Danuta Reah - Night Angels

She turned the key in the ignition, and put the car into gear. She glanced in the mirror, let the clutch in and moved off. A car pulled out behind her and followed her along the road. She wasn’t the only person heading over the Snake that night. Car lights behind her would be some comfort, make her feel less as though the world had ended and she was the last survivor of some catastrophe. But as they travelled along the last straight before the road began its climb, the car behind pulled out and overtook her smoothly and effortlessly. Bloated plutocrat. She watched with detachment as the tail-lights disappeared, the afterlight dancing in the darkness ahead. She was more stoned than she’d realized. She’d better be careful.

She shivered and turned up the heater. The air roared and blew, bringing the smell of the engine into the car. Her feet were hot, but the rest of her was chilled by the cold air that seeped in through the loose-fitting windows and the rattling door.

She was climbing up the hill outside Glossop now. The road curved to the right past a house that glowed a warm light on to the road, then turned left, rock on one side, a drop on the other. The climb was long and steep, and she changed down to third, then second. The engine roared. There were white wisps in the air in front of her, and suddenly she was into a bank of fog, her lights reflecting in a white glare. She slowed down, peering ahead, wiping the windscreen futilely, trying to see. Then it was clear again, the lights shining on to the wet road, illuminating the rocks, the moorland grass, a sheep tucked into a lee of stone. She was nearly at the top, and the road flattened out. There was just wilderness round her now, flat peat and grassy tussocks and bog. Her headlights reflected on water, sullen pools in the dark ground. Soon, the road would start dropping down, past Doctor’s Gate, between Bleaklow and Kinder Scout, down between the thick trees, and on through the empty night.

She was in a half-daze as the road disappeared under the wheels. Home soon, home soon . It was a soothing mantra in her head. She thought about Luke and wondered if she should phone him when she got back. It had been good these past few months. She was going to miss him…Lights were dancing and drifting in the darkness and she watched them with incurious interest. The car swerved, and she jerked back to concentration. The smoke had been a bad idea. Grimly, she wound down the window, flinching as the rain spattered on her face and arm. Lights ahead? She remembered the car that had passed her as she drove out of Glossop. Bloated plutocrat… She tried to get a picture of it in her mind. Dark, it had been dark…

Without warning, her engine cut out. What the…? She pumped the accelerator. Nothing. She looked at the petrol gauge. Still half full. She’d topped it up that morning. The car rolled forward, slowing. She pulled into the side of the road as the car rolled to a halt. How…? Her headlights shone on to falling rain and blackness. She was cold. Her fingers were clumsy as she fumbled for the key in the ignition. The starting motor whined, but the engine was dead. She tried again, and saw the headlights begin to fade. Quickly, she turned them off. The battery was old. She should have turned them off at once.

She sat there, staring into the darkness, hearing the rain hitting the roof and doors. The wind had a thin, whistling sound. Then she saw the lights ahead. Suddenly, out of the darkness, two lights coming towards her. Like a car, only…Reversing lights, a car was reversing towards her, fast. A big car, a dark car? She turned the key in the ignition again, and again as the whine of the starting motor faded to nothing.

The engine was dead.

It was a cold morning. The rain of the night before had frozen on the ground, leaving the pavements shiny and treacherous underfoot. Puddles were patterns of white frost where the ice had shattered. The sky was clear as the sun came up.

Roz shivered as she got out of the car and the cold caught her. She saw her breath cloud in the air. The car park was deserted this early in the day, and she was able to park directly in front of the Arts Tower. She craned her neck to look up the height of the building. On windy days, when the clouds were moving, she would sometimes stand like this and watch until it looked as though the building was racing across the sky and the clouds were still. She pulled her briefcase off the back seat and locked the car door.

She checked her watch. Seven-thirty. Plenty of time. She ran the arrangements for the meeting through her mind. Roz was the senior research assistant for the Law and Language Group, a small, recently established team in the university, headed by Joanna Grey. When Roz had come to Sheffield a year ago, she had joined the linguistics department, hoping to pursue her research into interviewing techniques. Joanna, ambitious and dynamic, had encouraged her to develop her skills in computer modelling and analysis of language and had then guided her into the field of forensic linguistics, an expanding area that looked at all aspects of language in its legal context.

As she settled in to the new department, Roz had realized that Joanna was carefully building a team. Roz had done her early research into the subtexts of interviews, the meanings that lay below the surface of candidates’ responses in these situations, and Gemma Wishart, a recent Joanna appointee, specialized in the English of Eastern European speakers.

Joanna had staged her coup with care. She had got the support of her current Head of Department, Peter Cauldwell, for two grant applications, one to analyse police interview tapes with a view to designing training material and software, and the other to develop systems of analysis that would identify the regional and national origins of asylum seekers. At the same time, she had pursued her aim to set up an independent research group with the various boards and committees within the university who were, at this time, all for the idea of self-funding groups.

Once she had got her money, Joanna had made her bid for freedom and set up the Law and Language Group as an independent research team. She had a year to prove that the group could be an income-generating unit. The grant money kept them afloat, and they also kept up the routine legal work that had come Joanna’s way for years: the document analysis, the analysis of witness statements, the retrieval of documents from computers, work with audio and video tape.

Today’s meeting was the first of a series with the people who could, if they withdrew their support, put an end to the project tomorrow. Everything had to run with the smoothness, efficiency and effectiveness of a well-written piece of programming. These were the money people. They didn’t want to know about philosophies of pure research, or the abstractions that the true research scientist could chase for months and years. They wanted to know that Joanna and her team could deliver.

Joanna’s timetable had run into an unavoidable snarl-up. She had had a meeting the day before, and was relying on Roz to get everything organized. ‘I’ll be in well before nine,’ she’d said, before she left. ‘I’ll pick Gemma up on my way in. Just make sure everything’s set up.’ Roz could feel the slight adrenaline tension of responsibility as she pushed through the main doors. The porter greeted her as the doors closed behind her. ‘Morning, Dr Bishop.’

She nodded, a bit abstracted. ‘Morning, Dave.’ The familiar smell of the university closed round her. She usually climbed the stairs to her department – her concession to keeping fit – but this morning she was wearing her meeting gear, and her shoes weren’t designed for stair-climbing. She ignored the lift and stepped on to the platform of the endlessly moving paternoster elevator, drawn by its regular clunk, clunk. She was carried up past the blank wall between the ground floor and the mezzanine, the floor numbers appearing on the wall above her head, gliding past her and opening up on to the lobbies which then sank away under her feet as she was carried higher and higher.