Хилари Боннер - Death Comes First

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.

Alvin Nightingale was a twenty-one-year-old civilian investigator of West Indian descent employed by the Avon and Somerset Constabulary at Kenneth Steele House. He was intelligent, alert and ambitious. And he was not satisfied with his work. He was currently engaged in studying CCTV and other camera footage and had earlier that day been trying to follow the route of Joyce Mildmay’s Range Rover, with limited success. It was work he was good at, because Alvin was a meticulous young man, but he found it tedious beyond belief.

Alvin wanted to be a police officer. He had always wanted to be a police officer. Unfortunately he had so far been prevented from following his dream by a sight defect which meant that his long sight fell below required standards and was likely to further deteriorate. Corrective lenses and spectacles alone could not improve Alvin’s sight to the required level. Alvin had, however, managed to get himself on an NHS waiting list for an operation about which he was fiercely optimistic, even though the success rate was only 30 or 40 per cent. But he knew he could be in for a long wait; his was not considered to be an urgent case, because Alvin could see well enough. Not well enough to become a policeman, that was all.

Meanwhile Alvin liked to pretend he was a kind of trainee police officer. He was always on the lookout for matters that might draw him to the attention of his superiors. And he was intent on demonstrating that his eyesight wasn’t that bad. He was, in fact, determined to prove that his sight defect should not prevent him joining the force, and that he was definitely made of the right stuff.