another had died at the roadside. Despite the horror of that incident, she found her work incredibly rewarding.