Road Kill

Fifteen

On Tuesday evening I went back to the cottage. It seemed sad and dingy when I walked in but I was fresh out of clean clothes and, besides, the first floor walls wouldn’t knock themselves down. I really needed to get on with it or I was still going to be camping on a building site come Christmas.

I left my mobile switched on all night but Sean didn’t ring. By Wednesday morning I realised he wasn’t going to. He would be up to his neck in the Heathrow job and it wasn’t fair to expect him to be at my beck and call when he was working. He’d spared me more than enough of his time already. More than I probably deserved, given the circumstances.

I spent the day clearing up the mess I’d made at the weekend, shovelling the rubble into bags and boxes so I could cart it downstairs. I knew I couldn’t put off hiring another skip for much longer.

The activity was physically hard work but required no particular cerebral participation, leaving my mind free to wander. Almost inevitably, I found myself thinking about Sean, and my father’s warning.

They’d never liked each other from the first time they met. Perhaps, as far as my parents were concerned, there was always going to be an element of whoever I chose to bring home with me would never be good enough for their little girl.

It didn’t help that Sean’s personal transport back then had been a motorbike. A Yamaha EXUP – the FireBlade of its day. I was on an old Yamaha 350 Power Valve, the first bike I’d bought when I passed my test.

I remember being nervous on that ride up to Cheshire nearly six years ago, as though I’d had some premonition of how it was going to go. We’d arrived in the dark on a Friday evening, so the full extent of the house was shrouded. Even so, as we’d turned onto the driveway and our headlights had swept across the imposing front facade, it didn’t occur to me how it must look to him.

“Your folks live here?” he’d asked when we’d pulled up by the front steps and cut the engines. “Which bit?”

“All of it,” I’d said. At the time I hadn’t registered the significance of the question but later I realised he’d thought – hoped, really – that a house this big might be split down into apartments. It wasn’t until I’d visited his mother, years afterwards, that it dawned on me her little council house on a run-down Lancaster estate would have fitted inside the garage at my parents’ place and barely touched the walls.

Sean had still been a sergeant then, one of the instructors on the Special Forces course I had fought my way onto. Any obvious relationship between us would have set alarm bells ringing – as it was destined to do so catastrophically. So, we’d snuck away, leaving separately, meeting up on a motorway services.

I knew having an affair with Sean was madness but, like any doomed enterprise, once I was in the grip of it the dangers seemed worth the risk. Going anywhere together where people knew us, even my parents, was reckless at best. I suppose I was hoping that they would be as taken with him as I was.

Some hope.

My mother had prepared an elaborate meal for us and gone to town on the silver candlesticks and the starched linen in the dining room. I don’t know if she was expecting to impress Sean or overawe him. At least, as an NCO, he’d attended enough formal army dinners to know his way around a knife and fork with some finesse, even if he didn’t look entirely comfortable while doing it. Now, he spent so much time with royalty and riches he was blasé in any company, but back then I was aware of watching him anxiously while we ate.

I wasn’t the only one. My mother might have been regarding him as if he’d come before her on the bench but at least she had made an effort to be sociable. Not easy when just about every aspect of our work could not be discussed with outsiders. My father had spent the first two courses in almost silent scrutiny before he’d condescended to join in the conversation.

“You’ll have been posted to Northern Ireland at some point, I assume, Sean?” he’d asked with cool detachment.

Sean had nodded cautiously. “I’ve spent a little time there, sir, yes.” I knew he’d done two tours as a squaddie and three more he wouldn’t talk about, even with me.

“I was there myself many years ago,” my father said casually, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “It was not long after I qualified as a surgical registrar.”

“The City hospital?” Sean had asked.

“No, the Royal Victoria.”

Sean had a good face for playing poker but even he couldn’t prevent his eyebrows climbing at that. “That’s near the Falls Road,” he’d said, respect mingling with the surprise in his voice as he reached for his wine glass. “What kind of surgery did you specialise in?”

“Orthopaedics. By the time I was finished I’d become quite an expert on kneecaps.” He’d allowed himself a flicker of disgust. “Whenever we thought we’d developed a new technique for repairing the joint, they came up with a new way of destroying it.”

“Well, they’re nothing if not inventive when it comes to killing or maiming people over there,” Sean had said, his voice low.

“They’re not the only ones.”

Sean had heard the censure in his voice and put down his glass with a careful precision that made my shoulders tense. He’d tilted his head towards my father very slowly.

“Excuse me?”

“Come now, Sean,” my father had said with some asperity. “You can’t try to tell me that the soldiers weren’t just as guilty of delivering beatings – and worse – to people they thought were working against them. I’ve seen the results for myself.”

“And I’ve seen the results of a nail bomb being detonated by remote control when there was an eighteen-year-old soldier less than six feet away from it,” he said, his voice calm almost to the point of indifference.

My mother had given a soft gasp. “Oh, but that doesn’t happen any more, surely?” she’d said, shaky.

Sean had turned his head and pinned her with that dark and merciless gaze.

“It happens, just in a way that doesn’t offend middle-class sensibilities so much,” he’d said. He’d wiped his own mouth with his own napkin and thrown it onto the table, sitting back.

“If you’ve done something to offend the paramilitaries over there, they make you an appointment to have your kneecaps done,” he’d gone on, ignoring her averted head. “You have to turn up or, when they find you, you’re dead. And trust me, they will find you. People used to die from kneecappings. They’d bleed to death before the ambulance got there and it would be reported in the papers – another death chalked up to terrorism.”

“But—”

“But now,” Sean had overridden her protest, rolled right over it and crushed it and kept on coming. “Now, they call the ambulance for you first and make you wait, and when they hear the sirens approaching, then they kneecap you. More people survive, that’s the only change. It looks better that way on the news. Somebody sat down and thought long and hard about how to do that. That’s the kind of people we’re up against.”

He’d turned back to my father who had listened to his quietly bitter outburst without expression. “So you can’t try and tell me that the occasional squaddie stepping out of line isn’t understandable, isn’t justified.”

“Torture is never justified,” my father had rapped back with the iron certainty of someone who had the moral high ground and wasn’t going to relinquish it.

Sean had shaken his head. “Wait until it’s your family who are under threat, sir,” he’d said. “Until then, it’s nothing more than an academic exercise to you.”

We’d left the following morning, although we’d been intending to stay until after lunch. I’d been so ashamed of the way my parents had behaved that I hadn’t seen them again until I was in hospital after my attack, two months later. I hadn’t had to worry about my father sniping at Sean by then.

He was long gone.

***

The Devil’s Bridge Club held their midweek meet at a pub just outside the tiny village of Watermillock, overlooking Ullswater. William hadn’t been thrilled when I’d called him and asked for a chance to try out, but he hadn’t shot me down in flames either. Maybe they were just expecting me to crash and burn all by myself.

I’d set off early to get up there, taking the back roads through Sedbergh and up to Kendal.

The FireBlade bounded effortlessly up the sharp incline out of the town. And when I hit the derestricted zone at the top and opened the throttle, the response was instant.

Still grinning inside my visor, I made short work of the fast open stretch of road that now by-passes Staveley, filtering down a line of slow-moving cars and flicking past a lumbering cattle truck.

At Troutbeck Bridge I turned off for Kirkstone Pass. The going was slower and trickier there, the steep gradients and acute bends making me feather the rear brake more to keep the FireBlade balanced. It was this kind of road where the lightweight little Suzuki always used to hold its own against the big bruisers and I felt a pang of regret that I didn’t have it with me now.

Mind you, the FireBlade certainly came into its own once I arrived at the Watermillock Arms pub. The Watermillock was a typical Lakeland slate building with a gravel car park by the side of it that led out onto a grassed area with benches. From there you could sit and bask in the heat and admire the majesty of Ullswater in front of you and the craggy magnificence of Helvellyn at your back. When I brought my drink back outside from the bar intending to do just that, I found the bike had already gathered a small cluster of admirers of its own.

They were all young men probably around Jamie’s age, wearing expensive-looking race leathers and skinned kneesliders. One even had the aerodynamic hump on his back, which I thought was a little over the top for road use.

“Hey, does your boyfriend know you’re out on his bike?” he called when he spotted me. The rest of them cackled. He was short and stocky and blond haired, with that kind of pink and white complexion that goes instantly ruddy when exposed to just about any kind of weather.

“Seriously, you never ride this, do you?” one of the others said, dubious. “I mean, not by yourself?”

“Oh no,” I said, sweetly sarcastic, “I usually push it, or if it’s raining I take it in a taxi.”

That loosened them up a bit. I found out part of the reason for their disbelief was that the one with the hump, whose name was Mark, was on a FireBlade himself, albeit an earlier model that was rather more scuffed around the edges. I gave him some stick for owning a girl’s bike – which he denied vehemently – and by the time the place began to busy up the group of us had fallen into easy conversation.

The Devil’s Bridge Club arrived together, almost in formation, making a show of it. Their bikes rolled into the car park and slotted into line one after another, with Daz in the lead on his Aprilia, Jamie and Paxo in the centre, and big William bringing up the rear on his lime green Kawasaki.

I don’t know if he was looking anyway, but Daz spotted me as soon as he got off the bike. He hooked his lid over the Aprilia’s mirror, rubbed a hand through his hair and sauntered over to us.

“You really up for it then, Charlie?” he said, challenge in his voice.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

Not to be outdone, Mark stepped forwards with his chin stuck out. “When do we start?”

I glanced at him. I don’t know why I should have been surprised that he was here to try out for the Devil’s Bridge Club as well. He was just the right cocky slightly aggressive type. So what did that say about me?

Daz nodded to him. “Patience,” he taunted, smiling. “We’re just waiting for one more, then we can get on with it.”

We didn’t have to wait long. Ten minutes later an old black Kawasaki GPZ900R swung into the car park and pulled up with a flourish next to the bench where we were lounging like geckos in the sunshine.

“Shit,” I muttered when the rider removed his helmet. “Sam?”

Sam Pickering grinned at me. “Didn’t think I’d let you have a go at this loony exercise on your own, did you, Charlie?”

“What’s happened to your old Norton?”

“Nothing,” he said. “But I thought I might need something a bit more modern, so I borrowed this from a mate.”

The other prospective member, Mark, gave a snort at Sam’s description of the sixteen-year-old Kawasaki. Sam just beamed at him.

“Hi, how you doing?” he said cheerfully. He nodded to the row of parked-up bikes. “Which is yours, then?”

“FireBlade,” Mark said with studied nonchalance.

“Oh, smart,” Sam said brightly. “Same as Charlie’s.”

Mark looked crestfallen enough at that but I couldn’t resist adding a touch more salt.

“No – his is an older model.”

“All right, ladies, calm down,” Daz murmured. When I looked, his face was blank but there was suppressed laughter behind his eyes. “If you need fuel, speak now, because you won’t have time to stop. You want in, you’re going to be riding a simple set course, OK? From here you’re going up to the motorway at Penrith, a quick razz down to junction thirty-seven, across to Kendal, on to Windermere and back up Kirkstone to here. Got it?”

Most of it was almost the exact route I’d taken to get here. I felt my shoulders drop a fraction. At least I was going to be partly forewarned.

“That’s it?” Mark said blankly. “What’s to stop us taking a short cut?”

Daz broke into a smile. “There isn’t one to take,” he said. “And anyway, you won’t be on your own. The three of you are all going to set off at the same time.”

“So it’s first one back, yeah?” Mark said. I saw his gaze flick from me to Sam and back again, and he smiled. In the bag. I could hear him thinking from here. “No sweat. Let’s do it, yeah?”

Quite a crowd of other bikers had turned up by this time but the Devil’s Bridge Club kept themselves apart from the others, sitting together like the in-crowd, ignoring the rest. What’s so special about you?

I made sure my helmet was on straight and my jacket was zipped to the top, flexing my fingers inside my gloves, then hit the starter and the FireBlade growled into life.

Mark made certain he was first one out of the car park, with Sam close behind him on his borrowed Kawasaki. I brought up the rear, happy for now to follow the others and see what kind of breakneck pace they were determined to set.

I’d ridden out with Sam before, when he was on his Norton and I was on my Suzuki. It was a while ago, but I reckoned I knew his abilities pretty well. Mark was the unknown factor. I didn’t fancy cresting a blind brow and finding he’d got it all wrong and turned his bike into a mobile roadblock on the other side.

It soon became apparent that, for all his brave talk, Mark wasn’t quite as much of a have-a-go hero on the road as I’d feared. He was much more cautious than I’d been expecting through the winding roads that edged the lake.

I couldn’t say I blamed him for that. The road surface was awful, rutted and bumpy so that I could feel my tyres skittering on every bend. It was narrow, too, with intrusive slabs of rock or fronds of bracken on one side and a low wall leading straight into the lake on the other to funnel oncoming traffic into the middle of the road.

Cars had a nasty tendency to appear round blind corners with their drivers’ side wheels well over the white line. Too much commitment and we were in danger of smearing our head and shoulders across the front of somebody’s bumper.

Where Mark did seem willing to take risks was overtaking slow-moving traffic on our own side of the road. He hopped past cars in places that made me wince and hold my breath while I waited for the crash that never quite seemed to happen.

Sam clung tenaciously to his tail, handling the unfamiliar bike with deceptive ease. I caught the duck of Mark’s head as he checked his mirrors after every manoeuvre and wondered if he was dismayed to find the old Kawasaki still right up there with him.

He must have been hoping that, once we reached Penrith and turned south onto the motorway, it would be a different story. The trouble was that the GPZ might have been old but it was still capable of a hundred and fifty miles an hour. The FireBlades would top that by another twenty but neither Mark nor I quite had the bottle to max them out on the public road. Even if we’d had the room to do it.

Twenty-seven miles covered the three junctions down to Killington. We got there in less than twelve minutes. All the way I was praying there were no unmarked cars on patrol and that the camera van wasn’t sitting on its favourite bridge. If they caught us at these speeds they were going to lock the three of us up and throw away the key – after they’d sent us for psychiatric evaluation, of course. As it was, I couldn’t help being relieved when we thundered unmolested up the slip road by the wind farm at Lambrigg and plunged back onto the A roads again.

I’d already ridden this part of the journey on my way up to the meet and the experience had taught me to back off earlier and not go into corners quite as hot. That way I could start putting the power down sooner and slingshot out of the bends getting faster all the while.

By the time we turned off onto the road for Kirkstone Pass I was into the kind of flowing rhythm you only hit once in a blue moon. It all felt vaguely surreal. I was arriving at every corner exactly when I was supposed to, in exactly the right gear, at precisely the right speed.

I ripped past Sam, and then Mark, with the sense that I was never going to ride this well again so I might as well make the most of it. Mark was so taken aback when I slipped through on the inside of him that he let his bike come upright fractionally too early, running a tad wide on a vicious right-hander. Sam nipped the Kawasaki past while he was fighting to regain control. When I glanced back I could see the two of them neck and neck, Sam grinning broadly under his visor.

We tore through Patterdale and Glenridding, earning outraged stares from the hordes of fell walkers and tourists who thronged the narrow main street as we did so. Mark was pushing Sam hard, the two of them almost touching fairings. I hoped they’d be so busy with each other I might stand a chance of staying out ahead of them for the last few remaining miles.

Come on, Fox! Nearly there . . .

The van appeared out of nowhere.

All I caught was a big block of white that snapped out of an uphill corner so fast it seemed to have been dropped out of nowhere into my path. I barely managed to snatch the FireBlade out of its way, disrupting my tempo completely and provoking the bike into a vicious tank-slapper of a wriggle that nearly catapulted me into the rocks.

It took me a hundred and fifty terrifying metres to get it straightened out again, by which time my heart was thundering and my skin was cold and clammy under my leathers.

I risked a backward glance in my mirrors but there was no-one behind me. No van, no bikes. Assailed by sudden fear, I jammed on the brakes, locking the rear wheel briefly, my smooth coordination shot to hell. I pulled tight in to the gravelly shoulder of the road and put my feet down, looking back over my shoulder.

Still nothing.

A car came sedately towards me and went past. Just as it disappeared over the brow behind me I saw the brake lights blaze on. I didn’t need to be told what had caused the driver’s sudden emergency stop.

Oh shit.

I paddled the ‘Blade round in the narrow road, making a mess of it, and gunned back to where I could still see the tail end of the car, stationary now. I was already braking hard as I crested the rise.

The sight that greeted me was probably never going to be as bad as the one painted by my imagination, but it was bad enough, even so.

What was left of the black Kawasaki was on its side fifty metres further down the hill, with its back end on the grass verge and the front end stretching halfway across the road. It looked like it had rolled savagely end over end several times before it had finally come to rest there, fragmenting as it went. The motor was dead and a mixture of fuel and engine oil and coolant was seeping quietly into the gutter.

The other FireBlade was parked up on its stand and seemed undamaged. Mark was on his hands and knees next to it, retching violently and shivering like a whippet. I was glad to see he’d at least managed to get his helmet off before he’d lost his lunch.

When I looked at Sam, it wasn’t hard to understand what had made Mark throw up.

My friend was sitting propped up awkwardly against the rocks at the side of the road with his legs stretched out in front of him. The left one looked relatively normal, but the right now did an abrupt ninety-degree turn halfway along his thighbone in a manner that didn’t correspond with anyone’s idea of correct anatomy. I could see the shattered end of his femur jutting out through the flayed skin. His foot was twisted almost completely backwards.

A vivid picture of Clare’s terrible injuries sprang into my mind. Oh no, not another one . . .

The car that had come past me was still in the middle of the road with the doors left wide open and the engine running. A middle-aged couple had emerged with creditable speed, but now they were out they seemed at a loss to know how to deal with the situation. Of the white van, there was no sign.

I yanked my FireBlade to a halt and banged the stand down almost before it had come to a complete stop. I stripped my helmet off and dumped my gloves inside, part of me totally numb.

“For God’s sake call an ambulance,” I snapped to the aimless couple from the car.

As I dropped onto my knees next to Sam he reached out and grabbed my hand, squeezing hard.

“Thanks for coming back for me, Charlie,” he managed, his voice muffled under his helmet. He was trembling and breathless with the shock but I judged there wouldn’t be much pain. Not yet. That would come later, and in spades.

Considering the accident had occurred less than a minute before, Sam had already conspired to lose what seemed to be half his allocation of blood. The tattered leg of his jeans was sodden with it. I could see it pulsing from the wound.

“Don’t worry, Sam, we’ll get you sorted,” I said, giving him a grin that I hoped wasn’t as sickly as it felt.

I stood, twisting to face the couple from the car.

“Ambulance?”

The woman held up her mobile helplessly. “There’s no service on the phone,” she said, nodding to the stark hills on either side of us. “We must be in a blind spot. Should we go and find a call box or something?”

“No,” I said. “I need you to back your car up to the other side of this brow and stick it in the middle of the road with your hazards on to warn any other traffic. Otherwise, if anything comes belting down here and ploughs into us we’ll all be road kill.”

She nodded, pale but steady, and climbed into the driver’s seat. I moved back to the FireBlade and wrenched open the rear cubby where I kept a rudimentary tool kit, grabbing an adjustable spanner. “Mark – get yourself to the nearest land-line and call a meat wagon.”

“Erm, yeah, right,” he said, dazed.

“Pull yourself together and do it right now!”

He climbed back onto his FireBlade and headed off jerkily, missing his first gearchange. I didn’t stop to watch him go but stripped off my cotton scarf and hurried back to Sam.

I eased the scarf under his thigh, using the spanner to twist it tight above the wound. He sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth but made no other complaint. The flow of blood eased a little and I gently tipped his visor up. “Where else are you hurt?” I demanded.

“Just my bastard leg,” Sam said, gasping as he tried to shift his position. “Don’t you think that’s enough?”

I hid my dismay behind a reassuring grin. “If you couldn’t keep up you should have given me a shout,” I chided. “This is one hell of a way to get my attention.”

He tried to laugh and ended up coughing. He was moving his head and neck without problem and there were no marks on the gelcoat of his helmet. I took an instant decision and started to unbuckle the chinstrap.

“Hey, you aren’t supposed to do that,” objected the man from the car. “What if he’s got spinal injuries?”

I finished undoing the strap and eased the helmet off. “Sam, is your neck broken?”

He managed a weak grin. “No,” he said.

“Good,” I muttered. “Because when you’ve recovered I’m going to break it for you – scaring the shit out of me like this.”

“Sorry,” he said on the ragged edge of a laugh. His teeth had begun to chatter now, despite the warmth of the evening. Above his beard his face was a deathly white, making those seal-pup eyes enormous.

The woman from the car walked back, carrying a picnic blanket which she handed over to me despite her husband’s horrified look. I laid it across Sam’s chest and tucked it in behind his shoulders with a grateful nod in her direction.

“Where the hell’s that ambulance?” I wondered under my breath. I loosened the makeshift tourniquet a little so as not to completely cut the blood supply to what was left of Sam’s lower leg. A fresh welter of blood flooded out of the wound. He turned his head away so he didn’t have to watch himself leaking.

“I had him, Charlie,” he said, sounding unbearably tired. “Another mile or so and he would have been sucking on both our exhausts, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I tightened the scarf up again and hesitated before asking: “What happened?”

“That van. Just came round the corner and wham! I was toast. Matey-boy with the ‘Blade was trying to muscle his way past on the outside of me and I’d nowhere to go. Nearly got out of the way but the fucker caught my leg. Funny thing is,” he went on, voice blurring now as the pain began to kick in, “I coulda sworn he turned the wrong way.”

His eyelids were drooping. Desperate to keep him conscious, I said urgently, “What do you mean, Sam? Who turned the wrong way?”

“Hmm?” He jerked his eyes open again. “The van driver, ‘course,” he said. “I coulda sworn he turned into us, not away, like he was aiming right for us . . .”