Dead Scared

Sunday 13 January (nine days earlier)

THE GIRL AT the wheel of the Mini Convertible was staring straight ahead along an empty road. The trees on either side were very tall and thin, like long, skeletal fingers reaching to the sky. The few remaining leaves were still as stone. Wind that had earlier been racing across the Fens like a possessed soul seemed, at last, to have exhausted itself and the girl could hear nothing.

Except the voice in her head.

A sudden vibrating movement told her the car engine was running again. Her left hand reached down. The handbrake was off. This was it then.

Something, it could even have been her own foot, was pressing down on the accelerator. Tentative at first, and then with increasing pressure. More and more, until the pedal reached the floor of the car.

When the rope that had been firmly tied round a beech tree at one end and the girl’s neck at the other reached its full length there came a sound a little like that of a firework spluttering its last.

The Mini continued to speed forward for some seconds after the girl was no longer actively working the pedals. It stopped only when it collided with a food-delivery van heading the opposite way. The driver wasn’t injured, although what he saw in the driver’s seat of the Mini would feature in his nightmares for quite some time to come.

The girl’s severed head broke free of the rope, bounced a little way along the road, and came to rest amidst some nettle stumps.