savage, breaking both legs, flipping her face-down onto the bonnet before slamming her head into the windscreen, the baby trapped between her body and the car and taking the brunt of the impact, also striking the windscreen and then being torn loose from her arms, the cotton bedding she had wrapped it in unravelling as the child flew through the air.
Maria was thrown over the car like a rag doll, a mess of arms and legs and blood, landing back on the road, her head a fractured ruin, alive but not for long, her single remaining eye rolling in its shattered orbit and filling with blood, looking for her baby, not finding it, which was just about the only blessing, the lid trembling even as it glazed over in death.
Sonata Blue landed thirty yards away. In pieces.
12.
Coombes screamed. We both did. I slammed on the brakes and twisted the wheel, and it was at that moment that the front right wheel, already weakened from clipping the corner five hundred yards ago, decided to part company from the rest of the car. The axle dug in, flipped us up and over, the car rotating as it slid on its roof. We hit something â a parked car, a traffic island, it didnât really matter what because we were still doing fifty and it wasnât.
Unlike Coombes, I had forgotten to buckle my seatbelt.
There was a hideous, grinding noise and I felt pain in my leg and my arm and my head, three separate explosions of agony, each one a black hole supernova in its own right. Coombes was yammering about how he was bleeding and didnât want to die and all I could think about was how I had seen the blood fly from the girlâs legs as the car struck, and how there was now a head-sized hole in the windscreen and I was covered in her brains and how I prayed that the bundle she had been holding hadnât been a baby.
And then I passed out.
13.
It took them an hour to cut me free from the wreckage, and another hour in A & E to diagnose exactly how many broken bones I had. It turned out to be ten. One hip, one kneecap, one shin. One wrist and four fingers. One jaw. Plus a lump on my head the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. X-rays confirmed a fractured skull.
Coombes had a cut on his cheek.
The pen that had been sitting on the dashboard â the same pen that I had idly thought about stabbing him with â had somehow turned itself into a missile and opened a two-inch gash from his cheekbone to his jaw â less than an inch from his eye, he reminded me several times.
Once we had come to a halt, he had crawled out of the passenger side window leaving my poor smashed body in the footwell. Iâm told that he then lit a cigarette. The poor soul obviously needed something to soothe his nerves.
14.
I was unconscious for two whole days, and spent the next two weeks drifting in and out of a morphine-induced stupor. For the next two months I experienced massive confusion and memory loss which the doctors assured me was normal. My initial haziness on the events, and the broken jaw, meant that Coombes had free rein to say anything he wanted to anybody. Well used to being the subject of an internal investigation, he came up with a story that Hans Christian Anderson would have been proud of, had old Hans ever written about fatal car crashes. I actually managed to read a copy of his statement, and it went something like this:
Detective Stone and myself were on surveillance duty in an unmarked vehicle parked outside Grierson Haulage Ltd on Boothe Street. At twelve fifty-five AM, we saw a black Mercedes registration SD05 XKM leave the premises. The vehicle turned left and drove past us, and both Detective Stone and myself saw three passengers. Grierson was driving, there was an unidentified female in the front passenger seat, and an unidentified male in the rear passenger seat. The male passenger was holding a gun to the female passengerâs head; as they drove past, we saw him strike her on the back of the head with it. Concerned for her
Maria was thrown over the car like a rag doll, a mess of arms and legs and blood, landing back on the road, her head a fractured ruin, alive but not for long, her single remaining eye rolling in its shattered orbit and filling with blood, looking for her baby, not finding it, which was just about the only blessing, the lid trembling even as it glazed over in death.
Sonata Blue landed thirty yards away. In pieces.
12.
Coombes screamed. We both did. I slammed on the brakes and twisted the wheel, and it was at that moment that the front right wheel, already weakened from clipping the corner five hundred yards ago, decided to part company from the rest of the car. The axle dug in, flipped us up and over, the car rotating as it slid on its roof. We hit something â a parked car, a traffic island, it didnât really matter what because we were still doing fifty and it wasnât.
Unlike Coombes, I had forgotten to buckle my seatbelt.
There was a hideous, grinding noise and I felt pain in my leg and my arm and my head, three separate explosions of agony, each one a black hole supernova in its own right. Coombes was yammering about how he was bleeding and didnât want to die and all I could think about was how I had seen the blood fly from the girlâs legs as the car struck, and how there was now a head-sized hole in the windscreen and I was covered in her brains and how I prayed that the bundle she had been holding hadnât been a baby.
And then I passed out.
13.
It took them an hour to cut me free from the wreckage, and another hour in A & E to diagnose exactly how many broken bones I had. It turned out to be ten. One hip, one kneecap, one shin. One wrist and four fingers. One jaw. Plus a lump on my head the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. X-rays confirmed a fractured skull.
Coombes had a cut on his cheek.
The pen that had been sitting on the dashboard â the same pen that I had idly thought about stabbing him with â had somehow turned itself into a missile and opened a two-inch gash from his cheekbone to his jaw â less than an inch from his eye, he reminded me several times.
Once we had come to a halt, he had crawled out of the passenger side window leaving my poor smashed body in the footwell. Iâm told that he then lit a cigarette. The poor soul obviously needed something to soothe his nerves.
14.
I was unconscious for two whole days, and spent the next two weeks drifting in and out of a morphine-induced stupor. For the next two months I experienced massive confusion and memory loss which the doctors assured me was normal. My initial haziness on the events, and the broken jaw, meant that Coombes had free rein to say anything he wanted to anybody. Well used to being the subject of an internal investigation, he came up with a story that Hans Christian Anderson would have been proud of, had old Hans ever written about fatal car crashes. I actually managed to read a copy of his statement, and it went something like this:
Detective Stone and myself were on surveillance duty in an unmarked vehicle parked outside Grierson Haulage Ltd on Boothe Street. At twelve fifty-five AM, we saw a black Mercedes registration SD05 XKM leave the premises. The vehicle turned left and drove past us, and both Detective Stone and myself saw three passengers. Grierson was driving, there was an unidentified female in the front passenger seat, and an unidentified male in the rear passenger seat. The male passenger was holding a gun to the female passengerâs head; as they drove past, we saw him strike her on the back of the head with it. Concerned for her
Similar Books
The McCree's Star Spangled 4th
J.C. Isabella
Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change
S. M. Stirling
Glow
Anya Monroe
Material Witness
Lisa Mondello, L. A. Mondello
The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way
Harry Connolly
The Royal Sorceress
Christopher Nuttall
Chasing Ivan
Tim Tigner
Emmaus
Alessandro Baricco
The Devil's Dozen
Katherine Ramsland