Sound returned first. Gradually, Kincaid became aware of creaks and groans, like metal protesting, and then a sort of rhythmic ticking.
Smell came next. Burning rubber. Hot metal. Petrol.
His eyes flew open. At first the darkness seemed absolute. Then, as he began to make out shapes, nothing he saw made sense. When he tried to move, his head spun and a wave of nausea hit him.
Something warm trickled into his eye. Blinking, he reached down to touch his face—down, not up.
His orientation came back with a jarring click. He was upside down. What the hell had happened?
This time he moved more gingerly. Pain in his shoulder, a twinge of pain across his ribs. Seat belt. He was hanging upside down from his shoulder harness.
A flash of memory came. Lights. Bright lights on his left.
Shit. He must have been hit.
Take it easy, he told himself, stifling panic. Assess the situation.
Cautiously, he turned his head to the left, trying to focus. In the dimness he could make out a mass of metal and glass where the seat should have been. The passenger door.
“Shit.” This time he managed to whisper it. He touched the collapsed remains of his airbag, thinking it had probably saved his life. From somewhere behind him came a strobe of light, then he heard a car door slam. A voice called out.
The smell of petrol grew stronger. His heart thudded. Bloody hell, the engine. Reaching up, he felt for the ignition and turned the key. He had to get out of the car.
Inching his right hand upwards, he felt for the door latch. There. When he pulled it, there was a satisfying thunk. Good. Not jammed. He pushed the door outwards a few inches, exhaling with relief when it seemed to move freely. Another foot and it stopped, caught, he thought, on a slight rise in the ground. Still, it was enough.
He took a breath, wincing at the pain in his ribs, then, bracing his right hand against the roof, he unbuckled the seat belt with his left. He eased his shoulders through the open door, then slithered out and back until he was free of the car.
Panting from the effort, he used the door to lever himself up until he stood, facing the bonnet. The glare from his own headlamps shone into impenetrable blackness, disorienting him. Slowly, using the door as a support against the dizziness, he turned, blinking against more lights. It took him a moment to understand that he was seeing the headlamps from two cars. The first was nose in to the hedge that bordered the verge. When he blinked against the glare, he could see that the vehicle’s front end was crumpled like a child’s smashed toy.
Behind that car, another stood at a slight angle to the road, its headlamps illuminating the wrecked vehicle—the car that had hit him, he realized, with a shock that made him grip the door a little harder. A figure moved, blocking the light momentarily.
“Sir, are you okay?” It was the woman’s voice he’d heard before he climbed out of the car.
“I think so,” he managed, his voice cracking. Clearing his throat, he tried again. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Anyone else in the car?”
“No.” Thank God, he thought .
“Okay, good. Hang on. I’m ringing for help.” Her voice was calm, assured, but still he heard the tension beneath the words.
No one had emerged from the other car.
Fingers touching the underside of the Astra, he made his way to the end of the boot, then he stepped out towards the wrecked car, feeling his way across the uneven ground. The woman, who had knelt by the driver’s-side door of the wreck, stood.
“Hey,” she called. “You need to stay put.”
“I can help.”
As he drew nearer, he saw that she was dressed in a cardigan over what looked like hospital scrubs.
“I’m a police officer,” he said. “Is anyone hurt? I think that car hit me.”
He blinked as she shone a torch in his face.
“You’re bleeding.”
“It’s a surface cut. I’m fine.” He tried not to wince as pain shot through his ribs.
She looked back at the car against the hedge, seemed to hesitate. “Okay, look. I need to walk up the road to get a good signal. Can you just talk to this lady here while I do that?”
Kincaid nodded, then, realizing she probably couldn’t see the gesture, said, “Don’t worry. I’ve got it.”
After an instant’s pause, the woman started towards the road. “Right,” she threw over her shoulder. “You know what to do.”
Crossing the last few feet to the driver’s door, he realized there was no sound from the car’s engine. Had the Samaritan reached in and turned it off? Carefully, Kincaid lowered himself into a squat, wincing as pain shot through his knee. Touching the car for support, he peered into the driver’s window.
A glance told him that the airbag had deployed and collapsed. And that the impact with his car had crumpled the front end of the small saloon into the car’s interior. The driver was trapped. And she was conscious.
She turned her head towards him and whispered something he didn’t understand.
“Help’s coming,” he said. “You’re going to be fine.”
Now he saw that there was a passenger beside her. A man. And he wasn’t moving.
“I—” Her voice was a thread of sound now. She lifted her hand, reaching towards him, and he took it gently. Her fingers felt small in his, and warm. He thought her short hair was light in color, but he couldn’t tell more in the dim light. She moved, as if to struggle.
“Shh.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “Stay still. Are you in pain?”
She blinked, looking puzzled. “No. I—I don’t know. Will you stay . . . with me?”
“Of course I will. We’ll have you out of there in a tick, don’t you worry.” It was going to take the fire brigade, he thought, and probably the Jaws of Life. How long before they arrived? He caught the coppery scent of blood. “Just hang on,” he said, as reassuringly as he could.
“I—” Her fingers moved in his. “I didn’t mean . . .” Her voice faded and he thought, even in the dim light, that her skin had lost color.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “It was an accident.” He thought he heard sirens in the distance.
“No.” The woman turned her head until she could meet his gaze. “I didn’t . . . He was . . .” Her fingers tightened in his. “Please,” she whispered. “Tell them he—” And then the light went out in her eyes.
Viv knelt on the kitchen floor, chasing down slippery fingers of peeled potato with shaking hands. She’d dropped the pan of hand-cut chips destined for the deep fryer.
“Here, let me help,” said Angelica, squatting beside her and reaching for the pan.
“No.” Viv shook her head. “Can you do more chips? We’ve got to get them on or we’ll fall behind.” The hand-cut chips were one of the pub’s signature dishes and the orders for fish and chips and steak frites would be piling up. It was Angelica, the line cook, who ordinarily prepped them before service.
“Okay. But how about you take a smoke break.” It was a joke; a weak one. Viv didn’t allow anyone who smoked to work in back or front of house, much less smoke out in the yard.
Viv chased down the last potato and stood, dumping the lot in the bin.
Ibby, her sous-chef, gave her a cold look as he squeezed past her with two starters of gravlax and horseradish cream. “We’re already in the weeds. What were you thinking, letting that wanker in the kitchen?”
“I didn’t let—” Viv stopped, pressing her lips together. There was no point in arguing with Ibby—Ibby, whose ever-present sense of grievance kept him from being the chef his cooking skills justified. “Just get on with it,” she said.
His muttered, “Yes, Chef,” as he set the plates on the pass was sullen, and she thought that she might actually, finally, fire him. But he was right. What had she been thinking?
She’d taken a breath and turned back to the pies puffing up in the oven, when Bea came in from the bar, her face flushed.
“What the hell happened in here?” Bea hissed. “Sarah says you had a row and half the restaurant heard it. And the tickets are piling up.”
Viv met Bea’s gaze. “Where is he? Is he still out there?”
“No. But he’s left his coat.”
Panic seized Viv. “Grace. Where’s Grace?”
“She’s watching telly in the cottage. I just checked on her.”
Viv’s hands shook with relief. “Good. I just didn’t want—” She broke off as Jack came through from the bar.
The tiny kitchen was suddenly much too hot and filled with far too many bodies. “What the hell are you playing at, Viv?” Jack snapped his bar towel like a bullfighter throwing down a challenge. “Who the hell was that, swanning about the place all day in his poncey hat?”
They all stared at her. Waiting, for different reasons, to hear what she would say.
Finally, Viv spoke to Jack. “Fergus. Fergus O’Reilly. The chef. He was my chef, a long time ago.”
Kincaid had shaken the driver, gently at first, then more forcefully. When there was no response, he’d shouted for the woman with the mobile phone.
“I think she’s stopped breathing,” he said when she reached him.
She deftly moved him aside. Feeling for the pulse in the driver’s neck, she shook her head. “Bloody hell. I can’t get to her, and I don’t have any equipment.”
The sirens grew louder. “We’ll have to wait for the ambulance.”
“But she—she was just talking to me. And what about him?” He gestured towards the passenger.
The woman shook her head. “He wasn’t belted in. I’d guess his head hit the windscreen.”
Kincaid looked at the driver again, and he knew that she was too still, much too still. A wave of dizziness hit him.
He must have swayed, because the next thing he knew he was sitting on the ground and the woman was steadying him with one hand while shining a torch in his eyes with the other. “You may be concussed,” she said. “You’ve got a lump the size of a goose egg. Don’t move.”
The siren had grown deafening. Headlamps threw the woman’s face into profile. She was about Gemma’s age, with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. Then the siren’s wail stopped. Doors slammed, voices shouted. The woman left him. He stayed where he was, frozen, as the action flowed round him.
A boulder, he thought woozily. He might as well be a boulder in a stream. The water was so cold. Not water, he realized, but ground. The cold was seeping through his trousers. The night had turned chill. Why, he wondered, had the woman in the car had her window down? He was shivering now, his teeth beginning to chatter.
The woman came back to him, throwing a rough blanket over his shoulders. “Can you stand if I help you?”
Kincaid started to nod, then quickly thought better of it. She steadied him as he pushed himself up, then she supported him across the rough ground of the verge to her car. Opening the door, she eased him down onto the seat, examining his head in the light of the dome lamp. “You’ve got a good cut there, and one on your cheek, but the bleeding’s let up. What else hurts?”
“Ribs,” he managed with a grimace. “And my hand,” he added with surprise, glancing down at his right hand. He could see bruising, and the beginning of swelling. “Why didn’t I feel it?”
“Shock.” She reached into the footwell and drew something out of a bag. “I keep a thermos in the car for the drive home.” She unscrewed the cap and filled it. “Here. Drink up.”
Kincaid took it left-handed, with shaking fingers. It was coffee, hot and milky. A few sips stopped his teeth chattering. He could see the ambulance crew moving round the wrecked car, their yellow safety jackets gleaming in the light of the flares they’d laid.
“The woman,” he said. “The driver—”
His helper was shaking her head. “Nothing they could do. It’s going to be a job to get both of them out. I can’t imagine what happened. She always seemed such a careful person.”
“You knew her?”
“Oh, not well. But I recognized her. Nell Greene. She was an administrator at my base hospital. In Cheltenham. A nice woman, but she left under some sort of cloud.”
Nell, Kincaid thought. He wished he’d known. He kept hearing her voice, entreating him.
One of the yellow jackets loomed nearer. The woman, who’d been squatting beside the open car door, rose and spoke to him, their voices drifting down to Kincaid.
“Dead,” the man said.
His companion gave him a puzzled look. “What are you talking about? We know they’re dead.”
“No. I mean the bloke in the passenger seat. There was barely a trickle from that head wound. I’d swear he was already bloody dead when the car crashed.”
The woman in scrubs, he learned, was called Tracey, Tracey Woodman, and she’d been on her way home from an ambulance shift out of Cheltenham.
“I was only a half mile behind you,” she told him. “I heard the crash.” Her shoulders twitched in an involuntary shudder. “There’s nothing else sounds like that. I feared the worst.” She glanced down at him. “You were lucky.”
One of the ambulance crew called to her and, after telling Kincaid firmly to stay put, she walked away. The police arrived shortly after, first one panda car, then a second. The fire brigade was not far behind. Kincaid watched as the police and the firefighters conferred with the medics, set flares across the road to redirect traffic, then began setting up a cordon round the accident scene. Used to being in charge, he felt oddly helpless. It was only when an officer came over to speak to him that he realized he not only had no transportation, he had no means of communication. His mobile had been on the car seat.
“My mobile phone,” he said. “Did anyone find it?”
The officer, whose name badge read hawkins, shook his head. “No joy, I’m afraid. You’ll have to wait for the scene investigators to finish, and while I’m sure they’ll do their best, that won’t be anytime soon.” Hawkins took Kincaid’s details, raising his eyebrows at Kincaid’s rank. Kincaid at least had identification. His driving license and warrant card were still in his jacket pocket. He winced as he drew them out. His hand was throbbing and every breath brought a stabbing pain in his ribs.
“And what were you doing here? Sir,” Hawkins added hastily.
“Meeting my wife. We’re visiting friends for the weekend. At Beck House.”
This garnered another raised eyebrow. “Just so we can contact you, sir. And we’ll need a blood draw before you leave the scene. You’ll need to come into the station at Cheltenham to make a full statement tomorrow.”
He’d thought about asking if he could borrow the officer’s phone to ring Gemma when Tracey Woodman returned. “When they’re finished with you, I’d be happy to give you a lift.”
Kincaid accepted gratefully.
Woodman examined him, frowning. “You’ll need that cut on your forehead stitched.”
He shook his head, suddenly feeling exhausted. “Not tonight.”
“Then let me at least clean you up a bit, after they stick you.” Leading him over to the ambulance, she sat him on the tailgate, where one of the ambulance medics took a blood sample and labeled it. Then Woodman swabbed gently at the cut in his hairline, finishing with some strips of tape. “There. You’re going to look quite rakish, even once it’s stitched. Downright piratical.”
“My kids will be impressed.” He managed a smile. “Not to mention my wife. Once she gets over killing me for worrying her. I’m hours late, and I lost my mobile in the crash.”
“Do you want to use mine to ring her?”
Kincaid thought, then shook his head, gingerly. “It’s not far, I don’t think. Better I tell her in person. It’s Beck House, near Upper Slaughter.”
Woodman whistled. “The Talbot place? You do move in fine company. You know,” she added as they walked back to her car, “I think I heard at the hospital that Nell Greene had retired to one of the Slaughters. Inherited a cottage or something. We should all be so lucky.” She glanced at the mangled remains of Nell Greene’s little car and shrugged. “Or maybe not.”