Broken Lines (2 page)

Through his helmet Donovan heard the squeal of brakes swallowed almost instantly in an impact like an explosion. Lights cartwheeled across the sky. Afraid he'd swing round the last corner and pile into them he braked again, harder, and fought the resentful machine under him to a more-or-less controlled halt. The crash scene opened up before him, lit by the three Victorian lamp-posts that constituted Chevening's public lighting scheme.

The red van had hit a white saloon and bowled it across the roundabout like rolling a bottle. Between rolling and sliding it must have covered forty metres, the tortured metal shrieking in agony, before coming to rest on its side against an oak tree overhanging the road.

The van itself had veered left into Fletton Road. Somehow it had stayed upright as it ricocheted like a pin-ball off the churchyard wall, but the whole near-side had been stripped to the metal before it ended its career under the backside of a parked digger. Now it looked as if the digger had sat on its bonnet. The van's engine had gone as far under as it could and then come back into the cab.

‘God almighty!' whispered Donovan. All at once a cut face seemed small beer. He couldn't see how the occupants of either vehicle could have escaped with their lives.

But he had to be sure. Carefully now – he was probably the only one left for whom things could get any worse – he rode on to the roundabout and left the bike with its light shining back at the blind corner to warn anyone coming in his wake. He threw off his helmet and, fighting the weakness that adrenalin had thus far kept at bay, crossed the road to the white saloon.

It had been a good car once but it was done now. There might be a few parts deep in the engine block that could be salvaged, but in every way that counted it was a write-off. If it had had furry dice, the furry dice would have been a write-off.

Or just possibly not. Because modern cars are constructed in such a way that everything collapses and crumples and falls apart in order to safeguard the passengers inside. When Donovan steeled himself to look he met not a shatter of blood and bones and grey flesh forced into impossible contortions but shock-dilated eyes in the white face of a woman who, so far as he could see, hadn't a mark on her.

Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times before anything came out. Then she said – whispered, rather, but with the exquisite politeness that a totally unfamiliar situation engenders – ‘Please, could you help me?'

Relief almost made Donovan laugh. It certainly made him forget his manners. ‘Jesus, lady, I thought you were mincemeat!' The offside doors were under the car. He found the nearside handle sandwiched into a concertina fold of the door and pulled but nothing happened, and judging from the seized-solid feel of it nothing was going to. Without much hope Donovan tried the rear door but the whole frame was distorted, it would take cutting equipment to shift it.

He thought for a moment, sniffing the air like a dog. He couldn't smell petrol. The engine was dead. ‘Can you turn the ignition off?' She didn't answer. He tried again. ‘The ignition. The key. Can you reach it to turn it off?'

‘Oh – yes.' Donovan saw her right hand move, awkwardly because her body was tipped on her right side, held there by the seat-belt. He heard the key turn.

‘OK, good. Now, are you hurt?'

She needed a moment's notice of that too. ‘I don't know. I don't think so.'

‘Can you move your legs?'

‘Y-yes. But not much, there's something in the way.'

From the state of the car it could have been anything including the tow bar. Donovan wiped his forearm across his eyes. ‘Listen, you'd best stay where you are till help gets here. It won't be long, and they'll be able to force the door and get you out easy. The only way out right now is through the windscreen, and if you are hurt I could do some damage pulling you about. Keep still and be patient. You're in no danger, there's no need to be frightened. I have to go check the other vehicle.'

That seemed to bring home to her what had happened. Until then she was the victim of some incomprehensible disaster as impersonal as a lightning strike or an avalanche, and all she knew was to be grateful there was someone on hand to help her. But that brought it back. Another vehicle? – she was hit by another vehicle! She was driving round the roundabout when a red van that should have stopped at the broken line came straight on and hit her at full tilt. It wasn't an accident, not in any real sense – someone did this to her! Outrage flooded through her. ‘He hit me! I was on the roundabout, and he crossed the line and hit me!'

Donovan nodded. ‘He's pretty maced up too, by the look of it. Worse than you. If there's nothing I can do there I'll come straight back.'

‘Don't leave me!' From a whisper her voice rose to a wail.

Donovan flinched. ‘I have to. Look, there are people coming now – I'll get someone to wait with you. I'll be back as soon as I can.'

Her free left hand came towards him through the broken windscreen, imploring, seeking contact. He stepped back quickly, then, feeling like a worm, turned his back on her.

People were coming from the little knot of houses round the church. He sent the first to phone for the police, Fire Brigade and Ambulance – the cars from Queen's Street wouldn't be able to do much more in this situation than he could – and the second to keep the woman company. ‘I don't think there's any chance of a fire now, but if I'm wrong yell for me and get out of the way.'

‘What about her?'

But he had no answer. He took off at an uncertain run towards Fletton Road.

Even more than the car the van looked as if it had been through one of those compactors that reduce a ton of engineering to an Art Deco coffee-table. There was hardly enough paint left to show what colour it had been. The bonnet was crushed downwards and the pillars of the windscreen inwards. The height of the front portion of the cab had been halved.

Again Donovan gritted his teeth to look. This was a man who'd hit him in the face with a gun, but that didn't make it any easier to see him reduced to the filling in a steel sandwich.

And again he didn't see what he expected to. Firstly, though the driver had certainly come off worse than the woman in the car – there was blood on his forehead and bubbling through a rent in the leg of his jeans – he was surprisingly active, struggling to haul his legs out of the compacted well of the van on to the front seats. He was also too noisy for someone at death's door, sobbing in shock and terror and pain.

The second thing Donovan noticed was that he knew this man. Mikey Dickens was a junior member of The Jubilee's leading crime family, and if there'd been any time in the last ten minutes for the policeman to ask himself who was most likely to have robbed Ash Kumani at gunpoint, Mikey Dickens was the answer he'd have come up with. The small stature and ready violence should have been enough to tell him.

And the third thing he noticed was that, unlike the white saloon, all around the van stank of petrol.

There was a long moment in which Donovan was close to walking away. Mikey Dickens was in a situation entirely of his own making. It was a miracle he hadn't killed the woman in the car; and if he'd hit Donovan any harder he wouldn't have been in this quandary, he'd still have been crawling round Ash Kumani's floor wondering which end of the sky fell on him. He couldn't think of a single good reason to risk his life for the likes of Mikey Dickens.

Because that was what he'd have to do to get him out. Both wings of the van had been forced back by the impact, reducing the doors to mere jagged slashes in the wreckage. Not even a weasel like Mikey was coming out that way. The windscreen had been crushed by the digger to a letter-box slit. The only other exit, unless the Fire Brigade got here with cutting equipment before the thing went up like a bomb, was the back doors. And to get out that way, Mikey was going to need help.

There were limits to what flesh and blood could do. If Donovan waited for the emergency services, and put in his report that he was unable to render assistance due to the damage sustained by the vehicle, no one would challenge it. Certain risks, even serious risks, came with the territory but this wasn't one: crawling over a ruptured petrol tank that could explode at any second. There were police officers who went that far beyond the call of duty – Donovan had before now – but nobody had a right to expect it. It would be noted that he was concussed, and also how he came by that concussion. Senior ranks would support his decision, and even in the canteen no one would dare suggest they'd have handled it better for fear that some time they'd get the chance to prove it.

So it was neither peer pressure nor official expectation that made his mind up. Mostly it was lacking the time and the strength of will to hammer out a rational decision. It was easier and quicker to go by gut instinct, and instinct said he couldn't leave a man to burn, not even Mikey Dickens, not even in a conflagration of his own making.

Where the door had been was a gap sufficient to take Donovan's hand but not enough of his arm for him to reach the ignition. ‘Give me your keys. Mikey! – the keys. I have to get the back door open.' Mikey's pinched little face, the ski mask discarded now, was white with terror. But intelligence glimmered in the hunted-animal eyes, and he crawled on his elbows towards the sound of Donovan's voice. ‘Mr Donovan, is that you? Oh thank Christ. Get me out of here, for pity's sake!'

‘I will,' promised Donovan. ‘But you have to reach me the keys. Then get yourself into the gap between the seats, and I'll come in and pull you out.'

Put like that it sounded nothing at all. He could have Mikey out of there in just a few seconds. Only the stench of petrol turned it from an exercise in logic into a trial of nerves, and even then there was only a problem if the petrol met a spark. The stink alone would do neither of them any harm. Donovan tried hard to hold that thought.

Mikey was bloodier but less shocked than the woman in the car. He understood immediately what Donovan intended and what he needed. He squirmed round as best he could in the space remaining over the front seats and groped for the ignition with one gloved hand. When he had the key he put it into Donovan's fingers as carefully as if his life depended on it.

And Donovan dropped it. It wasn't just nerves making him clumsy. He'd taken his own gloves off in order to reach through the crack, and the metal key seared his palm as if it had been among hot coals.

Fortunately he was already withdrawing his hand when the heat got through to him and it fell at his feet. If it had fallen among the twisted debris inside the car it would never have been found in time.

Mikey had his gloves on, he didn't know that the key was hot and what that meant. Donovan did: it meant there was a fire in the engine compartment. It meant that there was no longer a margin of safety, however slim. But Mikey didn't need to know. The man couldn't have wanted to get out of that van any more if there'd been a kilo of Semtex under his seat and a Des O'Connor song on the radio: scaring him even more would be counter-productive. Donovan bent quickly and picked up the key with his fingertips. Mikey was in no position to notice. ‘OK, I'll have it open in a second. Get you over them seats as best you can.'

It wasn't the Queen's English but Mikey knew what he meant. Both front seats had head restraints which had halted the collapse of the roof: the space between them was the only way out. A bigger man would never have done it. An injured man in less immediate peril would not have thought he could do it. But Mikey was coming through that gap if he had to strip naked to do it: somehow, in the narrow place, he wriggled out of his heavy coat and wormed his way into the tight channel that was his only exit from hell.

He got just far enough to think he had it licked, then he stuck fast. Even with his mind racing it took him a second to figure out how. His shoulders were already through the gap and they were the widest part of him: the rest should have followed. But whatever it was that stabbed into his thigh had torn a rent in his jeans that had now become snagged on the gearstick.

He fought so fiercely to free himself that anything other than denim would have given way. But Mikey robbed petrol stations to keep himself in a manner which included top quality jeans and the fabric resisted all his efforts to rip it. When Donovan got the key turned in the back door he met the frantic waving hands and terrified face of a man trapped in his worst nightmare.

And the reason he could see the terror on Mikey's face was that there was now some light inside the wrecked van. A flickering rosy glow was emanating from under the remains of the dashboard.

There was no time left: either he went in or he got out. It wasn't a conscious heroism that made him kneel on the platform immediately above the punctured tank and grab one of Mikey's hands in his own, but it was heroism just the same. He knew what could happen – what
would
happen, the only question was when. But the longer he waited the more danger he was in, so he flung the door out of his way, got just as far into the van as he had to to reach the trapped man, gripped the gloved hand tight and yanked with all his strength.

With the leverage he had Mikey's jeans stood no chance. There was a ripping sound, a sudden loss of resistance, and Mikey came at him as if he'd been shot from a cannon. Donovan had no time to avoid him: their heads clashed – sending new stars spinning through Donovan's vision – their limbs tangled and they fell out of the back of the van like a pair of overexcited wrestlers falling out of a ring. Donovan landed on his back with Mikey on top of him and all the breath gushed out of him. Mikey, his injuries notwithstanding, hit the ground running.

He travelled three, maybe four paces, and then he slid to a halt and looked back. Donovan was still on the ground, plainly stunned, sitting up now but either unaware of the giant petrol bomb he was sitting beside or unable to get away from it. The leaked fuel was all around him.