Straight (25 page)

I told Simms the way to Hungerford so that he could drop me off there, and the big car purred along with Sunday afternoon somnolence.

Martha said something I didn’t quite catch and I turned my face back between the headrests, looking toward her and asking her to say it again. I saw a flash of raw horror begin on Harley’s face, and then with a crash and a bang the car rocketed out of control across the road toward a wall and there was blood and shredded glass everywhere and we careened off the wall back onto the road and into the path of a fifty-seater touring coach which had been behind us and was now bearing down on us like a runaway cliff.

I
n the split second before the front of the bus hit the side of the car where I was sitting, in the freeze-frame awareness of the tons of bright metal thundering inexorably toward us, I totally believed I would be mangled to pulp within a breath.

There was no time for regrets or anger or any other emotion. The bus plunged into the Daimler and turned it again forward and both vehicles screeched along the road together, monstrously joined wheel to wheel, the white front wing of the coach buried deep in the black Daimler’s engine, the noise and buffeting too much for thinking, the speed of everything truly terrifying and the nearness of death an inevitability merely postponed.

Inertia dragged the two vehicles toward a halt, but they were blocking the whole width of the road. Toward us, round a bend, came a family car traveling too fast to stop in the space available. The driver in a frenzy braked so hard that his rear end swung round and hit the front of the Daimler broadside with a sickening jolt and a crunching bang and behind us, somewhere, another car ran into the back of the bus.

About that time I stopped being clear about the sequence of events. Against all catastrophe probability I was still alive and that seemed enough. After the first stunned moments of silence when the tearing of metal had stopped, there were voices shouting everywhere, and people screaming and a sharp petrifying smell of raw petrol.

The whole thing was going to burn, I thought. Explode. Fireballs coming. Greville had burned two days ago. Greville had at least been dead at the time. Talk about delirious. I had half a car in my lap and in my head the warmed-up leftovers of yesterday’s concussion.

The heat of the dead engine filled the cracked-open body of the car, forewarning of worse. There would be oil dripping out of it. There were electrical circuits... sparks... there was dread and despair and a vision of hell.

I couldn’t escape. The glass had gone from the window beside me and from the windshield, and what might have been part of the frame of the door had bent somehow across my chest, pinning me deep against the seat. What had been the fascia and the glove compartment seemed to be digging into my waist. What had been ample room for a dicky ankle was now as constricting as any cast. The car seemed to have wrapped itself around me in an iron-maiden embrace and the only parts free to move at all were my head and the arm nearest Simms. There was intense pressure rather than active agony, but what I felt most was fear.

Almost automatically, as if logic had gone on working on its own, I stretched as far as I could, got my fingers on the keys, twisted and pulled them out of the ignition. At least, no sparks. At most, I was breathing.

Martha, too, was alive, her thoughts probably as abysmal as my own. I could hear her whimpering behind me, a small moaning without words. Simms and Harley were silent; and it was Simms’s blood that had spurted over everything, scarlet and sticky. I could smell it under the smell of petrol; it was on my arm and face and clothes and in my hair.

The side of the car where I sat was jammed tight against the bus. People came in time to the opposite side and tried to open the doors, but they were immovably buckled. Dazed people emerged from the family car in front, the children weeping. People from the coach spread along the roadside, all of them elderly, most of them, it seemed to me, with their mouths open. I wanted to tell them all to keep away, to go farther to safety, far from what was going to be a conflagration at any second, but I didn’t seem to be able to shout, and the croak I achieved got no farther than six inches.

Behind me Martha stopped moaning. I thought wretchedly that she was dying, but it seemed to be the opposite. In a quavery small voice she said, “Derek?”

“Yes.” Another croak.

“I’m frightened.”

So was I, by God. I said futilely, hoarsely, “Don’t worry.”

She scarcely listened. She was saying “Harley? Harley, honey?” in alarm and awakening anguish. “Oh, get us out, please, someone get us out.”

I turned my head as far as I could and looked back sideways at Harley. He was cold to the world but his eyes were closed, which was a hopeful sign on the whole.

Simms’s eyes were half open and would never blink again. Simms, poor man, had developed his last one-hour photo. Simms wouldn’t feel any flames.

“Oh God, honey. Honey, wake up.” Her voice cracked, high with rising panic. “Derek, get us out of here, can’t you smell the gas?”

“People will come,” I said, knowing it was of little comfort. Comfort seemed impossible, out of reach.

People and comfort came, however, in the shape of a works foreman-type of man, used to getting things done. He peered through the window beside Harley and was presently yelling to Martha that he was going to break the rear window to get her out and she should cover her face in case of flying glass.

Martha hid her face against Harley’s chest, calling to him and weeping, and the rear window gave way to determination and a metal bar.

“Come on, Missis,” encouraged the best of British workmen. “Climb up on the seat, we’ll have you out of there in no time.”

“My husband ...” she wailed.

“Him too. No trouble. Come on, now.”

It appeared that strong arms hauled Martha out bodily. Almost at once her rescuer was himself inside the car, lifting the still-unconscious Harley far enough to be raised by other hands outside. Then he put his head forward near to mine and took a look at me and Simms.

“Christ,” he said.

He was smallish, with a mustache and bright brown eyes.

“Can you slide out of there?” he asked.

“No.”

He tried to pull me, but we could both see it was hopeless.

“They’ll have to cut you out,” he said, and I nodded. He wrinkled his nose. “The smell of petrol’s very strong in here. Much worse than outside.”

“It’s vapor,” I said. “It ignites.”

He knew that, but it hadn’t seemed to worry him until then.

“Clear all those people farther away,” I said. I raised perhaps a twitch of a smile. “Ask them not to smoke.”

He gave me a sick look and retreated through the rear window and soon I saw him outside delivering a warning which must have been the quickest crowd control measure on record.

Perhaps because with more of the glass missing there was a through current of air, the smell of petrol did begin to abate, but there was still, I imagined, a severed fuel line somewhere beneath me, with freshly released vapor continually seeping through the cracks. How much liquid bonfire, I wondered numbly, did a Daimler’s tank hold?

There were a great many more cars now ahead in the road, all stopped, their occupants out and crash-gazing. No doubt to the rear it would be the same thing. Sunday afternoon entertainment at its worst.

Simms and I sat on in our silent immobility and I thought of the old joke about worrying, that there was no point in it. If one worried that things would get bad and they didn’t, there was no point in worrying. If they got bad and one worried they would get worse, and they didn’t, there was no point in worrying. If they got worse and one worried that one might die, and one didn’t, there was no point in worrying, and if one died one could no longer worry, so why worry.

For worry read fear, I thought; but the theory didn’t work. I went straight on being scared silly.

It was odd, I thought, that for all the risks I took I very seldom felt any fear of death. I thought about physical pain, as indeed one often had to in a trade like mine, and remembered things I’d endured, and I didn’t know why the imagined pain of burning should fill me with a terror hard to control. I swallowed and felt lonely, and hoped that if it came it would be over quickly.

There were sirens at length in the distance and the best sight in the world, as far as I was concerned, was the red fire engine which slowly forced its way forward, scattering spectator cars to either side of the road. There was room, just, for three cars abreast; a wall on one side of the road, a row of trees on the other. Behind the fire engine I could see the flashing blue light of a police car and beyond that another flashing light which might betoken an ambulance.

Figures in authority uniforms appeared from the vehicles, the best being in flameproof suits lugging a hose. They stopped in front of the Daimler, seeing the bus wedged into one side of it and the family car on the other, and one of them shouted to me through the space where the windshield should have been.

“There’s petrol running from these vehicles,” he said. “Can’t you get out?”

What a damn silly question, I thought. I said, “No.”

“We’re going to spray the road underneath you. Shut your eyes and hold something over your mouth and nose.”

I nodded and did as I was bid, managing to shield my face inside the neck of my jersey. I listened to the long whooshing of the spray and thought no sound could be sweeter. Incineration faded progressively from near certainty to diminishing probability to unlikely outcome, and the release from fear was almost as hard to manage as the fear itself. I wiped blood and sweat off my face and felt shaky.

After a while some of the firemen brought up metal-cutting gear and more or less tore out of its frame the buckled door next to where Harley had been sitting. Into this new entrance edged a policeman who took a preliminary look at Simms and me and then perched on the rear seat where he could see my head. I turned it as far as I could toward him, seeing a serious face under the peaked cap: about my own age, I judged, and full of strain.

“A doctor’s coming,” he said, offering crumbs. “He’ll deal with your wounds.”

“I don’t think I’m bleeding,” I said. “It’s Simms’s blood that’s on me.”

“Ah.” He drew out a notebook and consulted it. “Did you see what caused this ... all this?”

“No,” I said thinking it faintly surprising that he should be asking at this point. “I was looking back at Mr. and Mrs. Ostermeyer, who were sitting where you are now. The car just seemed to go out of control.” I thought back, remembering. “I think Harley ... Mr. Ostermeyer ... may have seen something. For a second he looked horrified ... then we hit the wall and rebounded into the path of the bus.”

He nodded, making a note.

“Mr. Ostermeyer is now conscious,” he said, sounding carefully noncommittal. “He says you were shot.”

“We were
what
?”

“Shot. Not all of you. You, personally.”

“No.” I must have sounded as bewildered as I felt. “Of course not.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Ostermeyer are very distressed but he is quite clear he saw a gun. He says the chauffeur had just pulled out to pass a car that had been in front of you for some way, and the driver of that car had the window down and was pointing a gun out of it. He says the gun was pointing at you, and you were shot. Twice at least, he says. He saw the spurts of flame.”

I looked from the policeman to Simms, and at the chauffeur’s blood over everything and at the solidly scarlet congealed mess below his jaw.

“No,” I protested, not wanting to believe it. “It can’t be right.”

“Mrs. Ostermeyer is intensely worried that you are sitting here bleeding to death.”

“I feel squeezed, not punctured.”

“Can you feel your feet?”

I moved my toes, one foot after another. There wasn’t the slightest doubt, particularly about the left.

“Good,” he said. “Well, sir, we are treating this from now on as a possible murder inquiry, and apart from that I’m afraid the firemen say it may be some time before they can get you loose. They need more gear. Can you be patient?” He didn’t wait for a reply, but went on, “As I said, a doctor is here and will come to you, but if you aren’t in urgent need of him there are two other people back there in a very bad way, and I hope you can be patient about that also.”

I nodded slightly. I could be patient for hours if I wasn’t going to burn.

“Why,” I asked, “would anyone shoot at us?”

“Have you no idea?”

“None at all.”

“Unfortunately,” he said, “there isn’t always an understandable reason.”

I met his eyes. “I live in Hungerford,” I said.

“Yes, sir, so I’ve been told.” He nodded and slithered out of the car, and left me thinking about the time in Hungerford when a berserk man had gunned down many innocent people, including some in cars, and turned the quiet country town into a place of horror. No one who lived in Hungerford would ever discount the possibility of being randomly slaughtered.

The bullet that had torn into Simms would have gone through my own neck or head, I thought, if I hadn’t turned round to talk to Martha. I’d put my head between the headrests, the better to see her. I tried to sort out what had happened next, but I hadn’t seen Simms hit, I’d heard only the bang and crash of the window breaking and felt the hot spray of the blood that had fountained out of his smashed main artery in the time it had taken him to die. He had been dead, I thought, before anyone had started screaming: the jet of blood had stopped by then.

The steering wheel was now rammed hard against his chest with the instrument panel slanting down across his knees, higher my end than his. The edge of it pressed uncomfortably into my stomach, and I could see that if it had traveled back another six inches, it would have cut me in half.