The Best of Times (12 page)

CHAPTER 9

William Grainger always said his life was totally changed in one moment: the moment when he stood, awestruck, in the field high above the side of the motorway, looking down onto it. He’d gone out to check on the heifers they’d moved that morning from the field on the other side of the farm. Usually they were untroubled by the traffic; occasionally they became nervous.

This lot seemed untroubled. They walked over to him with their swinging walk, hoping he was food; when they realised he was not, that he had brought nothing for them, they stopped and turned away, an untidy, disappointed, good-natured crowd. One of them had lifted her tail and discharged a mass of cow shit on his boots; a protest, he’d thought, cursing her, pushing his feet through the dry grass to try to get rid of the worst. And then, as he looked down at the road, shimmering in the heat haze, the air brilliantly clear again after the brief thunderstorm, he saw it and knew even as he watched that he would never forget it: all in a sickening slow motion, a lorry suddenly swerving sharply to the right, cutting across the fast lane and then failing to stop, bursting through the central median, its trailer sinking onto its side, like some great dying beast, and then discharging the deadly flotsam of its load—whatever it was; he couldn’t really see—tossed into the air and continuing on its journey into the advancing traffic. A minibus travelling westwards in the fast lane became impacted in the undercarriage of the lorry; and a black Golf immediately behind that swung sideways and rammed into one of the lorry’s wheels. A silver BMW behind the lorry, apparently out of control, spinning, twisting, across the road, coming finally to rest, rammed into the car in front of
it. Cars began to swerve and skid into one another, like bumper cars in a fairground; one hit the central median; another made a small, odd leap and landed on the hard shoulder; it all went on, seemingly unstoppable in both directions of the road.

William stood, frozen with horror now, hearing the scene as well as watching it—the dreadful noise, blaring horns, and crunching metal and raw, dreadful shouting and screaming—and aware too of the dreadfully dangerous smell of burning rubber.

Instinct told him to go down to the road; common sense told him not to. He could be of no use, would add to the chaos; he reached in the pocket of his jeans for his mobile, remembered he had left it in the tractor on the other side of the fence, and started to run, waving his arms at the scene in a futile gesture, as if anyone seeing him would have understood what he was going to do.

CHAPTER 10

For just a second, Jonathan was tempted to drive on, remove himself from the horror and the carnage, get to London swiftly and safely, rid himself of Abi. If he went on, he had a chance of disentangling his life; if he stayed, he had none.

He stopped the car and left his former life forever …

The car immediately ahead of him was driving steadily on as if nothing had happened; other cars coming from behind him were slewing into one another, gradually coming to a halt. Jonathan sat, fighting for breath, leaning on the steering wheel, recovering from the shock, hauling himself under control together with the car; the road ahead emptied now as the traffic went on forwards, vanishing into the haze of the heat, caught up in the doctrine of the motorway, of pushing on, of getting there, of never looking back, not getting involved,
leaving him behind: and he would have given in that moment all he had to be one of them …

He opened the door, slowly and very cautiously, started to get out, and then found his legs wouldn’t hold him; he felt sick and dizzy and sat down again, his head dropping weakly onto the steering wheel.

He looked at Abi; she was green-white, staring at him, her eyes huge with fright: there was an ugly gash on the side of her head. “What happened?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I couldn’t see; the lorry seemed to lose control. Your head all right?”

She felt the gash, looked at the blood on her hand. “Yes, I think so. I’ve got some tissues somewhere; I’ll just—”

“Give me my mobile.”

“I can’t find it—I dropped it.”

“Well, give me yours then.”

He took it, dialled
999
. Asked for the police and gave them the whereabouts.

“Yes, thank you, we’ve got that one,” the voice said. “Several people calling in. They’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Jonathan looked at the great mass of traffic gathering, stretching in both directions. “I hope so,” he said. “It’s pretty bad.” And then watched, disbelieving, as first one car, then another and then another, moved onto the westbound hard shoulder, accelerating and driving away.

“Stupid fucking bastards,” he said; and then got out of the car and began to walk slowly, almost against his will, towards the lorry.

• • •

It was a hideous sight. A minibus had gone straight into it, under its wheels, and had crumpled up like so much paper, and from it he could hear the hideous sound of children screaming; a Golf, desperate to avoid it, had first turned, then skidded a hundred and eighty degrees into the traffic in the middle lane; a larger car—a big Ford—had managed to miss it, but driven into the barrier and swung round
before it stopped, facing the wrong way … A man was climbing out of it, shaking his head oddly, as if to rid it of what he had just seen and done; his windscreen was shattered, and blood was running down his face.

Jonathan realised the Golf’s engine was still running; turning it off seemed suddenly the most urgent thing. He scrambled over the barrier, ran to the car. The window had shattered with the impact, as had the windscreen. Jonathan looked down and into it: at a girl, or all he could see of her, a mass of long blond hair and blood, a bare brown arm with a white watch—odd how one noticed these things—flung out towards the windscreen as if warding it off; and yes, the engine still switched on. Jonathan reached in, turned the key, and then very gently lifted the arm, felt for the pulse. And found nothing.

He straightened up and found himself staring into the shocked, puzzled eyes of the driver of the Ford, and simply nodded at him, confirming the girl’s death, unable to speak.

“Oh, God,” said the man, staring round him at the carnage, “what did it … How did it happen?”

“Christ knows. You OK?”

“Seem to be. Yeah. Can’t think how. Arm hurts a bit.”

Jonathan looked at his arm; it was hanging oddly.

“Looks like it’s broken. I’ll check it later.”

They stood there for a moment, looking up at the lorry from the driver’s side; the cab was astonishingly intact. They walked round it, and as they reached the near side, they saw the door was open, and a girl was standing on the step. She jumped to the ground.

“You OK?” said Jonathan, and then, “You weren’t in there, were you?”

She stared at them both, her expression totally blank, then shook her head, turned her back on them, and vomited rather neatly onto the road. She was very young, and very pretty, Jonathan noticed; after a moment she walked, slowly but quite steadily, towards the hard shoulder, where she sat down and put her head in her arms.

“Shocked,” said Jonathan, “but she seems OK. Extraordinary.”

“She can’t have been in there, can she? Or climbed up to have a look?”

“God knows. Look—I’m going up into the cab. Make sure the engine’s turned off there. It could explode any moment.”

• • •

Oddly, he didn’t feel frightened, wasn’t aware of being brave; just knew it had to be done.

Constable Robbie Macyntyre had been dreading his first big crash. He just didn’t know how he would deal with it. He wasn’t exactly squeamish, and of course they had spelt out to them in training that things like severed limbs and worse were inevitable and shown them DVDs. It wasn’t that; more the thought of people in terrible pain, crying out, begging for help.

The first calls had come in five minutes ago; hundreds more would follow. Already two cars had left the depot, and he was in the third, with his colleague Greg Dixon. Robbie was intensely grateful that this was not Greg’s first big crash, or even his hundred and first. “Been doing this for ten years,” he’d said to Robbie when he joined the unit. “Got pretty bloody used to it.
Bloody
being the word, if you get my meaning.”

As far as they had been able to establish, the congestion on the road was already severe in both directions.

The main priority now, apart from clearing a way for the emergency services to get through, was to garner information and communicate it to the control room: how many casualties, how many ambulances would be required, whether the fire brigade would be needed to cut people out.

Robbie kept remembering his superintendent’s words:
Gridlock on the motorway takes seconds: you’ll have a mile tailback inside a minute
.

One of the main problems subsequent to a crash, he’d been told—although it didn’t sound as if it would be today—was rubbernecking. “You can get an incident entirely on one carriageway and the traffic comes to a standstill on the other,” Greg Dixon said. “Just because
people slow down, even crash into the car in front at times, just to have a gawp. Good old Joe Public.”

He didn’t take a very rosy view of Joe Public; Robbie was swiftly coming to realise why.

• • •

Jonathan slithered down from the lorry’s cab; the Ford driver was still there.

“OK?”

“Yes, the engine was off. Hell of a mess up there. Windscreen’s shattered, blood everywhere. Poor bugger driving it’s not too good, though.”

“I bet he’s not. Is he … alive?”

“Just. Maybe not for long.”

“Should we get him out?”

“Christ, no.” He glanced over at the hard shoulder. “That girl OK?”

“She’s disappeared,” said the man. “She was still sitting on the hard shoulder last time I looked. Nobody with her. But she’s not there now.”

“Wandered down the road, I suppose. She seemed very shocked. Oh, well. She’s the least of our worries, I have to say …”

A man was walking towards them, holding a small boy by the hand; he was crying and saying, “Mummy … Mummy …”

“Is he all right?” Jonathan said.