by Keith Dixon
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
UTTER QUIET. I looked across at Laura but she was silent too, leaning back in her seat. I spoke her name—no reply. I put a finger on her neck to check she had a pulse. Then I climbed out of the car and struggled on to the grass verge, which was slick with moisture. I stood for a moment and breathed deeply while cars swept past on the carriageway, unaware of the collision they’d narrowly missed.
No signal on my mobile phone. I tried to wake Laura again but she was out cold. I got my bearings. Towards my left the lights of Chester lit up the sky with an orange glow. To my right, the road headed off into darkness lit only by receding tail lights. I set off towards the city, trudging through the long grass of the verge and stumbling on the series of small hummocks and holes that pocked its surface. Around me I heard the distant noise of a city at night, together with the roar of cars speeding past on their way to celebrations and the occasional honk of a car horn on the ring-road.
After a hundred and fifty yards I came to a Little Chef that was set back from the road and barely visible until you reached it. It was a neon oasis in the frosty night. I walked in, noticing, stupidly, that inside the door there was a wicker basket full of complimentary copies of the Daily Mail. In the main room there were a dozen or so wooden tables, but there were only three people in the whole place to occupy them. They all looked up at me as if I’d entered their private worlds of sorrow. A perky junior with a red cap slid in front of me. ‘How many?’ she said.
‘Can I use your phone? There’s been an accident.’
‘Oh—okay. It’s over there.’
She pointed across the seating area and I mutely followed the direction of her arm. I rang 999 and when it was answered I said I wanted an ambulance and the police and probably the fire service, though there wasn’t a fire involved.
‘A car tried to run us off the road,’ I said. ‘It didn’t try. It succeeded. I think my partner is hurt. Actually, she is hurt, but I don’t know how badly.’
I gave directions, then hung up. When I turned round the young girl with the red cap was looking up at me with the tiniest of furrows on her freckled face.
‘Sir?’ she said. ‘I think you’re bleeding.’
She pointed down to the maroon carpet, where a small puddle of bright red was accumulating, dripping from my left hand. She was experienced enough in the world of catering to know that it wasn’t ketchup.
Within fifteen minutes an ambulance arrived, followed almost immediately by two police cars. I’d tried to release Laura from her seat-belt but in the end thought it best that professionals do it. A piece of Laura’s passenger window had cut my hand when I climbed out of the car, but it was so cold and my adrenaline so high that I hadn’t noticed. Laura had been knocked unconscious, had woken up, but then passed out again. At the moment she was conscious but very subdued. She had some scratches on the side of her face, and a lap full of window glass, but I couldn’t see what other injuries she might have suffered.
The paramedics scrambled into the car and began talking to Laura in quiet voices. Two policemen approached me.
‘Do a breath test on me,’ I said. ‘I want it on record that I hadn’t had anything to drink. We were deliberately pushed off the road by another driver.’
One of the policemen looked ten years older than his companion and he took charge. He breath-tested me and spoke to me for a few minutes, staring into my face and trying to tell whether I was suffering from concussion or under the influence of drugs. I described briefly what had happened.
Other officers had begun to take charge of the queuing road traffic, laying out cones and putting their cars at an angle across the road to direct oncoming vehicles around the incident. One of the para-medics finally managed to undo the safety-belt and forming a human chain they lifted Laura out of the car, head-first. A stretcher was waiting, and after replacing her Burberry scarf with a neck-brace, they began to carry her towards the gaping doors of the ambulance. I went to watch them carry her in.
Laura saw me standing there and smiled. Then she lifted a frail finger and pointed it at me: ‘You’re fired,’ she whispered.
The ambulance doors slammed shut.
