The Silence (Dc Goodhew 4) (11 page)

Until that moment, the names Oakington and Dry Drayton had been irrelevant to him, just anonymous titles appearing on a couple of signboards. They were so insignificant compared to Peterborough and Amsterdam, or the other major points along the way.

Less significant still than São Miguel do Rio Torto in Portugal, where he’d been born and hoped to spend his retirement.

There was rain in the air, so he set his wipers to sweep the windscreen intermittently; they made the return journey about once every minute. Visibility was good.

Suddenly the trailer in front of him shuddered, and Francisco just had time to tighten his grip on the steering wheel and extend his brake foot before he saw the stricken trailer start to slew. Something tumbled from its darkened roof into the glare of his own headlights. It was there for a split second before it fell in front of him.

Not something . . . Someone.

A moment of colour. Clean clothes. Fresh blood. He slammed on the brakes, rigid and frozen as his lorry continued to travel, sliding towards the back of the trailer in front, parallel for a moment then closing fast as the lorry travelling behind cannoned into his rear.

Francisco’s cab crumpled, folding around him, the windows exploding in all directions, the seat and steering wheel inexplicably moving together, pinning him in between. Then the lorry was on its side, damp tarmac grating his door and sending sparks through the driver’s missing window.

A short time later, through his dimming consciousness, Francisco picked out the blue lights, all the emergency services, but most of all a young policeman who called to him through the little tunnel that had once been the nearside window.

‘The fire brigade will free you as soon as possible. Can you hear me?’

Francisco nodded. ‘I need to get out now.’ It hurt him even to speak. ‘Where am I?’ he asked.

‘Just outside Cambridge.’

‘I think my legs are trapped.’

‘Your lorry has been involved in a collision with two others. We’ll get you all out as soon as possible.’

‘And the girl?’

The young policeman’s gaze darted warily around the remains of the cab. ‘In here?’

‘It’s why we crashed.’ Francisco intended to say more, but his voice was overtaken by a groan accompanying a spasm of pain. ‘Under,’ he gasped. He barely recognized his own voice. ‘Under,’ he repeated.

The policeman’s hand gripped his own and the remnants of his last cigarette flaked from his fingers.

‘Where is this?’ Francisco mumbled.

‘Cambridge,’ the policeman repeated.

‘No,’ he grunted again, louder this time. But somehow he sensed his voice had weakened. ‘Where exactly?’

‘Near Oakington.’

‘Oakington and Dry Drayton,’ he whispered, remembering the signboard. Suddenly those names were as relevant as São Miguel do Rio Torto.

Finally he understood all the other delays, the chaos – the havoc he’d always been so impatient to see scooped off the road with undue haste.

He gripped the policeman’s hand more tightly. ‘She’s underneath,’ were his final words.

The three lorries had come to rest in a skewed zigzag. The first one hung over the central reservation, its trailer section sliced open by the second lorry. All the efforts involved in a carefully packed house-move were spilled across the outside lane. The top of a coffee table lay flat on the road. Goodhew saw no sign of its legs.

Headlights from the emergency vehicles had been hastily replaced by floodlights, and Goodhew wriggled back out of the crushed cab into their full glare. A paramedic walked towards him.

‘He just died,’ Goodhew informed her.

‘And are you okay?’

Goodhew followed the woman’s gaze, and saw that his clothes were now heavily stained. ‘It’s the driver’s blood. He was trying to tell me that he’d hit a woman. Said she was underneath.’

The bright pools of artificial light were compact and distinct, fading into complete darkness within inches of their perimeter. The paramedic stared at the black gap between two sets of wheels and where one side of the felled lorry lay almost flat on the ground. ‘Call me if you find anything,’ she muttered, then walked away without looking Goodhew in the eye.

The third lorry had jack-knifed and come to rest with its cab relatively undamaged. It was the rear half that had taken the brunt of the impact, decelerating from fifty-five to zero within yards as it tore into the undercarriage of the lorry in its path. The result was a narrowing ‘V’, an acute angle of scrap metal and 36-inch-high tyres.

The whole crash scene seemed overrun with emergency crews cutting, tending and directing, but no one seemed to notice Goodhew. He hesitated, he knew he should tell someone what he was considering, but if they delayed him it might be too late. He wanted to believe that, by some fluke, someone could still be alive under there.

Although the trailer lay on its side, it was no longer entirely rigid, and the impact had buckled it just enough to allow Goodhew a crawlspace. He lay flat on his stomach and, with his mobile phone in his hand, extended his arm in amidst the wreckage and took a photo. The flash lit the space for a moment, then he quickly withdrew his arm. The timer revolved for a few seconds and then the photo appeared. The light had reflected off the wet tarmac, blanching the image, but Goodhew saw what he’d been looking for. It was a smudge of orange, out of focus but clearly fabric.

He folded his hand around his phone and dropped back on to his stomach, then he slid further under the toppled vehicle. The gap was tight, narrowing further in. Every few inches he had to stop and check his route, using the meagre light from the phone’s screen to see for the next couple of feet. As he moved forward, he had to keep his head low, his cheek only an inch from the greasy tarmac.

He made it another yard forward before realizing that the gap between the wreckage and the ground was starting to reduce. It was also becoming more difficult to tilt his face up in order to see where he was heading. If he went much further, it might be impossible to back out again, then he himself would need to be rescued. But equally he felt he’d already come too far to turn back. He took several new pictures with his phone and finally managed to take one that gave him the answer. The orange fabric was clearer now, and he could distinguish part of an arm and her fingers. They were dirty and bloodstained, but still intact.

He held the phone a little further from his face, squinting as he tried to identify anything that might confirm a definite sign of life. Or death.

At that moment Marks’s number flashed up on screen, and Goodhew realized his own odds were not so great.

‘Where are you?’ Marks barked. ‘I’m at the scene now.’

‘I’m under the lorry, sir.’

‘You need to get out right now.’

‘There’s someone under here.’

‘Goodhew!’

‘I’m nearly there.’

‘It isn’t safe, there are procedures that must be followed. And you’re not going to find anyone alive under this mess.’

Silence.

Then the beam of a flashlight swung under the lorry, and hit Goodhew full in the face. ‘Get out now, Gary.’

‘I can’t.’

‘It’s not a request. Out.
Now
.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t move backwards,’ he lied.

‘Bollocks. I know the position of the lorry, Gary, and it gets narrower as you move forwards.’

‘It’s harder to back up.’ Goodhew drew a deep breath. ‘Shine the torch on her, please, sir.’

‘I can’t bloody well see her.’

‘Stick your arm in further and I’ll direct you.’

‘I can’t see anything if I do that.’

‘It doesn’t matter – I can. Okay, okay, round to your left . . . Stop! Now, slowly, left again. Stop.’

By craning his neck, Goodhew could see the furthest point of torchlight, a narrow beam that clipped the edge of a metal strut, before landing to give him a partial view of a woman’s face. He could see her cheek and ear, her jawbone and neck. ‘I can reach her,’ he called out.

They were still on the phone and, though just yards apart, Marks might as well have been a mile away.

‘That lorry’s not stable, I want you out of there.’

‘I don’t think I can. Look, if I’m with her, they’ll only need to work on one spot and, if she’s not dead, I might be able to help.’

Marks didn’t actually say it, but Goodhew could imagine his boss’s exasperated response:
Don’t be stupid, of course she’s dead.

It took Goodhew almost twenty minutes to reach her, pressing himself ever flatter to the ground as he wriggled forward.

He had spoken to her several times during the last ten minutes, but there was no response. Finally he got close enough to touch her. She was over to his right as he lay on his stomach, his face level with the back of her head.

‘Can you hear me?’ he whispered.

He slid his hand over and around her cheek, to feel for any hint of breath. He cupped his palm close to her nose and mouth. But there was something getting in the way. He felt around more urgently, then realized that whatever it was led to her mouth. It went directly inside. He didn’t want to move her, but she needed to breathe, no matter what other injuries she’d sustained. He lifted his own head as far as possible, and turned hers towards him.

And despite the bad light, he saw the thing forcing its way through her open mouth. Not going in but coming out –
what the . . .

And that was when he recoiled, pressing his face to the tarmac and struggling to breathe. He wanted to fight his way out from under that lorry, just to escape it. But that was impossible: he was just too exhausted and too tightly wedged in to go anywhere.

His mobile rang again, and he answered. He could hear himself carefully explaining the situation to Marks, his voice on some kind of autopilot and doing a poor impression of calmness.

It took another two hours for the wrecked lorries to be lifted. Goodhew didn’t think he’d moved in all that time; even when he’d spoken to Marks, his face had stayed put, his eyes fixed on the road surface. It seemed like the only thing he was able to trust right then.

He told himself to look at her again, to try to understand what he thought he’d seen and silently offer her body the
respect
it deserved. Instead, he didn’t lift his head again until he felt a hand tugging at his shoulder, and heard the firm voice of the paramedic he’d spoken to earlier.

‘Gary.’ Her voice was insistent, as if it wasn’t the first time she’d spoken his name. ‘Come on. That’s right.’ She spoke as though he was being coaxed from a ledge. She helped him to stand.

He did exactly what he was told, but beyond that struggled to gather his thoughts. It was as if some part of his brain had switched off and would take several attempts to reboot.

He muttered something.

‘You weren’t under a bed.’ She laughed – a false noise that didn’t suit her. ‘That’s your shock talking.’

She had one hand on his elbow and the other pressing into the small of his back, manoeuvring him towards a waiting ambulance. By the time his head began to clear, he was sitting inside the vehicle with a thermal blanket draped around his shoulders. Marks was there too, with an expression of angry relief written on his face.

‘Strickland’s examined the body, taking her back for autopsy . . .’

Goodhew wasn’t really listening. ‘Did you see her?’

‘Strickland told me. He’s insisting on having a word with you. Ah, here he comes.’

Goodhew nodded. As far as he knew, Strickland was the most humourless and pedantic man on the planet, but he was also a very thorough police surgeon who would never waste any of his time just to hand-hold a junior officer.

Strickland was to the point. ‘DI Marks thought it important that you had some kind of understanding of the condition of the body. One of the injuries sustained by the young lady was a huge crushing force sustained to the abdomen. Certainly, I would say, enough to cause death – although it is possible that she had already been fatally injured at that point. Needless to say . . .’

Gary hung his head and stared into his filthy hands.

‘. . . it was likely to be the result of the wheels rolling over her, and simple physics tells us what that kind of enormous pressure will exert on soft tissue. Her diaphragm would have ruptured and her oesophagus would have compressed a little, but intestines are extremely plastic. The first time you witness intestines expelled through the mouth, well, it’s certainly weird but with the forces involved, not as improbable as it would seem.’

Goodhew had his hand raised, willing Strickland to stop. He’d understood as soon as Strickland had mentioned
simple physics
. It was Strickland’s favourite phrase when he wanted to demonstrate the frailty of the human body.

But Strickland had continued with his explanation, while Goodhew pumped hand-sanitizer on to his palms, and tried to expunge the feeling of raw intestines against his skin.

Three years on and it was a memory he had never chosen to revisit, until forced on him now by the realization that he had ended up face to face with Rosie Brett’s little sister and the remains of the family home. Until then the memory had been lodged in the part of his brain called forget-it-ever-happened.

Goodhew’s dinner was virtually untouched, but Bryn was gone and in his place sat Gully.

‘I’ve only been here a couple of minutes,’ she began. ‘Bryn rang me because he was worried.’

‘Really?’

‘I don’t know why you’re surprised. You didn’t even see him leave or me arrive. He made a good call. He said you’d become totally vacant, like you weren’t here at all.’

‘No, I was just thinking.’

‘Bollocks, it was more than that. I just saw it, remember? Most of us don’t go that far away, even when we’re on annual leave.’

Goodhew managed to smile. Gully was a good antidote to self-pity.

He went over to the bar and returned with a pint of lager and a large glass of Bacardi and lemonade. ‘Cheers,’ he said. He leaned forward, lowering his voice. ‘Libby Brett’s brother and sister both killed themselves.’

‘Yes, I know. I found that out this afternoon when I went to visit her course tutor. I thought he might be in a good position to arrange some extra support.’