They walked slowly along the side closer to the river, scanning for indications that a car had gone over the edge and down the slope. The water ran twenty feet or so below the level of the road at this stretch, at the foot of a steep banking.
‘No crash barrier,’ Rodriguez noted. ‘Is that not a bit remiss if it’s a known blackspot?’
‘The previous casualties haven’t been people going off the road. It’s eejits smacking head-on into oncoming vehicles because they’ve misjudged the bend, or more commonly round here, they’re trying to overtake in a completely inappropriate place. Wait till you’ve been here a while, you’ll see: some of them act as though they’ve got radar.’
Rodriguez kept crouching low to the ground, running one hand along the top of the grass, the other training his torch a few feet in front of him. Ali was pointing hers down towards the water. The beam picked out tufts and bushes before the flat blackness. It didn’t shimmer so much here: it was slow and deep.
‘Got tread marks, I think,’ Rodriguez announced. ‘The grass is flattened here.’
Ali pointed her torch where he was indicating, and then a few feet along. There was a second indentation, around six inches wide.
‘Looks parallel,’ she said.
They proceeded cautiously, picking out every step with care under the beams of both their flashlights. The indentations were sporadic, vanishing and then resuming again, sometimes visible on one side, sometimes the other, but always the same distance apart.
Ali stopped Rodriguez a few yards from the edge. They played their torches down the rest of the slope, picking out where their progress ended.
‘Shit. I’m going to be popular.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’ll need to scramble a helicopter to search along the river, and we’ll have to call out a diving team as well. There’s no choice, but I’m about to put a big hole in the budget for nothing. It’s what, quarter past three now? That call went out at about two forty-five. Anybody who went into that freezing water half an hour ago and didn’t come straight back out is already dead.’