Peter James: Dead Man's Grip

‘Roy,’ she gasped. ‘I’m in hospital.’

He’d had enough of Meat Loaf. Just as the railway-crossing barrier began to rise, Stuart Ferguson switched to an Elkie Brooks album. ‘Pearl’s a Singer’ began to play. That song had been on in the pub the first time he’d gone out with Jessie.

Some women on a first date tried to distance themselves from you, until they knew you better. But they’d had six months of getting to know each other over the phone and the Internet. Jessie had been waiting tables in a truck stop just north of Edinburgh when they’d first met, late at night, and chatted for over an hour. They were both going through marriage bust-ups at the time. She’d scrawled her phone number on the back of the receipt and hadn’t expected to hear from him again.

When they’d settled into the quiet side booth, on their first proper date, she’d snuggled up to him. As the song started playing, he’d slipped an arm around her shoulder, fully expecting her to flinch or pull away. Instead she’d snuggled even closer and turned her face towards him, and they’d kissed. They continued kissing, without a break, for the entire duration of the song.

He smiled as he drove forward, bumping over the rail tracks, mindful of a wobbly moped rider just in front of him, the wipers clunking. His heart was heavy with longing for Jessie, the song both beautiful and painful for him at the same time. Tonight he would be back in her arms.

‘In one hundred yards turn left,’ commanded the female voice of his satnav.

‘Yes, boss,’ he grunted, and glanced down at the left-angled arrow on the screen, directing him off Station Road and into Portland Road.

He indicated and changed down a gear, braking well in advance, careful to get the weighting of the heavy lorry stabilized before making the sharp turn on the wet road.

In the distance he saw flashing headlights. A white van, tailgating a car. Tosser, he thought.

‘Tosser,’ Carly said, watching the white van that filled her rear-view mirror. She kept carefully to the 30mph speed limit as she drove along the wide street, heading towards Station Road. She passed dozens of small shops, then a post office, a curry house, a halal butcher, a large red-brick church to the right, a used-car showroom.

Immediately ahead of her was a van parked outside a kitchen appliance shop, with two men unloading a crate from the rear. It was blocking her view of a side road just beyond. She clocked a lorry that was coming towards her, a few hundred yards away, but she had plenty of space. Just as she started pulling out, her phone rang.

She glanced down at the display and saw to her irritation that it was Preston Dave calling. For an instant she was tempted to answer and tell him she was surprised he hadn’t reversed the charge. But she was in no mood to speak to him. Then, as she looked back up at the road, a cyclist going hell for leather suddenly appeared out of nowhere, coming straight at her, over a pedestrian crossing on her side of the road, just as the lights turned red.

For an instant, in panic, she thought it must be her who was on the wrong side of the road. She swung the steering wheel hard to the left, stamping on the brake pedal, thumping over the kerb, missing him by inches, and skidded, wheels locked, across the wet surface.

Empty chairs and tables outside a café raced towards her as if she was on a scary funfair ride. She stared, frozen in horror, gripping the wheel, just a helpless observer as the wall of the café loomed nearer. For an instant, as she splintered a table, she thought she was going to die.

‘Oh shittttttttttt!’ she screamed as the nose of her car smashed into the wall beneath the café window and a massive explosion numbed her ears. She felt a terrible jolt on her shoulder, saw a blur of white and smelled something that reminded her of gunpowder. Then she saw glass crashing down in front of the buckled bonnet of the car.

There was a muffled barrrrrrrrrrppppppppp , accompanied by a slightly less muffled banshee siren.

‘Jesus!’ she said, panting in shock. ‘Oh, God! Oh, Jesus!’

Her ears popped and the sounds became much louder.

Cars could catch fire, she’d seen that in films. She had to get out. In wild panic, she hit the seat-belt buckle and tried to open her door. But it would not move. She tried again, harder. A baggy white cushion lay on her lap. The airbag, she realized. She wrenched the door handle, her panic increasing, and shoved the door as hard as she could. It opened and she tumbled out, her feet catching in the seat belt, tripping her, sending her sprawling painfully on to the wet pavement.

As she lay there for an instant she heard the banshee wail continue above her head. A burglar alarm. Then she could hear another wailing sound. This time it was human. A scream.

Had she hit someone? Injured someone?

Her knee and right hand were stinging like hell, but she barely noticed hauling herself to her feet, looking first at the wreckage of the café and then across the road.

She froze.

A lorry had stopped on the opposite side. A huge artic, slewed at a strange angle. The driver was clambering down from the cab. People were running into the road right behind it. Running past a mountain bike that had been twisted into an ugly shape, like an abstract sculpture, past a baseball cap and tiny bits of debris, towards what she thought at first was a roll of carpet lying further back, leaking dark fluid from one end on to the rain-lashed black tarmac.

All the traffic had stopped, and the people who had been running stopped too, suddenly, as if they had become statues. She felt she was staring at a tableau. Then she walked, stumbling, out into the road, in front of a stationary car, the high-pitched howl of the siren almost drowned out by the screams of a young woman holding an umbrella, who was standing on the far pavement, staring at that roll of carpet.

Fighting her brain, which wanted to tell her it was something different, Carly saw the laced-up trainer that was attached to one end.

And realized it wasn’t a roll of carpet. It was a severed human leg.

She vomited, the world spinning around her.

At 9 a.m. Phil Davidson and Vicky Donoghue, dressed in their green paramedic uniforms, sat chatting in the cab of the Mercedes Sprinter Ambulance. They were parked on a police bay opposite the taxi rank at Brighton’s Clock Tower, where they had been positioned by the dispatcher.

Government targets required that ambulances reached Category-A emergencies within eight minutes, and from this location, with a bit of aggressive driving, they could normally reach anywhere in the city of Brighton and Hove well within that time.

Ninety minutes into their twelve-hour shift, the rush-hour world passed by in front of them, blurred by the film of rain on the windscreen. Every few minutes Vicky flicked the wipers to clear their view. They watched taxis, buses, goods vehicles passing by, streams of people trudging to work, some huddled beneath umbrellas, others looking sodden and gloomy. This part of the city didn’t look great even on a sunny day; in the wet it was plain depressing.

The ambulance service was the most constantly busy of all the emergency services and they’d already attended their first call-out, a Category-B emergency shout to attend an elderly lady who had fallen in the street outside her home in Rottingdean.

The first life lesson Phil Davidson had learned, from his eight years as a paramedic, was very simple: Don’t grow old. If you have to, don’t grow old alone.

Around 90 per cent of the work of the paramedics was attending the elderly. People who had fallen, people who were having palpitations, or strokes or suspected heart attacks, people who were too frail to get a taxi to hospital. And there were plenty of wily old birds who knew how to exploit the system. Half the time, much to their irritation, the paramedics were nothing more than a free big taxi service for lazy, smelly and often grossly overweight people.