Dark Tides (14 page)

‘RTC,’ Hollis said, as I grappled with my door on the Focus. ‘Bad one.’

‘Where?’

I dropped inside, tossed my speed gun into the footwell and reached for my seatbelt.

A lucky break for the Mercedes blonde. She was getting a free pass.

Hollis clambered in under the wheel, hitting the lights and the siren. He stomped on the accelerator and the Focus shot forwards, shimmying as it joined the road.

‘Injebreck reservoir.’

‘We’re close.’

Hollis nodded. ‘Should be the first on scene.’

I grabbed for the radio and told Control we were in progress, giving them our position and our ETA and asking for more details. The details were sketchy. The call had come in from a member of the public. There was talk of a fatality, which wasn’t something we could rely on. Civilians had a tendency to overreact and fear the worst. It was an understandable response. Chancing on a car accident was a scary experience. Especially at night, in damp conditions, on a lonely back road. Most people didn’t want to get too close. They were afraid of getting blood on their hands or of trying to assist someone and ending up getting sued. They had visions of petrol tanks exploding. Of being consumed in a Hollywood fireball.

It was different for me. Different for Hollis. We had no choice but to get involved. I’d been on attachment to the Roads Policing Unit for close to a year now, covering for an officer who was off on long-term sick, and I’d seen a hell of a lot of accidents. A lot of fatalities. Especially during the TT fortnight, when at least a handful of visiting bikers would perish every year. I wouldn’t say it became routine. Never that. But I had a good idea of what to expect. I had a reasonable sense of what we might be able to do and what we might not. If we got there in time, and if the paramedics did too, then maybe this was someone we could save. We’d done it before when the early information had been dire. Not always. Not even often. But sometimes.

I placed the radio back in its cradle and braced my hand against the dash as Hollis powered up a narrow residential street lined with parked cars. We thumped into a sequence of speed bumps, my seatbelt chewing into my shoulder.

The Focus was a mess. All patrol vehicles are. They’re used twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Officers live in these cars. They eat in them, drink in them, sweat in them. I’d arrested plenty of people who’d done much worse than that in the back of a police van. The interior of the Focus was caked in dust and dirt. It smelled bad, too. A combination of odours it was best not to try and distinguish from one another.

The siren wailed. The blue bulbs spun and flickered, strobing the street ahead. Hollis was a good driver. He was quick but controlled. I’d ridden with him many times. Had never felt like we might crash. Didn’t feel that way tonight.

I reached for the grab handle as we lurched round a corner and accelerated away from the houses on to a country lane. It started to rain. The drops came fast and thick and heavy. Hollis hit the wipers. Medium setting. It wasn’t enough. The rain hammered down, sluicing over the glass, smearing the way ahead. He set the wipers to maximum and they flailed from side to side.

In a normal car, at normal speeds, we were perhaps ten minutes away from the reservoir. With Hollis driving, I was guessing five minutes. Maybe six, allowing for the pelting rain. There wouldn’t be much traffic. The reservoir was in the bowl of Baldwin valley, out beyond the tiny village of West Baldwin. After the reservoir, the narrow road snaked up over hills in the middle of the island. It wasn’t a fast route to anywhere, let alone at this time of night, in the dark, in a rainstorm.

Hollis didn’t talk and I didn’t distract him. The radio squawked and buzzed in its cradle. I reached for it once to acknowledge that an ambulance was in progress. It sounded like we were three minutes ahead. Enough time to check on the victim or victims. Enough time to secure the scene and clear any vehicles that might be blocking the road.

We came over a rise, the valley a dark fuzz ahead of us, the sporadic lights from a sprinkling of country homes burning yellow in the black. The road was swamped with rainwater. The tarmac dropped fast and coiled, but Hollis rode the curves with calm assurance, gathering momentum, building speed. We bottomed out in a soggy compression at the base of the hill, the chassis scraping tarmac, and Hollis cut the siren as we blitzed through the tiny hamlet of whitewashed cottages in the centre of the village. The blue lights twirled off walls, hedgerows, trees and overhanging branches. The winding curves beyond the village were tight and blind. Hollis flicked the siren back on.

Control had said that only one vehicle was involved in the incident, with a single passenger, but I was experienced enough to know that might not be accurate. I had to be ready to react to unknown factors. Had to be fully alert.

Hollis glided round another puddled curve, then over a soggy rise. The reservoir appeared before us – a long, narrow spill of blackened water, the surface dimpled in the rain.

There was a car stopped up ahead. Its brake lights shone wetly, hazards blinking, headlamps blaring. The vehicle belonged to the person who’d called the accident in. It was pulled over to the side of the road, at about the mid-point of the reservoir, close to the entrance to the plantation that clung to the steep left-hand slope of the valley. The mass of dense pines speared skywards, smudged and hazy in the pounding deluge. A half-glimpsed figure was standing next to the car, silhouetted against the red and orange and blue-white glare, shoulders hunched against the torrent. The figure waved an arm at us and Hollis cruised by, then cut his speed and slid to a halt.

We unclipped our seatbelts and threw open our doors, darting out into the rain and the pungent scent of burnt rubber and petrol and the saturated pines.

I could tell it was bad right away. The crash vehicle was slanted off at an odd angle, pointed away from the road, towards the water. The reservoir was bordered by a low stone wall but the nose of the car had punched right through it. There were loose bricks scattered across the road and the grass verge. Beads of glass sparkled in the mingling lights of the vehicles at the scene.

The car was a Japanese saloon – some kind of mock rally edition. It had a fishtail spoiler, an oversized exhaust and lots of garish stickers. Its rear end was raised up from the ground, wheels in the air.

I freed my torch from my belt and came round the side, slipping on the grass, rainwater dribbling down the collar of my jacket. I aimed the torch at the front of the vehicle and saw that the bumper and part of the crumpled bonnet were low in the water. The windscreen was smashed, the side window splintered. The driver was slumped forwards over the steering wheel but his door was deformed and wedged tight against the jagged gap in the wall.

No way in.

Hollis had gone round the other side. He was angling his torch through the passenger window, ducking low. He opened the door but it barely moved before striking brick. He reached his arm in up to his shoulder but he couldn’t quite touch the driver. He shook his head and shouted something I couldn’t catch over the clatter of rain on metal.

I tried the rear door. It opened wide enough for me to clamber inside. I pulled myself forwards between the front seats. The rain was driving in through the broken windscreen, drenching the dash and the seats. There was a lot of broken glass. A lot of shattered plastic. The interior reeked of a hot, burning smell, like singed electrical wires.

The driver wasn’t moving.

I shone my torch in his face and I saw two things right away.

The first was that he was dead. No question about it. His neck was pitched forwards at an unnatural angle, drooping sickeningly to one side, obviously broken, the seatbelt biting into his throat. His eyes were sightless, pupils blown, and a dribble of bloody saliva was leaking from the corner of his mouth.

The second was that I knew him.

‘How’s it look?’ Hollis was squashing his rain-greased face up against the gap in the passenger door.

I didn’t answer him. I just pinched the water from my eyes and rocked back on to the rear seat and felt my body sag. My arm dropped and my torch dropped with it and that’s when I saw the third thing, and it was the most shocking and inexplicable of them all.

There was a mark on the car mat behind the dead man. Nothing too unusual. Nothing that would seem particularly remarkable to anyone else.

But it was remarkable to me.

A single muddy footprint was pointed out towards the door.

You stand in your drenched socks beneath the sodden, bowed pines, the frenzied rain rattling through the foliage. You’re soaked through and very cold. You’re suffering from shock. You’re in a lot of pain. The impact was far more brutal than you could have possibly imagined. You held tight to the reverse of the driver’s seat and that was your mistake. You heard something crunch inside your chest. But what else could you do? You only had mere fractions of a second to react and for one horrible moment you’d thought that you were going to be flung out through the exploding windscreen.

You’re bleeding from a cut on your head and that makes you mad. You should have come up with an alternative approach. There were flaws in your planning and that disturbs you. You’ll have to be so much more careful the next time around.

But there were unexpected advantages, too. First, your target panicked and lost control so completely that the impact with the wall was severe. The whiplash effect was substantial. You didn’t even have to break his neck. At least, not in the way that you’d anticipated. You hitched the seatbelt up around his throat when the car hit the wall, and then after everything had stilled, you jerked the belt extra tight and flipped the rear seat upright again before you left, just to make it plausible.

And second, the scene unfolding before you now is so much more perfect than you could have hoped. There was no way you could have planned for Claire to be here. No way you could have arranged it. And that makes you believe there’s something bigger going on, that you’re part of a more complex scheme, the poetry of coincidence. Destiny or fate, some people would call it, and who are you to argue with that?

Twelve months later, the reservoir was placid and the dry stone wall had been rebuilt. A collection of newer, darker stones had been laid at the point of impact, stitching the wall back together like a suture on a wound. I wished all the destruction from that night could have been healed so easily. I wished that, standing here, I could feel even half as serene as the waters appeared.

There was a sensation of things stirring inside me, of restlessness and unease. Some days the movement was sluggish. Other times it whipped up into a cyclone of rage and despair that I struggled to contain. Right now it was somewhere in between.

I set down the laminated photograph of us all together. The shot had been taken on that first Hop-tu-naa, about half an hour after we’d left the woods. David had balanced his camera on the roof of his Fiesta and set the timer, and there we all were, pale and stark in the harsh flashbulb glare, our masks flipped up on top of our heads, except for Callum, who was still acting the ghost.

Outwardly, I looked happy. I was loose-limbed and sparkly-eyed and smiling toothily, my arms draped around David and Mark as Rachel rode piggyback on Scott and made rabbit ears behind Callum. Looking at the shot, you’d never know that inwardly I was all clenched up with shame and confusion, my mind spinning back to the sensation of the unknown hand touching me, my emotions lurching between hormonal excitement and self-loathing and fear.

Attached to the photograph was a card with a catch-all sentiment:
Remembering you
. And that was part of the problem. The things I could remember. The things I couldn’t forget.

I took a step backwards into Callum. He squeezed me with one arm and hugged Rachel with the other. David was supposed to have been here, too. He’d joined us for the fundraising walk Rachel had organised in Scott’s memory the previous month. The local paper had carried a photograph of the four of us starting out on the hike from the grandstand of the TT course, along with a brief article that mentioned how we planned to mark the anniversary of Scott’s death by gathering at the reservoir and spending the day together. Now David had cancelled at the last moment, blaming a crisis at the airport. I didn’t know what I resented most: that perhaps he didn’t care enough to come for Scott’s sake, or that maybe he’d decided not to show because he preferred to avoid me.

Rachel was holding a balled tissue under her nose. She was sniffling, her eyes reddened, knuckles white. She’d held the same pose on the day of the funeral and I found myself wondering if she was aware of that.

The funeral had been a bleak affair. Scott had been young and in good health, his death brutal and unexpected. His parents took it very hard. His fiancée looked as if she’d been struck down by a sudden illness. She spent most of the service hunched over, clutching her stomach, and I found myself wondering if there was something more we didn’t know. Turned out she was pregnant. Scott’s daughter, Sarah, had been born four months ago into a world where she’d grow up without her father, and it was just one more outcome from his death that I was still struggling to assimilate.

I almost hadn’t gone to the wake, which would have been a mistake. Everyone wanted answers. Everyone wanted closure. Everyone seemed to think it was something I could provide. Within seconds of taking a paper plate and a few drooping sandwiches from the buffet, a group of Scott’s relatives had formed a ring around me and I’d been forced to run through what I’d seen when I’d arrived at the crash site. I didn’t tell them the truth, of course. I didn’t say that I knew from personal experience that Scott was a reckless driver and that he’d had accidents in the past. I didn’t mention that when I shut my eyes I could still see the slackened pitch of his head, the awful way his Adam’s apple had protruded from his throat. I told them it had been quick. Told them it had been painless. Told them it had been terrible bad luck.

Eventually, the last of them drifted away, muttering appreciation for all that I’d done, not realising that there hadn’t been anything for me to do. The sad truth was that Scott had been long gone before Hollis even responded to the call from Control. But then, if you ask me, his death in a road accident had been an inevitable outcome from the moment he’d first passed his driving test.

I set my plate down and wandered outside on to the lawn of the golf club where the wake was being held. The others were waiting for me under the shelter of a weeping oak. I didn’t need to explain any of it to them. They knew the same things about Scott that I did. And in that moment of walking towards them, the years seemed to fall away. One tragedy had blown us apart and now another had pulled us back together again.

Rachel was the first to break from the others. She spread her arms and hugged me hard, whispering in my ear and smoothing my hair.

‘Must have been so awful for you. Being the one to find him like that.’

I could feel the wetness of my tears smearing her cheek.

‘I guess I always hoped that he’d calm down.’

‘Not Scott,’ Callum said, and in his voice was a strange kind of admiration.

David came round from behind Rachel. He was wearing a slate-grey suit that looked as if it had been tailored to fit him precisely. His collar was unbuttoned and his dark tie was loose.

‘What happened to your face?’ I asked.

‘Oh.’ He smiled sheepishly and raised his fingers to the short line of stitches that ran up on a diagonal slant from just above his eyebrow. ‘I fell in the shower.’ He reached out and touched my arm. ‘Hope you told him he was an idiot.’

‘I’d told him that too many times already. Reckoned he’d be bored of it.’

‘Will you have to give evidence? Will there be a hearing of some kind?’

‘An inquest. But there’s not much I can say.’

And there really wasn’t. My colleagues in Accident Investigations had already formed a conclusive opinion. It was a classic combination of wet roads, excessive speed and an alcohol reading just north of legal limits. All too familiar. An open-and-shut case.

Except for the footprint.

I’d mentioned it in my written report. I’d even drawn Hollis’s attention to it at the time of the crash. But nobody had been particularly interested and ultimately it was dismissed as incidental. There was only one mark. A size-nine shoe print. The tread pattern matched a pair of Scott’s shoes that were found in the boot of his car. The shoes were muddy. To the extent anyone thought about it at all, the conclusion was that the print belonged to him, the theory being that at some point earlier in the evening, before he’d gone into the pub where he’d spent a few hours watching a European football match, he’d changed out of the dirty trainers and into the tan loafers he’d been wearing at the time of the crash. Perhaps he’d stepped into the back of his car to retrieve something when he was still wearing the trainers, leaving a scuff on the mat. In any case, there was nothing to suggest anyone else had been involved in his accident. Nothing to indicate foul play.

Perhaps things might have been different if I’d told them about the night six years before, about the attack on Edward Caine and Scott’s involvement in it. But I hadn’t. There were a whole bunch of reasons why. Many of them were reasonable. Some less so.

Most important of all, I had no proof that the footprint was related. I was in a highly suggestible state when I discovered that the accident victim was Scott. I was juiced on adrenaline. I was shocked and unnerved. So what had seemed sinister at the time, what had struck me as something like a taunt, became steadily more innocuous in the days and weeks that followed.

Besides, I trusted the Accident Investigations crew. I knew how good they were. They were highly professional, highly capable people. They hadn’t spotted anything that concerned them about Scott’s accident and any alternative explanation from me would have sounded extremely implausible.

And my credibility was a factor, because in the aftermath of the accident, I was under active consideration for the vacancy in DI Shimmin’s team. It was a job I’d gone on to land. I was now a detective constable with new responsibilities and challenges, and during the past year, I liked to think that I’d proved to be a worthy appointment. But I had no doubt that I wouldn’t have been given the opportunity in the first place if I’d gone around shooting my mouth off about some outlandish suspicions concerning Scott’s death and a sinister footprint.

And yet the doubts still niggled. Sure, it seemed most likely that the footprint meant nothing whatsoever. But I couldn’t escape the feeling, no matter how hard I tried, that perhaps my initial gut instinct had been right. That despite all the logic and evidence that went against it, the instantaneous connection I’d formed in my mind when I first saw the print was valid. That, somehow, it signified a link back to Scott’s past. To all our pasts.

Not that I’d mentioned any of this to the others. Our patched-up friendships were fragile and what had happened to us in the Caine mansion that night was something we had still never discussed. Sometimes I found myself on the verge of saying something, but I held the words back because I knew how unwelcome they’d be and how paranoid I’d sound. The therapy I was going through had made me aware of how unreasonable my fears and anxieties could sometimes be. It had taught me to test my thinking, to compare it against other more rational explanations. And the most simple explanation of all was that the footprint meant nothing of consequence. So I’d kept my deepest concerns to myself. I’d acknowledged them and I’d analysed them, and even if I couldn’t dismiss them altogether, I’d managed to suppress them.

Or at least, I had until October came around again. Until the anniversary of Scott’s death dawned. Until I could no longer avoid scratching that lingering itch because I could no longer deny the need I had to satisfy my own fearful curiosity, no matter how irrational and obsessive it might be.

‘Shall we go?’ Callum nodded towards the dirt-streaked minibus he’d parked along the road.

‘You still haven’t said where you’re taking us.’

We knew the activity Callum had in mind but not where it was going to take place.

‘Relax, Cooper. All will be revealed.’

‘Maybe I’d relax if I knew where we were heading.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’ Callum smiled in a way that I guess he thought was enigmatic. I thought it was punch-worthy.

‘Sure you’re up to this?’ Rachel squeezed my arm. ‘If you’d prefer to be by yourself . . .’

‘No,’ I told her. ‘I could use the company.’

But I didn’t explain why I felt that way. I didn’t dare admit, even to myself, that I was scared to be alone.