The Best Of Times

PROLOGUE. A Time Near to Now

It happened just before four p.m. after a brief thundery shower. The Friday traffic had packed the M 4 in both directions, heavy enough to hold cars in the fast lane just within the speed limit, light enough to keep all three lanes moving. Viewed on the CCTV cameras, everything looked orderly and under control.

At one minute to four, a lorry travelling eastwards swerved suddenly, and then accelerated towards the central median, cutting through it with lethal force, and then turned in on itself, its trailer twisting and half rearing before falling onto its side, slithering along the road into the oncoming traffic and finally coming to a halt just short of the hard shoulder. It burst open, not only the doors, but the roof and sides, discharging its burden of freezers, fridges, washing machines, dryers, some tossed into the air with the force, some skidding and sliding along the motorway, a great tide of deadly flotsam, hitting cars and coaches in its path.

A minibus driving westwards in the fast lane became impacted in the undercarriage of the lorry; a Golf GTI immediately behind it swung sideways and rammed into one of the lorry’s wheels. A vast, unyielding dam of vehicles braking, swerving, skidding was formed, growing by the moment.

On the eastbound side of the carriageway, the cars immediately behind the lorry smashed into it and one another; one hit the central median with such force it became embedded in it, and the dozen or so after that, with an advantage of two or three seconds’ warning, skidded into one another relentlessly but comparatively harmlessly, like bumper cars in a fairground.

The freezers and refrigerators continued on their journey with enormous force; one car hitting them head-on made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and was struck by an oncoming motorbike; another shot sideways and hit the central median.

Up and down on the road, then, stillness formed, and a strange semi-silence overtook the road, engines stopped, horns hushed, but replaced by other, hideous sounds, of human screaming and canine barking, and through it all the absolutely incongruous noise of music from car radios.

And then a hundred mobiles, in hands that were able to hold them, called the police, the ambulance service, called home. And even as they did so, the chaos spread out its great tentacles, reaching far, far down the road in both directions so that hundreds were unable to escape from it.

Within the space of thirty or forty seconds, chance, that absolutely irresistible force, had taken its capricious hold on the time and the place. It had disrupted the present, distorted the future, replaced order with chaos, confidence with fear, and control with impotence. Lives were ended for some, changed forever for others; and a most powerful game of consequences was set in train.