THERE WAS a bang and her head jerked forward. The world fell into a blur, a feeling of movement and noise but nothing making sense, her brain swamped with shock. The world was slowing but vaguely she knew nothing was slowing fast enough. That was when she snapped back into real time, when her instincts scoffed at her sluggish brain and took back control.
Freya Dempsey slammed her foot on the brake pedal and the car screeched to a stop. She took a few seconds to breathe deeply and consider where she was, what had happened and where she should direct her rising anger. She had pulled out on the corner of Siar Road and Kidd Street and some eyeless half-wit had gone straight into the side of her car. It had to be their fault because the shock commanding her system wasn’t willing to move over and make room for guilt. Some idiot had crashed into her and if they weren’t already in great pain she intended to do something about that. Traffic was stopping around her and somewhere in the background a committed moron was leaning on his horn as though it might help.
Freya began to swear loudly and prodigiously in the car, as a woman from Whisper Hill would, and she toned it down to a feral hiss as she stepped out into public, as a woman living in Cnocaid should. Nothing felt painful as she stood up, although she was pretty sure she could whip it up into something chronic should the need to lay it on thick arise. She grimaced at the damage to her car and repeated the look when she spotted what had hit her. Now she could see how expensive it was she decided it was definitely their fault.
A man in a dark blue suit and white shirt was getting out of a black car that would have been gliding luxuriously through the streets of Challaid until it crossed her path. Now the front right was tangled up in itself, the bumper pushed into the wheel arch, and the well-dressed driver was looking at her with the sort of anger that promised trouble before he opened his mouth.
He shouted, “What the hell were you doing? Don’t you even look where you’re going, or are we all just supposed to play dodgems with you?”
It occurred to her that she hadn’t looked carefully because a van had blocked her view, but she shouted back, “Of course I looked. You must have been rocketing up that road like you owned it, thinking you can drive however you want. You’re going to have to pay for the damage you’ve done.”
His mouth hung open for a few seconds before he said, “Have you been on the glue or something? That was your fault, you’ll pay for that.”
Before either of them could spin the argument round in another circle the back door of the heinously expensive saloon car opened and a man got out. He wore a dark gray suit and white shirt with a yellow tie and a long black coat that was open. He had a trim goatee beard and was bald on top, hair shaved short at the sides and wearing gold-rimmed glasses. He couldn’t have been much past forty, Freya guessed, and from the second he stepped out of the car it was clear that he not only owned it, he also owned anything else that caught his fancy.
He didn’t look angry as he walked over to the woman and young man, instead rather amused. Freya Dempsey was thirty-one and boldly attractive in a way that warned you in advance she was more than two handfuls, so whatever trouble you got into with her was your own fault. The owner of the car seemed to have worked all that out by the time he reached her, and he was still smiling.
He said, “I am sorry about that, a terrible accident, no one’s fault.”
Freya said, “Not mine anyway.”
He laughed again, turned to his driver and said, “Will, see if you can get the cars off the road so we don’t block the traffic, and deal with the police when they finally bother to show up, their station’s only up the road. Oh, and if you see who’s been blowing their horn for the last few minutes see if you can stick their steering wheel up their backside and make them spin on it.”
The driver was used to doing what he was told and scurried off, leaving Freya alone with his boss. They stepped onto the busy pavement, ignoring the pedestrians who had stopped to watch the pleasurable spectacle of a minor accident that inconvenienced others but not them.
The smiling man said, “My name’s Harold Sutherland.”
“Oh, wow, so you can afford the repairs.”
The Sutherland family ran the Sutherland Bank, and it wouldn’t be a skip into hyperbole to say the Sutherland Bank had a controlling interest in the city of Challaid, and undue influence over the country of Scotland. The bank often seemed to have its hand on the tiller of the entire economy, and the family who founded it still very carefully controlled it. If you lived in Challaid and your name was Sutherland you had no excuse for not being wealthy, and if you sat on the board of the bank you were probably rich to the extent that counting the zeros on your bank account became a long snooze.
Harold laughed at her bad manners and said, “I suppose so. Can I ask your name?”
“Freya Dempsey.”
“Were you going somewhere important? Perhaps we could call a taxi for you.”
“Nowhere important enough to make me leave my car. You?”
“A meeting, but they’ll wait for me.”
The driver had by now moved both cars to the side of the road so the traffic was moving again, crunching slowly over broken glass. He was tall and broad, still in his twenties but with the sort of downturned mouth that suggested he had a lot to frown about and lines on his forehead that gave an equally negative second opinion. He had a narrow face and thin eyebrows, all a little too angular to be attractive. He glared at Harold as he stalked across to Freya and handed her car keys to her without a word.
He turned to Harold and said, “I’ve called another car; they’ll be here in a minute or two.”
Before another word was said the police arrived and started asking questions of them all, looking to apply blame as quickly as possible. When they heard the Sutherland name the blame rushed with open arms toward Freya, and when an even more extravagant car arrived to help him complete his journey it was all they could do not to take off their jackets to cover the puddle Harold stepped over as he made his way to it. Freya stood on the pavement, abandoned by everyone, including the police who had independently decided not to care about her a millisecond after Harold Sutherland suggested she had done nothing wrong and they should leave her be. All she could do was stand on Kidd Street, shops and shoppers on either side of the road, and wait by her battered car for the tow truck to arrive.