Death Comes First

Twenty-four

Joyce reckoned the journey from Landacre was going to seem much longer than the couple of hours it would actually take. Assuming Charlie was taking them home. At least he seemed to be heading in the right direction. He had turned on to the M5 and was driving steadily northwards, keeping to the speed limit — which was a relief; she’d been afraid he might drive faster. Then again, the last thing he’d have wanted was to attract attention by driving erratically.

Fred was, for him, strangely silent in the rear compartment of the vehicle. Then again, there was nothing strange about being silent in the face of such a terrible experience. Molly, too, was so traumatized she couldn’t speak; she huddled next to Monika, sobbing non-stop.

Joyce was exhausted. It had been a long day and she’d driven for several hours. The husband she had believed to be dead had suddenly turned up alive, albeit half out of his mind. His account of the events that had led to his staged death had been shocking and at the same time ludicrous. On top of that, she’d witnessed a brutal attack on a young woman who, it seemed, had been having an affair with her not-so-dead husband.

At least she had Fred back, that was the main thing. All she needed to do now was to get her children away from her husband. And then find a way to deliver him into the hands of the police. She had no doubt that was where he belonged.

As to how she was supposed to achieve her two aims, she hadn’t a clue.

Charlie had indicated that he was prepared to take Monika to hospital. It seemed Joyce had got through to him: rather than risk being accused of murder, he’d see to it the girl got the medical treatment she needed.

In addition to helping Monika, Joyce hoped that a stop at A & E would give her a better chance of freeing herself and her children from Charlie’s clutches than if they went straight home. At the hospital there would be people — doctors, security guards, people in authority. The Firs would most likely be empty; with the family absent, any police presence would surely have been withdrawn.

She noticed that they were approaching the Exeter turn-off.

‘Why don’t we come off the motorway here, Charlie, and take Monika to A & E at the Devon and Exeter,’ she suggested, more in hope than expectation. ‘The quicker she gets medical attention, the better for all of us.’

Charlie made no reply.

Right on cue, Monika, who’d been drifting in and out of consciousness, let out a horrible, incoherent cry.

Molly gasped through her sobs. Joyce rested her right hand lightly on her husband’s forearm.

‘We could just drop her off at A & E. We don’t even need to get out of the car,’ she said tentatively.

‘No!’ Charlie screamed at her. ‘I’m taking us home. Like you said.’

And he accelerated sharply so that they hurtled past the Exeter junction.

Joyce daren’t say more for fear of provoking him further. She was even more afraid now. All she could hope for was that he would have calmed down by the time they neared Bristol.

Eventually Charlie spoke again, reasonably calmly this time.

‘We’re going home, Joyce,’ he said. ‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You said let’s all go home and we can sort everything out there. Well, I’m doing what you wanted.’

‘Yes, but Monika does need to go to hospital, and soon,’ Joyce ventured.

Molly joined in from the back: ‘Monika seems worse, Mum,’ she said through her sobs. ‘She’s unconscious again. Her breathing’s shallow. I’m frightened, Mum.’

So am I, thought Joyce, but I mustn’t show it.

‘Can’t you hear your daughter, Charlie — your daughter who loves you so much,’ Joyce coaxed. ‘She’s frightened. Monika might be dying back there. And it was you who attacked her. She has to go to hospital. For your sake as much as hers.’

Charlie said nothing, just carried on driving as if he hadn’t heard. Joyce lapsed into silence, fearful of antagonizing him. They continued, no one saying a word, until they came to junction 22, the turn-off for Burnham-on-Sea, Weston-super-Mare, Bristol Airport and the A38 leading to Tarrant Park.

Charlie drove straight past it.

‘You’ve missed the turning, Charlie,’ Joyce said, hugely alarmed but trying to hide it.

He glanced at her sideways, then returned his eyes to the road.

‘You wanted us to take Monika straight to hospital, didn’t you?’

‘Well, yes,’ agreed Joyce.

‘And that’s what I’m going to do,’ said Charlie. ‘I know you’re right. I don’t want to be a murderer. We have to get Monika to hospital. Quickly. And I have to give myself up to the police. Then hope they will deal with me, with all of us, the way you seem to think they will.’

He touched her hand. Barely a touch. More of a brushing of flesh. But it seemed like a gesture both of affection and apology.

Relief washed over Joyce. Charlie appeared to be having a change of heart. Could it be that he was coming round to her way of thinking? She still felt uneasy, but she told herself that this was a good sign. He’d expressed some regret over what he had done. He retained at least some of the human decency she’d thought to be an integral part of him.

‘I’m so glad, Charlie,’ she told him. ‘I know you’re doing the right thing. The only thing.’

He smiled at her. Well nearly. It was more of a grimace.

At junction 18, the main Bristol turn-off, Charlie swung the Range Rover into the exit lane and on to the Portway towards the city centre.

So far so good.

Then, after a couple of miles, he drove straight past the turning for Southmead, the hospital Joyce had assumed he was heading for.

‘W-where are we going?’ she asked.

‘Bristol Royal Infirmary,’ he replied. ‘Why? Where did you think I was taking you?’

‘Southmead,’ she said. ‘The main A & E department is there now. It’s just moved from Frenchay.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Charlie. ‘I knew the move was about to happen, but I wasn’t sure which of those hospitals was operational. So I thought it safest to go to the Royal Infirmary.’

‘Right,’ said Joyce.

‘It won’t take long,’ Charlie reassured her.

He sounded so reasonable. As if he wanted to end this thing as much as she did.

She stole a quick look at him. His expression gave nothing away. And what he’d said did make sense. You had to drive pretty much through the city centre to get to the Royal Infirmary, but it was nearly nine thirty at night. The traffic shouldn’t be too bad. She hoped not, anyway.

‘Thank you, Charlie,’ she said.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We have a plan then. We will take Monika to A & E at the Bristol Infirmary and leave her there. We don’t have to go in. Nobody need see me. Then we’ll go home. To Tarrant Park. We’ll all be together. Like before. If I can’t have you and the kids with me in a new life, then I’ll settle for the old. Like you said, we can fix it. As long as I have you on my side, everything will be all right...’

Charlie had suddenly gone from morose silence to incessant talking. He was manic. Joyce felt she had no choice but to go along with him.

‘Yes, we’ll go home and be together, then we’ll be able to work things out,’ she said, praying she sounded more convincing than she felt.

Again Charlie lapsed into silence. He appeared to be deep in thought, as if weighing up his options.

To Joyce’s disappointment, even though it was late in the evening, there were still queues of traffic along the A4 Portway heading into the city centre. Possibly because of the terrible weather. She kept stealing glances at Charlie, who was sitting stiffly upright, grasping the steering wheel tightly, peering with considerable concentration through the windscreen in between the incessant swishing of the wipers.

By the time they reached the Floating Harbour, the city’s old dockland area, which in Victorian times had been formed by impounding 80 acres of the tidal River Avon so that visiting ships could remain afloat at all times, much of the traffic ahead had mysteriously cleared. Had it not been late on a wet and windy night, they might have had a view of the old wooden sailing vessel moored alongside Mardyke Wharf. But visibility was terrible in spite of the street lights, and in any case Joyce was too preoccupied with the nasty little drama which was taking place inside her own vehicle to enjoy the view.

She did notice that there were suddenly only a few vehicles ahead and that the traffic was now running smoothly. Charlie began to accelerate. Joyce was not unhappy about that. She wanted to get to the Royal Infirmary as quickly as possible. She still wasn’t sure exactly how she was going to make things pan out the way she wanted when they did get there. All she knew was that she had to get this nightmare to end. And the faster Charlie got them to the hospital, the faster that might be achieved.

She could see beads of sweat standing out on his forehead, even though the car’s climate control was working perfectly and the air con control panel monitor showed that the temperature inside the vehicle was a comfortable 20 degrees.

Charlie leaned forward in his seat, then looked across the road towards the harbour.

There was a gap ahead in the ornate iron railings along the roadside, one of several left to allow access to the quay by maintenance and port authority vehicles.

Charlie suddenly swung the steering wheel to the right and slammed his foot hard on to the accelerator.

The Range Rover was an automatic, requiring no gear change. The car hurtled towards the harbour, and shot through the gap.

A metre to either side and the railings might have halted or at least slowed the vehicle, which also only narrowly avoided collision with an oncoming taxi. There would still have been a crash, but nothing like what lay in store.

With a terrible lucid clarity, Joyce grasped at once what was happening: Charlie intended to drive them all straight into the harbour. He had spotted that gap and deliberately aimed at it. But she had no time to do anything to prevent the inevitable. There was a second set of railings at the waterside, which she hoped might provide a preventive barrier. However, the new Range Rover Sport boasts a 0 to 60 acceleration speed of under seven seconds. Charlie had been driving at around 35 miles per hour along the Hotwell Road when he’d suddenly accelerated. It took only three or four seconds for the vehicle to reach those railings, but by the time it did so the speed of the Range Rover had increased to over 60 mph.

Joyce heard Molly screaming and thought she probably was too. Charlie didn’t utter a sound. His body was rigid, his eyes focused straight ahead. If they were actually focused on anything.

The Range Rover crashed into the waterside iron railings, which only partly gave way on impact. The front of the vehicle caved in, but the impetus carried it forward, sending it somersaulting over the railings until it met the murky waters of the Floating Harbour nose first. It was almost instantly submerged.

The glass in the window next to Joyce shattered. So did the windscreen. The driver’s door burst open. The car was totally wrecked. Water flooded inside, causing the vehicle to become more quickly submerged than had it remained intact and any kind of significant air pocket formed. The Range Rover weighed more than 240 kilos. It sank to the bottom like a bloody great stone.

The Mardyke Wharf section of the harbour had a depth of only around four metres. There was therefore only two and a half metres of water above the sunken car. But under such circumstances that was potentially as lethal as ten times the depth.

Joyce was covered in broken glass. She had no idea whether or not she had suffered any cuts. Both the front safety bags had inflated. Joyce was half trapped by hers, and her safety belt still held her firmly in her seat. It was pitch-black in the car, although some light from the street lamps above permeated the gloom. She could not see Charlie, but she was aware that he was totally still. She didn’t know if he had been seriously injured or if perhaps he was dead. He certainly was not fighting for his life as she was trying to fight for hers. Presumably he had wanted to die, along with most of his family, and he seemed to have achieved his intention.

The big vehicle had landed upright underwater, with all its four wheels on the harbour bottom. A small air bubble had formed at the top of the car, above the line of the doors, but the water had already reached Joyce’s neck. She knew she had little time to free herself and her children. She fumbled for the catch of her seat belt. Mercifully she was able to release it at once. She leaned over the back of her seat, reaching for Molly. Only then did she realize that her daughter, not wearing a seat belt in the back, had been thrown forward, her upper body smashing into the head rest of the front passenger seat. Molly remained in that position, her head forced backwards at an impossible angle.

Joyce’s brain was barely functioning, yet somehow she registered that Molly’s neck was broken. For a second she hesitated, her hands reaching out towards her daughter’s poor twisted body.

She knew there was nothing she could do for Molly. But there had to be something she could do for Fred. He remained in the rear compartment, trapped by the doggy gate dividing that area from the rest of the vehicle. A doggy gate she had never managed to insert or remove unaided, a task she couldn’t even consider underwater in such conditions. If only she’d removed it after the dog had died. If only the bloody thing had never been fitted in the first place.

She hadn’t heard a sound from Fred. And the whole car was now virtually full of water. As the water rose to cover her nose and mouth, Joyce turned away from Molly. She knew she had to leave her daughter. It was just possible she could squeeze her way out through the broken window of the front passenger door. Joyce had always been athletic. Desperation gave her greater strength and agility than ever before. Somehow she managed to force herself out of the vehicle, even though several of her ribs were broken. The pain from where her seat belt had bitten in was extreme. She ignored it.

She was never to know how, nor to care how, she got out. And although sporty on dry land, she was only an average swimmer. She used the sides of the stricken vehicle, the back-door handle, the roof-rack rails, to haul herself around to the tailgate. Then she reached out for its handle, which, to her relief, turned with surprising ease. Momentarily encouraged, she pulled at the tailgate with all her remaining strength. It wouldn’t budge. Water pressure kept the rear door firmly closed. She wished then that she had at least attempted to remove the doggy gate from inside. It couldn’t have been more hopeless than this. But she hadn’t. Now her lungs were bursting. She had no chance whatsoever of re-entering the car to try to save Fred that way.

She didn’t even know if her son was still alive. She pressed her face against the rear door’s unbroken glass panel, desperate for a glimpse of Fred. She opened her eyes as wide as she could in order to see through the murky water, barely even aware of how much that stung. It didn’t help. She could hardly see a thing.

Then in a shaft of pale light from above, directly before her, right on the other side of the glass, she saw Fred’s face, a couple of inches from hers. His poor, drowning face. Fred’s eyes and mouth were wide open. Was he screaming or was he already dead?

Joyce clawed at the glass and pulled again, with renewed strength, at the rear-door handle. The terrible shock of suddenly seeing Fred like that had caused a physical spasm within her which had made it impossible for Joyce to fight any longer to keep air in her lungs. She began to breathe in water. She too was drowning. But she could not leave her son. Nor her daughter, even though she knew for certain that Molly was already dead. She would die there in the harbour alongside her children. It was all that was left for her.

But Joyce Mildmay did leave her children. She did not die with them beneath the murky waters of Bristol’s Floating Harbour.

Ultimately the human body’s desperate and undeniable animal desire for survival overwhelmed her whole being. She was unable to stop herself rising up from the harbour depths even though she had no conscious wish to do so.

Nature and gravity lifted her to the surface where, coughing and spluttering, she took big gulps of air, every breath causing pain to her ribs, but nothing like the terrible terrible pain of grief and despair, which was a much more excruciating agony. A quite unbearable agony.