Dead Man's Grip (6 page)

He ran back to his car, calling out at everyone he passed, ‘Please, if you witnessed the incident come over to my car and give me your names and phone numbers.’

He opened the tailgate and dragged out a folding POLICE ROAD CLOSED sign, which he erected a short distance behind his car. At the same time he shouted into his radio that there was a potential hit and run and he needed the fire brigade, the Collision Investigation Unit, the inspector and backup PCSOs and uniformed officers.

Then he grabbed a roll of blue and white POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, tied one end around a lamp post and ran across the road, securing the other end around a parking sign on the pavement. As he was finishing he saw two more officers from his unit running towards him. He instructed them to tape off the road on the far side of the lorry and grab names and phone numbers from anyone else who might be witnesses.

Then, inside the taped cordon, he pulled off his reflective jacket and threw it over the severed leg, wanting both to spare people the horror of it and to stop one particular ghoul in a raincoat taking any more photographs of it.

‘Get the other side of the tape!’ he shouted at him. ‘If you’re a witness, go to my car. If not, move along please!’

More emergency vehicles were arriving. He saw a second ambulance and a paramedic car which would be bringing a specialist trauma doctor. But his main focus now was on identifying the drivers of the lorry and the Audi from the mass of rubberneckers and potential witnesses.

He saw a smartly dressed woman with rain-bedraggled hair standing near the open driver’s door of the Audi. She was staring, transfixed, at the lorry.

Hurrying over to her, he asked, panting, ‘Are you the driver of this car?’

She nodded, eyes vacant, still staring over his shoulder.

‘Are you injured? Do you need medical assistance?’

‘He just came out of nowhere, came out of that side street, straight at me. I had to swerve, otherwise I’d have hit him.’

‘Who?’ Surreptitiously he leaned forward, close enough to smell her breath. There was a faint reek of stale alcohol.

‘The cyclist,’ she said numbly.

‘Were there any other vehicles involved?’

‘A white van was right behind me, tailgating me.’

He had a quick look at the Audi. Although the bonnet was crumpled and the airbags had deployed, the interior of the car looked intact.

‘OK, madam, would you mind getting back into your car for a few minutes?’

He gently took her shoulders and turned her round, away from the lorry. He knew that if drivers of vehicles involved in an accident stared at a serious casualty for too long, they would become traumatized. This woman was already partway there. He steered her over to the Audi and waited as she climbed in, then with some difficulty pushed the door, which seemed to have a bent hinge, closed.

As he did so, he saw a PCSO running over towards him. ‘Any more of you around?’ Pattenden asked him.

‘Yes, sir.’ The man pointed at two more Police Community Support Officers approaching, a short distance away along the pavement.

‘OK, good. I want you to stay here and make sure this lady does not leave her vehicle.’

Then he ran towards the two PCSOs, delegating each of them to scene-guard at either end of the crash site and to log anyone crossing the police line.

At this point, to his relief, he saw the reassuring sight of his inspector, James Biggs, accompanied by his duty sergeant, Paul Wood, coming, grim-faced, through the rain towards him, both men holding a reel of police tape and a police traffic cone under each arm.

At least now the buck no longer stopped with him.

Carly sat numbly in her car, grateful for the rain which coated the windscreen and the side windows like frosted glass, at least making her invisible and giving her some privacy. She was aware of the dark figure of the PCSO standing like a sentry outside. Her chest was pounding. The radio was on, tuned as it always was to the local news and chat station, BBC Radio Sussex. She could hear the lively voice of Neil Pringle, but wasn’t taking in anything he said.

The image of what was going on underneath the lorry behind her was going round and round inside her head. Suddenly Pringle’s voice was interrupted by a traffic announcement that Portland Road in Hove was closed due to a serious accident.

Her accident.

The car clock said 9.21.

Shit. She dialled her office and spoke to her cheery secretary, Suzanne. Halfway through telling her that she did not know when she would be in and asking her to phone the chiropodist, she broke down in tears.

She hung up, debating whether to phone her mother next or her best friend, Sarah Ellis. Sarah, who worked at a law firm in Crawley, had been her rock after Kes’s death five years ago in an avalanche while skiing in Canada. She dialled her number, then listened to the phone ringing, hoping desperately she was free.

To her relief, Sarah answered on the fifth ring. But before Carly could get any words out, she started sobbing again.

Then she heard a tap on her window. A moment later, her car door opened and the police officer she had seen earlier, the one who had told her to wait in her car, peered in. He was a sturdy-looking man in his mid-thirties, with a serious face beneath his white cap, and was holding a small device that resembled some kind of meter.

‘Would you mind stepping out of the car please, madam?’

‘I’ll call you back, Sarah,’ she spluttered, then climbed out into the rain, her eyes blurry with tears.

The officer asked her again if she was the driver of the car, and then for her name and address. Then, holding a small instrument in a black and yellow weatherproof case, he addressed her in a stiffer, more formal tone. ‘Because you have been involved in a road traffic collision, I require you to provide a specimen of breath. I must tell you that failure or refusal to do so is an offence for which you can be arrested. Do you understand?’

She nodded and sniffed.

‘Have you drunk any alcohol in the past twenty minutes?’

How many people had an alcoholic drink before 9 a.m., she wondered? But then she felt a sudden panic closing in around her. Christ, how much had she drunk last night? Not that much, surely. It must be out of her system by now. She shook her head.

‘Have you smoked in the last five minutes?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But I bloody need a fag now.’ She was shaking and her throat felt tight.

Ignoring her comment, the officer asked her age.

‘Forty-one.’

He tapped it into the machine, then made a further couple of entries before holding the machine out to her. A tube wrapped in cellophane protruded.

‘If you could pull the sterile wrapper off for me.’

She obliged, exposing the narrow white plastic tube inside it.

‘Thank you. I’d like you to take a deep breath, seal your lips around the tube and blow hard and continuously until I tell you to stop.’

Carly took a deep breath, then exhaled. She kept waiting for him to tell her to stop, but he stayed silent. Just as her lungs started to feel spent, she heard a beep, and he nodded his head. ‘Thank you.’

He showed her the dial of the machine. On it were the words
sample taken
. Then he stepped back, studying the machine for some moments.

She watched his face anxiously, shaking even more now with nerves. Suddenly, his expression hardened and he said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you that you have failed the breath test.’ He held the machine up so she could read the dial again. The one word on it:
fail.

She felt her legs giving way. Aware that a man was watching her from inside the cafe´, she steadied herself against the side of her car. This wasn’t possible. She could not have failed. She just couldn’t have.

‘Madam, this device is indicating that you may be over the prescribed limit and I’m arresting you for providing a positive breath sample. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you may later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not possible, she said. ‘I didn’t – I haven’t – I was out last night, but-’

A few minutes ago Carly could not have imagined her day getting any worse. Now she was walking through the rain, being steered by the guiding arm of a police officer towards a marked car just beyond a line of police tape. She saw two ambulances, two fire engines and a whole host of other police vehicles. A tarpaulin had been erected around the rear section of the lorry and her imagination went into hyperdrive, guessing what was happening on the far side of it.

There was a terrible, almost preternatural stillness. She was vaguely aware of the steady patter of the rain, that was all. She walked past a fluorescent yellow jacket lying on the road. It had the word police stencilled on the back and she wondered why it had been discarded.

A tall, thin man with two cameras slung around his neck snapped her picture as she ducked under the tape. ‘I’m from the
Argus
newspaper. Can I have your name please?’ he asked her.

She said nothing, the words ‘I’m arresting you’ spinning around inside her head. She climbed lamely into the rear of the BMW estate and fumbled for the seat belt. The officer slammed the door on her.

The slam felt as final as a chapter of her life ending.

‘Dust. OK? See that? Can’t you see that?’

The young woman stared blankly at where her boss was pointing. Her English wasn’t too good and she had a problem understanding her, because the woman spoke so quickly that all her words seem to get joined together into one continuous, nasally undulating whine.

Did this idiot maid have defective vision or something? Fernanda Revere strutted angrily across the kitchen in her cerise Versace jogging suit and Jimmy Choo trainers, her wrist bangles clinking. A slightly built woman of forty-five, her looks surgically enhanced in a number of places and her wrinkles kept at bay with regular Botox, she exuded constant nervous energy.

Her husband, Lou, hunched on a barstool in the kitchen’s island unit, was eating his breakfast bagel and doing his best to ignore her. Today’s
Wall Street Journal
was on the Kindle lying beside his plate and President Obama was on the television above him.

Fernanda stopped in front of twin marble sinks that were wide enough to dunk a small elephant in. The vast bay window had a fine view across the rain-lashed manicured lawn, the shrubbery at the end and the dunes beyond, down to the sandy Long Island Sound beachfront and the Atlantic Ocean. On the floor was a megaphone which her husband used, on the rare occasions when he actually asserted himself, to shout threats at hikers who tramped over the dunes, which were a nature reserve.

But she wasn’t looking out of the window at this moment.

She ran her index finger along one of the shelves above the sinks and held it up inches in front of her maid’s eyes.

‘See that, Mannie? You know what that is? It’s called
dust
.’

The young woman stared uncomfortably at the dark grey smudge on her boss’s elegant manicured finger. She could also see the almost impossibly long varnished nail. And the diamond-encrusted Cartier watch on her wrist. She could smell her Jo Malone perfume.

Fernanda Revere tossed her short, peroxide-blonde hair angrily, then she wiped the dust off the finger on the bridge of her maid’s nose. The young woman flinched.

‘You’d better understand something, Mannie. I don’t allow dust in my house, got that? You want to stay here working for me or you want to go on the next plane back to the Philippines?’

‘Hon!’ said her husband. ‘Give it a break. The poor kid’s learning.’

Lou Revere looked back up at Obama on the television. The President was involved in a new diplomatic initiative in Palestine. Lou could do with Obama’s diplomacy in this house, he decided.

Fernanda rounded on her husband. ‘I don’t listen to you when you wear those clothes. You look too dumb to say anything intelligent in them.’

‘These are my golf clothes, OK? The same as I always wear.’

The ones that made him look ridiculous, she thought.

He grabbed the remote, tempted to turn the sound up and drown her voice out.

‘Jesus, what’s wrong with them?’

‘What’s wrong with them? You look like you’re wearing a circus clown’s pants and a pimp’s shirt. You look so – so…’ She flapped her hands, searching for the right word. ‘Stupid!’

Then she turned to the maid. ‘Don’t you agree? Doesn’t my husband look stupid?’

Mannie said nothing.

‘I mean, why do you all have to dress like circus clowns to play golf?’

‘It’s partly so we can see each other easily on the course,’ he said defensively.

‘Why don’t you just wear flashing lights on your heads, instead?’ She looked up at the clock on the wall, then immediately checked her watch: 9.20. Time for her yoga class. ‘See you later.’ She gave him a quick, loveless wave of her hand, as if she were brushing away a fly.

They used to embrace and kiss, even if they were only going to be apart for half an hour. Lou couldn’t remember when that had stopped – and in truth he didn’t care any more.

‘Seeing Dr Gottlieb today, hon?’ he asked.

‘He’s just so stupid, too. Yes, I’m seeing him. But I think I’m going to change. I need a different shrink. Paulina, in my yoga class, is seeing someone who’s a lot better. Gottlieb’s useless.’

‘Ask him for stronger medication.’

‘You want him to turn me into a zombie or something?’

Lou said nothing.

Carly sat in the back of the police car, trails of rain sliding down the window beside her, tears sliding down her cheeks. They were heading up a hill on the A27. She stared out at the familiar grassy landscape of the Brighton outskirts, which were blurred by the film of water on the glass. She felt detached, as if out of her body and watching herself.