One wrong turn, p.17
One Wrong Turn, page 17
Almost.
Just the whisper of the tyres on the wet road and an ominous groaning, creaking sound.
The lights on the dash blinked and stuttered.
‘Shit!’ Paul said.
He was wrestling with the wheel. Stamping uselessly on the accelerator. Looking wildly through the windscreen and then twisting the key in the ignition to no effect.
‘What is it?’ the woman in the back demanded.
But Samantha already knew.
It wasn’t a trick or a stunt or an escape attempt Paul was making.
The engine had cut out.
It had just stopped.
The same way it had stopped earlier today, although this time the dashboard lights had flickered back on. The headlamps appeared to be working.
‘I don’t know,’ Paul said. ‘We’ve lost engine power. The steering’s gone heavy.’
‘Are you messing with me?’
‘No! We’re breaking down.’
47
‘You wouldn’t have been involved in this, otherwise,’ Paul told me.
I stared at him without saying anything, a wave of nausea crashing over me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this. I didn’t know if I could stand it.
‘You. Ben.’ His voice became a rasp. ‘That guy at the petrol station. None of it would have happened if we hadn’t broken down.’
That guy.
He’d beaten Gary to a pulp. He’d crushed his skull with a brick.
‘Everything would be different.’
He was talking in an odd monotone, gaping down at the gun in his hand, as if he couldn’t quite understand how he’d ended up holding it. As if his entire life had been one long sequence of freak coincidences, unforeseen consequences and bad luck that had led him here, to this moment, where he’d crossed paths with Collette and his fate had been set.
‘Samantha wouldn’t be back there.’ He rotated his head on his shoulders and stared miserably out of the rear window. ‘I wouldn’t have left her on her own.’
‘Oh, please.’ Collette tutted. ‘Enough with the self-pity, am I right, Abi?’
I looked frontwards again, not wanting to engage with Collette, wary of giving her another opening to mess with me.
Dimly, I became aware of two bright red beacons in the distance up ahead. The rear-light clusters of another car glowing in the murk.
That’s when it hit me.
The fog was dissipating and my headlights were penetrating further. I could see more of the road.
More of everything.
My head seemed to buzz with a dizzying clarity.
Paul’s wife.
They’d told me she was hurt and that she’d needed the hospital. And how long ago had that been?
My heart clenched as my eyes arrowed to the dashboard clock.
00:43
I’d picked them up at around twenty past eleven.
Well over an hour ago.
I felt a cramping in my stomach as I remembered how I’d tried and failed to save Gary. It could only have taken minutes from when Paul had assaulted him to when he’d died.
I turned to Paul again, seeing how his attention remained on the rear window, the pained and faraway look in his eyes.
When Ben and I had stopped in that lay-by, we must have been so close to his wife. Just metres away.
Had she heard us? Tried to call to us?
My throat closed up.
‘You said she was hurt,’ I said, barely able to force the words out.
‘What’s that?’ Collette asked.
‘Paul’s wife. You said she needed the hospital.’
‘Did we say hurt? Oh, I’m sorry. We should have said dead.’
48
Ben
Ben reached in through the shattered driver’s window of the Mercedes and fumbled for the button to release the central locking. His hand hopped with adrenaline. His intestines contracted and twisted.
The car’s alarm was screeching and wailing. It was blisteringly loud. The savage pitch aggravated his head injury, making it feel as if someone was driving a spike into his temple, jiggling it around.
He’d flailed backwards and fallen when his torchlight had first revealed the woman inside the car. One heel had caught on something, his foot had slipped from under him, and he’d crashed down onto his backside, hard.
His head had strobed with a white-hot flash of pain. For a second, he’d thought he might pass out again. Breathing became difficult. His heart had leapt and banged against his ribs.
He didn’t know how long he’d stayed there. Maybe a minute. Perhaps longer.
But his fears had been immediate and terrible. His scream seemed to echo on inside his mind.
Would Abi end up the same way?
Who were Paul and Samantha, really?
And then he’d pushed himself up off the ground, the cold gravel digging into his palms, and he’d staggered back to the window and peered inside again.
At the same awful scene.
The same shocking brutality.
Until he’d stepped back and looked off into the fog, desperate for someone else to come along, anyone to come along, knowing all the while it was unlikely to happen, that he was the only one here.
His heart ached, but he’d come here for a reason. A way to find Abi.
He had to get inside.
Which had taken him longer than he’d anticipated. He’d tried thumping the base of the multitool against the window glass, but the only thing that had cracked was the plastic casing of the tool. He’d stepped back and kicked out with the flat of his training shoe, but the glass had flexed and held, and he was worried that if he kicked any harder it might shatter, and he could cut his lower leg to ribbons. Then he’d cast the torch of the multitool around on the ground before jogging over to the drainage gully at the side of the lay-by, where he’d plunged his hand into an icy puddle, moving it around until he’d clasped a rock.
The rock was about the size of his fist. It was weighty and sharp and angular. He’d run back to the window with it, where he’d raised it above his shoulder before bringing it down hard.
With the first blow, the glass had crunched around the impact point in a tight, contained circle, the car had rocked, and the alarm had begun to screech. He’d struck out again and again, weakening the surrounding glass and then punching a tiny hole in the centre. With even more blows he’d widened the hole, and then he’d poked and prodded at the radiating fragments of glass with the pointed edges of the rock.
Now, with his face pressed to the metal paintwork of the car and his arm stretching painfully through the jagged hole in the window, his fingers grazed the toggle switch and he pressed it, barely able to hear the locks disengage over the piercing shriek of the alarm.
Opening the door, he stared into the din and the horror as an interior light came on, exposing the harrowing scene.
The woman was slumped against her seat belt, her body twisted awkwardly to one side and horribly still. Her hair concealed her face. There was blood on her hands, in her lap, on the windscreen. A charred, chemical scent laced the air.
Ben swallowed thickly, then reached further inside, being careful of the glass and the blood. He stretched until he touched the woman’s neck. She didn’t stir, or move, or react in the slightest. She was faintly warm, but the only pulse Ben could feel was the one that was jumping in his own fingertips.
49
Dead.
The word reverberated in my mind.
Suddenly, everything was worse again.
Collette sounded so calm. So eerily unfazed. I didn’t think it was an act. I was starting to understand that Collette at her core was colder and much more calculating than I could possibly have imagined.
Paul moaned and looked up at the roof of the car, then whined in the back of his throat, hugging himself with his free arm. His face was drawn and etched with despair.
‘Is that true?’
I didn’t know why I asked him that. I could tell it was true from his agonized response. And Collette’s tone had left no room for doubt.
Dead.
My mind raced.
I seriously doubted it had been an accident. Not based on how things had gone tonight.
Had Paul killed his wife, or was it Collette? What exactly was binding the two of them together? What the fuck was going on?
My car swayed and wobbled. I’d unintentionally jerked my hands on the steering wheel. They were adhering to the faux-leather as my sweat mingled with the remnants of Gary’s blood.
A shudder ran through me.
Then I thought of Ben again, and a dart of pain pierced my chest. I felt so alone, so lost and broken.
The engine note droned, the night air blustered by. There was barely any wind outside, but it felt as if I was driving into a storm.
Everything had tilted.
Paul had the gun, but he was no longer the one in control.
My mind flashed back to his odd behaviour early on at the petrol station, before he’d shot Ben. When we’d first approached the shop, he’d seemed jittery and on edge. He’d been distracted when he’d asked Gary for nappies instead of formula and wipes. Then he’d acted fidgety and furtive when I’d gone into the toilets. And afterwards, outside, he’d been sweating, pensive.
Distressed.
A lot like he was acting now.
Wait.
I’d bumped on something. It was something to do with those first fraught seconds after I’d found Gary’s body, when Paul had held his gun on me in the stark glare of the security lamp.
As my heart raced, and my pulse beat behind my eyes, I tried to replay it in my mind, but it wouldn’t come to me. There was something that didn’t quite fit, and then it was gone.
Concentrate.
I rewound a bit more, thinking of the argument Ben and I had witnessed between Paul and Collette in the back of my car. Had we misunderstood what we’d seen? At the time, we hadn’t been able to see Collette’s face. We’d assumed she’d been scared and intimidated by Paul. But perhaps we’d been wrong about that. Perhaps she’d been the one doing the intimidating.
Then another connection struck me, ripping through my body with a crackling jolt.
The text message Collette had sent Paul when we’d arrived at the petrol station. At first, I’d assumed it had been about us. Then it had seemed as if it had been a prompt to get Paul to pay for our fuel.
But what if it hadn’t been either of those things? What if it had been an instruction? Or a threat?
Because of the cameras, maybe? Because one or both of them had murdered Paul’s wife not long before and they hadn’t wanted to be recorded?
It was Collette who’d repeatedly declined to get out of my car. It was Collette whom Ben had seen concealing her face with her hand. And it was Paul, not Collette, who’d got out of my car and gone into the shop, where it seemed likely that he’d confronted Gary and forced him to cut the recordings and erase the footage before killing him with the brick and returning to argue with Collette and . . .
There it was again. The niggling feeling that I was missing something. It was something about Paul and his attack on Gary and the moments that had come afterwards.
‘There’s a roundabout coming up,’ Collette said. ‘Slow down and take the exit for Plymouth and Liskeard.’
Outside in the dark, my headlights illuminated a large green road sign with a graphic of the upcoming roundabout on it. I braked, and shifted down through my gears, then flicked on my indicators, glancing at my hand as I did so.
Oh.
My head pounded. The temperature in the car seemed to plunge by about ten degrees.
I entered and exited the roundabout, fear lighting up my nerves as I began to accelerate along a dual carriageway, the car wobbling and rattling as I changed back up through the gears, painfully conscious of Collette sitting so close behind me.
I returned my hand to the steering wheel for a second, staring at it. I lifted my sticky fingers from the steering wheel and placed them back down again, one after the other.
Then I reached up very quickly and flicked on the map light.
And immediately looked at Paul’s hands.
‘What are you doing?’ Collette demanded.
I didn’t answer her.
I was horrified.
It felt for a moment as if a bucket of iced water had been dumped over my head.
‘Turn that light off.’
A sickly tremor started inside me, radiating out to my extremities. My hands shimmered in the wan glow of the interior light. They shimmered because of the sticky film of blood that was adhered to them. The blood from when I’d tried to resuscitate Gary.
But there was barely any blood on Paul’s hands. There was none on the hand that he was holding the gun with, anyway. His dominant hand, probably. The one he’d held the gun in when he’d shot Ben. The one he would have used to bludgeon someone with a brick.
And there was only a small amount of blood on the hand he was hugging himself with. Enough, maybe, to have smudged off from my own hand when he’d grabbed for my fingers and bent them back before letting go. Or when he’d manhandled me back at the petrol station.
‘Fine,’ Collette snapped. ‘I’ll turn it off my damn self, shall I?’
She lunged past my shoulder and flipped off the light with her unbandaged hand, returning us to near-darkness.
I blinked, and the darkness seemed to envelop my heart.
Ben, I need you. Ben, I wish you were with me right now.
There were smears of blood on the backs of Collette’s knuckles. There was blood under her fingernails, too.
50
‘Drive faster,’ Collette told me.
My ears were ringing. Her voice sounded warped and strange.
My body was locked with panic.
The blood could have come from her injured hand, but what if it hadn’t? Was it possible that she could have been the one who’d killed Gary? Truly possible?
Right now, I wouldn’t put anything past her, but I had no idea if there had been enough time for her to kill Gary between when I’d last seen her in my car before I’d headed into the ladies’ toilets, and when I’d emerged to see her arguing inside the car with Paul.
Maybe there had been.
Possibly.
I looked at Paul again, seeing how much he was suffering and how distraught he appeared. I knew I needed to protect myself and my unborn baby. I knew I needed to survive this, somehow. I couldn’t tell which one of them I should be more afraid of right now.
What was it he’d said when I’d first found Gary?
It was an accident . . . I didn’t have a choice . . .
A choice.
At the time, I’d been sure he’d been talking about killing Gary. But maybe that hadn’t been what he’d been talking about. Or not really. Maybe what he’d been talking about was his involvement in making Gary delete the security footage and getting him outside where he could be attacked by Collette.
Oh, God.
Collette had told me she’d manipulated Paul, just as she’d manipulated me.
But Paul had shot Ben. I’d watched him do it. I’d tried to stop him and he’d shot Ben anyway. It was hard not to believe Ben was dead because of him.
Except . . .
Something terrible occurred to me.
Something that ripped the air from my lungs.
He shot Ben after Ben ran. And Ben only ran because I told him to.
And I hadn’t just told him. I’d yelled at him, screaming it at the top of my lungs.
Me.
A mixture of guilt and horror rippled through me.
If I hadn’t shouted at Ben, he’d be in my car with me now. It was my fault.
But not entirely.
Paul had still pulled the trigger.
Even if he hadn’t wanted to, he’d done it.
But why? With his wife already dead, what possible leverage could Collette have over Paul that—
I stopped, a dreadful fear engulfing me.
Then I whipped my head around and looked over my shoulder at the empty baby car seat.
51
Ben
Ben’s throat constricted as he flicked his torch beam across the scatter of baby things on the back seat of the Mercedes. A pack of nappies, some wipes, a cuddly bunny and a padded book, plus a dozen bottles of pre-packaged formula milk.
The thumping pain in his head reached a dizzying crescendo and he put out a hand to steady himself.
There was a baby, somewhere, but there was no telling where the baby was now.
His nerves were jumping. The car alarm was wailing and screeching. It felt as if the calamitous noise had crawled inside his skull, thrashing to get out. The swelling above his left eye was now so severe and puckered that he could barely see out of it. And what he could see with his right eye was terrible.
It looked as if the woman who was dead just metres from him had been shot.
Abi.
The panic was so enormous it suffocated him. He’d already searched the driver’s side of the car and it had been a crushing disappointment. There’d only been litter and an empty drinks bottle in the pocket of the driver’s door. He’d found nothing other than a sticker for the hire car company on the reverse of the sun visor, together with an unwanted glimpse of the angry bruising to his face in the mirror that he’d slid open. The central cubby had been completely empty. No paperwork or hire car agreement. Not even a stub for a car parking ticket.
He’d been unable to open the boot in the conventional way from the outside because the latch wouldn’t release. A security precaution, probably, because Ben had broken into the Mercedes rather than unlocking it with a key. But now he found that he could flip down the rear seats and search the boot cavity behind them.
Where he discovered more baby things. A blanket. A folded buggy. And a mid-sized fabric suitcase.
Please have something useful inside.
Ben lunged and grappled with the handle of the case, dragging it out past the buggy, unzipping it in a hurry on the back seat. But all he found was a pile of clothing in disarray. There was a mix of men’s and women’s garments, as well as several Babygros, some muslin cloths and a tiny woollen hat. There was another compartment in the lid of the case, but it contained only washbags and more nappies.
