Fatal Act (2 page)

‘Are you taking me to my hotel or not?’ the fare interrupted. He clambered out of the cab. Well over six foot, he leaned over Bern as though spoiling for a fight.

‘Yes, yes, I’ll take you there just as soon as the emergency services get here. Look, there’s no point getting shirty about it. This had nothing to do with me. The collision took place before we got here.’

His passenger glared at him.

‘I want you to take me to my hotel now. I’ve got to be up early in the morning –’

‘We’ve got to wait for the Old Bill.’

‘Wait? Wait here? I don’t think so.’

T
hat was all Bern needed. So much for adding a few miles on the clock to earn an extra quid or two. He was driving around in the dark when most people were at home, and all he had to show for it was an irate customer and the memory of an accident which would probably give him nightmares. As if that wasn’t enough for one night, he now had to wait for the police who would probably want a statement, holding him up even longer. He almost wished he had indeed reversed away and driven straight off when he had first seen the Porsche blocking his path. His real mistake had been to leave the main road in the first place. That was what happened when you tried to be clever. In the meantime the American continued grousing.

‘Look, why don’t you get back in the cab, mate? You’re getting soaked out here.’

Grumbling, the passenger climbed back in and sat, arms folded, glaring. Bern shivered and pulled up the collar of his raincoat, hoping he wasn’t going to catch a chill. He was definitely too old to be driving around at night.

A
t last the sound of a siren pierced the night air. A moment later, the blue flashing light of a police car came round the corner, followed by an ambulance. Bern was irrationally relieved to see a paramedic running towards the demolished Porsche. The driver was dead; it made no difference. But the image of her bloody face had become someone else’s memory to expunge.

A
policeman in uniform approached with an officious air. Noting down Bern’s details, he asked him for a full account of what had happened. Bern gazed at him uncomfortably. All he wanted to do was to go home and sleep but he still had his fare, and the policeman was scowling at him. He was probably tired too. Bern answered his questions as helpfully as he could, but he had little to say.

‘I didn’t check the time but I must have arrived on the scene about a minute before I called 999. I just got out the cab to see what had happened, saw the state of the Porsche, and called up. That’s all, really. I saw the vehicles and –’ He broke off with a shrug. ‘There was so much blood. It was horrible. I thought I ought to take a look, you know, in case there was someone still in the car, trapped maybe, and needing help urgently. But I could see she was past help.’

T
he police officer squinted suspiciously at him.

‘How could you tell? That’s for a medical officer to –’

‘Take a look for yourself,’ Bern cut in with a burst of annoyance, ‘and then you tell me if you think anyone could survive with injuries like that. I’m telling you, it doesn’t take any sort of medical training to see that woman’s dead.’

Without warning he turned his head away and threw up, splashing the policeman’s boots with flecks of vomit.

‘I
DON
’
T
KNOW
why we’ve been summoned to a hit and run,’ Detective Sergeant Sam Haley grumbled by way of greeting. ‘What’s wrong with traffic?’

Her usually cheerful round face was twisted into a sour expression as she scowled up at the grey sky.

‘Why didn’t you ask the chief why we’ve been called out, if you’re so keen to know?’ Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel responded mildly.

She hoped her colleague might be able to tell her about the accident they had been summoned to investigate, but Sam shook her head.

‘It’s hardly the sort of question a lowly sergeant can ask.’

Geraldine acknowledged the remark with a rueful smile.

T
heir senior investigating officer, Reg Milton, had a tendency to regard questions as a challenge to his authority. In his defence, he was efficient in disseminating information promptly. When she had first arrived in London, Geraldine had found his authoritarian attitude abrasive. The longer she worked with him, the more strongly she suspected he was actually quite insecure beneath his arrogance. But Sam was right. Reg was not the kind of man to encourage informal questions. He was more comfortable issuing orders.

A
light shower began to fall, dampening Geraldine’s mood even further. Jumping into the driver’s seat, Sam ran her fingers through her bleached blonde cropped hair, lifting it back into its customary spikes.

‘It seems there’s something suspicious,’ Geraldine said as they drove off.

‘It had better be bloody suspicious to get us out of bed at this ungodly hour on a Saturday morning.’

Geraldine couldn’t help laughing.

‘It’s gone nine o’clock. It’s hardly early.’

‘It’s nine now, but I’ve been up for nearly an hour. It’s Saturday. I’d still be asleep if it wasn’t for this bloody job.’

U
p early to do some last minute shopping in preparation for her niece’s visit that weekend, Geraldine had been secretly relieved to be summoned to work. Although she had only recently discovered that she had been adopted at birth, she had never felt close to her sister, Celia. Offering to spend time with her niece was Geraldine’s way of making an effort to support her sister. Celia was taking a long time to come to terms with the loss of their mother who had died not long before Geraldine had relocated to London. Before Geraldine had moved, she had made a vague promise to have her niece to stay. She had been putting off fixing a date, but the invitation had somehow slipped out in an unguarded moment. To Geraldine’s relief, Celia had sounded resigned rather than angry when Geraldine had called to postpone her niece’s visit.

‘S
o? What’s so urgent we had to be called out in the middle of the night?’ Sam repeated her question as they drove out of the car park.

Ignoring the exaggeration, Geraldine related what little she knew about the incident. A car had driven into a van. The damage to both vehicles had been out of all proportion to the speed indicated on the car’s dashboard, where the speedometer had smashed on impact.

‘So it’s a car crash,’ Sam replied. ‘Big deal. Like I said, traffic should be dealing with it.’

‘Yes, but they felt something wasn’t right about it, so they called the Homicide Assessment Team out, and they also thought there was something wrong and so here we are, doing what we’re paid to do. Someone died in that crash,’ she added solemnly.

S
am grunted. Geraldine continued, hammering her point home. She was aware that she sounded pompous, but she didn’t care. What she had to say was more important than maintaining her image as a tough detective.

‘Whatever time we’re summoned makes no difference to the dead. Just because they have no voice doesn’t mean they have no rights.’

‘I know, I know, but this isn’t a suspicious death, it’s a car crash.’

‘Well, let’s wait and see what we find when we get there. We must have been called out for a reason.’

‘A cock up, more like.’

The rain began to fall more heavily as they drove in silence the rest of the way.

E
ven on a Saturday morning the roads were congested as they approached central London and crawled along the Marylebone Road. Neither of them spoke. Sam stared ahead sullenly. Geraldine made no attempt to engage her in conversation, accepting that in her present mood the sergeant was best left alone. If Geraldine had been at home, she would have been tidying her spare bedroom in readiness for her niece’s arrival. Celia would have been on the way to London. It would have been strange for Geraldine, not having her flat to herself, even if it was only for one night. She was surprised that her initial relief had turned to disappointment, now the visit had been cancelled. Forcing herself to focus on the task ahead, she ran through what little she knew about the incident so far.

A
t last they reached the entrance to Ashland Place, which was blocked by a police vehicle spanning the narrow side road. They had to park round the corner in Paddington Street.

‘What happened exactly?’ Geraldine asked as they entered the cordoned off area.

She felt her usual frisson of excitement, rapidly followed by a twinge of guilt because the summons meant there had been a fatality. Up ahead, a white Porsche had driven into a black van. From a distance, she surveyed the heap of crumpled metal and shattered glass, the mangled remains of two vehicles. A forensic canopy had been erected over the cars as protection from the rain that was now falling steadily. The highway glistened with rainbow patches of oil as she bent down to pull on blue overshoes before approaching the vehicles.

B
eneath the canvas, white coated scene of crime officers were industriously measuring and photographing, collecting samples of glass and fabric. Apart from an occasional shout, the only sound was the muffled hum of traffic passing along the main road. Approaching the white car, she looked at its shattered front. The Porsche had slammed head first into a van, which had probably shunted it backwards. The car must have been travelling at speed because its front section had concertinaed, as though it was made of tin. The driver hadn’t stood a chance.

‘Someone’s in there,’ Sam muttered.

‘Yes, someone’s in there,’ a scene of crime officer echoed, in a curiously hollow tone.

‘What about the driver of the van?’ Geraldine asked sharply.

No one answered.

G
eraldine peered inside the Porsche. The air bag had been deflated to allow access to the dead woman seated at the wheel. Her face was covered in pools and rivulets of blood, making it difficult to distinguish what she looked like. From the little Geraldine could see of a turned up nose and neat chin, she thought the victim looked very young.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll find out who did this to you,’ she whispered under her breath to the dead woman.

She made her way along the narrow gap between the vehicles and the side wall of the building that bordered the road, to the front of the van. The side windows were intact, but the windscreen had been smashed. A scene of crime officer had the driver’s door open and was examining the seat carefully.

‘Was the van empty?’ Geraldine asked. ‘There can’t have been anyone driving it. No one could’ve escaped unhurt from that,’ she added, nodding to indicate the crash.

T
he scene of crime officer who was working on the interior of the van straightened up and shrugged.

‘Yes, it’s hard to see how anyone could have survived a collision like that. The Porsche must have been going at a cracking pace, although the speedometer was smashed in the crash and that indicates the vehicle was travelling at under twenty miles an hour. There’s no sign of the other driver. We’ve searched the entire street in case he was somehow thrown clear, and managed to crawl away, but we’ve found nothing yet. The van must have been parked here, with no lights on, and the Porsche rammed straight into it. Which means she must have been doing more than twenty miles an hour to do this much damage. A lot more. We’re getting the speedometer checked.’

‘But what about the van? There must have been a driver at some point. Who’s it registered to?’

The scene of crime officer shrugged.

‘Someone called Trevelyan. Your colleague over there has the details.’

G
eraldine returned to the Porsche and stared at the blood spattered face of the victim for a moment before turning to look for Sam. The sergeant was talking to a uniformed officer standing by the cordon. Geraldine suspected Sam was happy to avoid viewing the victim.

‘We’re still checking the interior of the van,’ a scene of crime officer replied, ‘it’ll take a while.’ He frowned. ‘But so far there’s been no sign of any injured party. No blood stains. Nothing. The whole thing’s weird, actually, because the van’s facing the wrong way. It must have been parked here. Either that, or else a ghost was driving that van.’

He grinned as though he had cracked a joke. No one laughed.

I
t was all quite straightforward. No one sitting in the driver’s seat of the van could have survived the crash. Someone had parked irresponsibly, the Porsche had come along travelling far too fast, and a woman was dead. With a sigh, Geraldine turned her attention back to the Porsche which had been shunted sideways across the street by the impact, so that the passenger door was almost flat against the wall. Only the driver’s door was accessible. She leaned down to peer inside the car. There wasn’t much to see from there, just the back of a head of long blonde hair soaked in blood like some ghastly lowlights.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ the scene of crime officer warned.

‘This isn’t our first potential crime scene,’ Geraldine snapped.

The initial rush of adrenaline had faded and she felt exhausted.

H
aving studied the interior of the car, she went over and joined Sam who was still deep in conversation with a uniformed constable manning the cordon. He was gesticulating and seemed to be ranting about something, while Sam alternately nodded and shook her head.

‘What was he going on about?’ Geraldine asked, when she and Sam were on their way back to the car and the constable could no longer hear them.

‘He was pissed off about some bloody reporter turning up earlier on, just before the Homicide Assessment Team arrived. It makes you sick, the way they exploit something like this, just for a story.’

‘How did the reporter get here so quickly?’

‘Apparently she was just round the corner. Aren’t they always? Anyway, she heard the accident. It must have been an almighty crash, and she came running up hoping for a story. They sent her packing before she could get anywhere near the Porsche. Imagine if she’d got a picture and someone who knew the victim saw it! These people are vultures. They’re shameless.’