Already Dead(92)

The car continued to veer from side to side, dented a telegraph pole on one side, and took out a plastic grit bin on the other. An overhanging bough of ivy rattled across the roof like gunshots.

Eyes wide, his hands sweaty, Charlie stared at the hill ahead. The narrowest corner was coming up, where there was an ancient stone house with mullioned windows. He knew it was the last bend before the run down into the Market Place past the bookshop and the hairdresser’s. Beyond it, if he couldn’t stop the car, he’d be flying out into the traffic on St John’s Street.

He’d forgotten the junction with The Dale. Ironic, when it was the street he lived on. When he was within a few yards, a white delivery van nosed out of the junction. The driver saw him coming and stopped, gaping at the vehicle swinging from one side of the road to the other.

Charlie only had one option. He yanked on the handbrake. The rear wheels locked, the back end swung round, the nose caught a stone step and the BMW flipped over, turning twice in the air before it hit the van, crushing its bonnet, then bounced off and slid into St John’s Street on its roof. A Sixes bus ploughed into it, pushing it up on to the pavement in front of Ken’s Mini Market, where it lay with its engine still running and fragments of glass showering into the gutter.

For a moment, everything was unnaturally silent. Then people began to shout. And Sheena Sullivan continued to scream.





29





Barbara Dean had always known there were moments when your life changed. When a ring on the doorbell might mark the end of then and the beginning of now. A before and an after, divided by a turn of the latch and the opening of a door. A moment when you found two police officers standing on your step. And you knew. It was more than an interruption of normality. It was a closing down of life, as if someone had turned off the power to your world and plunged it into darkness.

As she stood and stared at the two officers, Barbara realised that one of them was speaking. She could see his mouth moving. But the sentences had gone missing in the air somewhere between them. It was as if there was a time lag, his words bouncing off a distant satellite and returning slowly to earth, reaching her ears long after they’d been spoken. But no – not reaching her ears, but her brain. She heard the sounds, but her mind wouldn’t process them into anything that made sense. This wasn’t what she’d expected to happen.

They came into the hallway and sat in her lounge. Their presence on her leather sofa was so unnatural that they might as well have been wax dummies that had been stolen from Madame Tussaud’s. They looked almost like real police officers, but there was something creepily wrong with them.

‘They crashed at the bottom of Green Hill,’ the first officer was saying.

Barbara could detect from his tone that he’d said it already, perhaps more than once.

‘Was he badly injured?’ she said.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Is he dead?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

She sat for a few moments trying to make sense of the answers. The two officers sat forward on the sofa, uncomfortable and anxious to leave.

‘They?’ she said.

‘Your husband had a passenger, Mrs Dean.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘There was someone else in the car with him. A woman, we believe. We thought—’

‘What?’

‘We thought it might have been you.’

So that explained the looks of surprise when she answered the door. They’d expected to find no one home, or a teenage child perhaps. That would have been worse for them, she supposed – having to break the news to a child that their parents had been in an accident. It was foolish that she should feel a surge of relief on their behalf. As if it was some consolation that they only had to inform the grieving widow.

‘Could it be a mistake?’ she asked. ‘Are you sure it was Charlie?’

The other officer consulted a notebook. ‘He was driving a red BMW 5 series.’ He read out the registration number. ‘Does your husband own that vehicle?’

‘I can’t remember registration numbers,’ she said.

‘It’s registered in his name.’

‘Well, then. That’s probably right.’

She felt a laugh beginning to rise up in her chest, and stifled it with a cough. They would think she was hysterical. Did they still slap women across the face to cure hysteria? Or was that only in films? She was laughing at herself, though – at her silly inability to make the right responses.

‘What am I supposed to say?’ she asked, looking at the older of the two. The officer must have dealt with situations like this before, would know what words people normally spoke in these circumstances, how a well-balanced woman responded to the news of her husband’s violent and sudden death.