Forty minutes later PC Gethin Roberts arrived. She liked the young PC, his gawky manner, his huge feet, his obvious pride in the job only equalled by his ability to introduce the subject of his adored Flora into every conversation, though not so much recently, she’d noticed. Roberts was an endearing sort of fellow, an oversized, clumsy, Some-Mothers-Do-’Ave-’Em sort of guy, always bumping into things, knocking his head, stubbing the great toe on the end of his size elevens. But lately, even Alex had commented, as PC Gary Coleman had become increasingly excited over his impending nuptials, Roberts had done the opposite. Something of his spark seemed to have been extinguished. The bouncy exuberance that had marked him out had all but abandoned him, but she didn’t know why.
She glanced across at the young officer’s face. ‘You all right, Roberts?’
He nodded, didn’t look at her, his face set and focusing hard on the road ahead. He wasn’t talking so she changed subjects, putting forward one of her weaker theories. ‘Do you think it’s possible Ms Marconi couldn’t sleep, went for a drive, was distracted?’
He still kept his eyes on the road, hands steady on the wheel, frowned and shook his head. ‘Not a chance, Mrs Gunn.’
‘And you say further checks on the car turned up nothing? Brakes OK?’
‘Yeah. So far they’ve found nothing wrong with the car.’ He took a swift glance at her, opened his mouth then clamped it shut again.
She would have loved to be able to ask Roberts what the trouble was, but it wouldn’t be appropriate. And he probably wouldn’t confide in her anyway. And now she couldn’t even discuss it with Alex, so she said nothing.
But she continued her musings in silence.
Maybe Flora had dumped him.
Maybe he no longer wanted to get married to her.
Maybe he’d just fallen out of love with her.
Surely not. They were one of those simple couples who meet, fall in love, stay in love, get married, have children, grow old together.
The crash site was a silent ten-minute drive from her office and about the same distance from Gina Marconi’s home. Fifteen if she’d been driving slowly. But according to the one image they had captured on CCTV she had been doing fifty miles an hour even through the centre of the town.
As a few spots of rain leaked out of the sky they reached the spot, still marked nearly a month later. Police warning signs, weathered now, had been erected along with an appeal for witnesses. None had come forward so far except the unlucky Graham Skander. His wall was still reduced to a pile of bricks. Obviously the insurance company hadn’t settled yet.
On a mossy triangle beyond the crash site there was still a bank of flowers, most well past their best, in sodden cellophane wrapping, raindrops looking like tears shed for the dead woman, silky ribbons dirty and sopping wet. Life and flowers do not last. Traffic cones shielded the narrow pavement and the demolished wall behind.
Roberts parked the car in a lay-by fifty yards beyond, switched his blue light to flash and together they walked back to the scene. The pavement was narrow, not wide enough for them to walk side by side, so she went first. The police tape that marked off the area was a flimsy, ineffectual barrier. The wall was ahead of you when you manoeuvred the right-hand bend. She’d forgotten how sharp the corner was, and how the uncompromising wall confronted you. Skid marks were still clearly visible, marked and measured by the crash investigators. Debris also marked the spot: splinters of glass, and silver paint marks on the scattered bricks, even a few dark splashes of blood. There was the usual road kill to the side. A grey squirrel, a blackbird, eyes already picked out by hungry crows. The kerbstone was low. Easy for an out-of-control car to mount. Martha peered over the stones at Graham Skander’s house. Very nice, she thought. Mellow Georgian brick with the pleasing symmetry of the late eighteenth century. And the bricks that lay on the ground looked old too. No wonder he was so angry at it being destroyed again. Had this been her house, she reflected, and her problem, she would have accepted the council’s offer of bollards to protect the wall. But Skander had struck her as a stubborn man.
The car and its driver had come off worse than the wall. It could be rebuilt but not them. Gina and the four-month-old Mercedes had been written off. She looked around carefully, committing the scene to memory. Sometimes visiting the scene of an incident provided answers. At others there was no sense of death or drama. And here? It reflected the Americans’ description of what the English call a ‘car accident’. The Americans call it a ‘car wreck’. At her side, in his clumsy way, Roberts tried to help. ‘She went at it at sixty, Mrs Gunn,’ he said. ‘Straight at it. Never turned the wheel to even try and take the corner. Straight in.’ There was almost a note of admiration in his voice. She turned to look at him, read the bleak unhappiness that made his comical features even more misshapen, his nose appear larger, his eyes droopy and bloodhound-like, his forehead creased with lines of anxiety, his hands great big agitated spatulas by his side. The rain came down harder.
She stood there as the traffic, cautioned by the police signs, crept past, drivers peering nosily out of windscreens now rain-soaked, wiper blades trying to swoosh the water away and give clear visibility. Sometimes the weather matched the mood so perfectly it intensified the emotion. But, in spite of the rain, Martha stood still, trying to transport her mind backwards, trying to insert herself into Gina Marconi’s desperate state, and from there to imagine the scene moments later when the owner of the house and the wall – Mr Graham Skander, retired civil servant – had peered through his curtains, rung the emergency services and, with typical propriety, put his dressing gown on and run outside. So he had been the first to see the scene of devastation, the car crushed and embedded into the wall, the woman collapsed at the wheel, the radiator steaming into the night air. According to his statement the woman had been unresponsive when he had shouted, with dreadful hindsight and cruel irony, ‘Are you all right?’
And yet, Martha realized, it is what we all do. She had once been first on the scene of a fatal accident where an elderly lady had suffered a traumatic amputation of her leg. Her question had been the same: Are you all right? Knowing, hoping, that the woman was already dead rather than suffering.
She’d read Skander’s statement. The police with typical pedantic stoicism had asked Mr Skander whether Gina had made any response, recording his answer with the same stolid literalism. ‘Not a flicker,’ he’d said. And so any explanation Gina might have given had died with her.
But something of the civil servant remained. Graham Skander had not abandoned the dead woman or the crash scene but had waited stoically, not leaving her side for eight long minutes, while police, ambulance and fire engines sliced through the night with flashing blue lights and muted sirens.
Over an hour later, finally freed from the wreckage, Gina had finally been pronounced dead at the scene. Under recent legislation the SIO, quick on the scene even at that unearthly hour, had authorized her removal to the mortuary and on Monday morning Martha had been informed and it had been arranged for the car to be removed on a low loader ready for a forensic inspection. End of story and the beginning of the investigation.
But however hard she focused, closed her eyes and tried to absorb the scene, Martha was no nearer the truth.
She would not find answers here, at this bleak roadside, where bright, beautiful and clever Gina Marconi had died. ‘Come on, Roberts,’ she said, tempted to pat his big, unhappy shoulder, ‘let’s go back to Shrewsbury.’
She headed back to the car, Roberts in her wake. What had she expected anyway, she thought dejectedly. All she had achieved was that every time she travelled along this stretch of road she would remember. And then she stopped in her tracks.
She glanced across at Roberts, who looked, if anything, even more dejected. She had the feeling that he too was glad to abandon the scene. He certainly marched very smartly, holding the car door open for her with a grin that didn’t fool her for a moment. Just before she climbed into the passenger seat she paused, again tempted to ask him what the problem was but, held back by protocol, she climbed in with no more than a nod. Once or twice during the journey home Roberts did glance across, even opening his mouth as though to ask her something or confide in her, but it was only as they turned into the car park of her office that he asked his one and only question.
‘Mrs Gunn,’ he said hesitantly, turning to face her, ‘do you have to be a doctor as well as a lawyer to be a coroner?’
‘These days it’s preferable,’ she responded gently, wondering whether – heavens above – this was the boy’s ambition? If so he had a long way to climb. A levels, medical school, pre-registration trial by sleeplessness.
‘When I started you could be either.’
‘So you’re a doctor?’
‘I am.’
At that he shot out of the car, whisked around and opened the door for her with surprising grace for PC Roberts. Without banging his knees, arms or head.
She thanked him.
Back in her office, a message from DS Paul Talith was waiting for her on her answerphone.