Left You Dead

38

Turner ran up to the BMW and stopped for a brief moment to assess it. Damage to a vehicle would tell him a great deal about the likely injuries sustained by the pedestrian.

Also, with older and cheaper vehicles, skid marks would be a good indicator of speed, but not on a wet road, and in any case this modern BMW’s braking system eliminated those. The Collision Investigation Unit would calculate the car’s speed later, using the BMW’s onboard computer and any local CCTV, by creating a computer-aided mock-up of the accident.

Looking at the front of the car, he saw that part of the number plate was broken off and there was a severe dent in the bumper, indicating it had struck the boy in the legs, likely breaking both of them but hopefully not shattering his knees, which could impact on his future mobility, if he survived.

In any frontal collision between a motor vehicle and a pedestrian, there were three possibilities. The first was that the victim had gone underneath the vehicle. The second was that they’d been thrown sideways. The third was that they’d gone over the top, which looked to be the case here.

The round bullseye break in the centre of the windscreen indicated that the boy had struck it with some force. The only part of the boy’s body hard enough to have created that, in toughened glass, would have been his skull. He looked at the spiderweb crack more closely to see if he could spot any strands of hair, which he could, and fragments of skin and blood from the scalp, which he saw were also present.

Next he looked at the roof and saw the marks where the boy must have struck it before bouncing off and into the road.

Not good.

He and Dunwoody ran past the car. A woman, a member of the public, was supporting the boy’s neck, and looked like she knew what she was doing. First-aid trained, he thought. Good. Two police officers were also kneeling beside him.

Dunwoody whispered into Turner’s ear. The classic gallows humour that helped keep them sane at times, when dealing with situations that might otherwise make them weep. ‘Is it a stay-and-play or scoop-and-run?’

‘The latter,’ he whispered back.

The colour of the boy’s bloodstained face was alabaster. Turner knelt beside him and immediately felt for his pulse.

It was alarmingly weak.