And then, suddenly, I was screaming — “No! oh, Christ, no!” — and I scrambled for the switches, desperately trying to cut the lights. My flailing hand hit the right one, and they went out. I heard the Ford’s tires bite, saw the flash of brake lights, the sickening slide as the brakes locked. On that icy road with its wicked, wrong-way camber there was no second chance. The truck went spinning backwards over the right hand verge, headlights sweeping across my own wildly staring eyes.
And as I braked, fiercely, not caring, I saw those headlights swing almost lazily across the night sky. The Ford rolled once, slowly, bounced high. It landed on its wheels and careened down the slope, plowing into the pines with a distant tinkle of glass and the crackle of splintering timber.
Silence.
I sat, gripping the wheel, staring numbly into the blackness.
It had worked perfectly. Yet I felt physically sick, because I couldn’t blot out what I had seen before I slapped the switches the second time, finally extinguishing those deadly lights. And I knew I had to do something. Down there in the stillness, a life could be seeping away into the soft pine needles.
So I pulled the hand brake on and climbed out of the truck and the cold hit me and I shivered, tightening up, and for a moment my whole body locked and I couldn’t move at all. Then I unfastened the padlock and took a torch from the toolbox and slithered off the road and followed the scarred earth, down through the tussocks, across the grass towards the trees.
Streaks of white, splintered wood showed where the Ford had hit the smaller pines and gone through. I picked my way through broken, twisted branches to where the little truck had crumpled its front end against a monster tree trunk, reared high in the air, and dropped back, canted over to one side. There was the crackle of cooling metal. The air reeked of petrol.
I took a deep breath, and opened the door.
She flopped down like a rag doll and I held her dead weight with my shoulder. Her hair brushed my cheek as I stared across at the empty passenger seat. Glass was everywhere. The steering wheel was buckled and she’d gone into the windscreen and her blonde hair was dark and wet. I reached up and touched the soft white skin of her neck, but life had gone. Just once I pressed my face against her still-warm breast, eyes squeezed tight against the tears, breathing deeply of that oh so familiar perfume. Then I pushed her away, head lolling, and gently closed the door.
As soon as I hit the headlights, I knew Frank had been wrong. When Dougail Gaunt left the garage, he hadn’t gone back for his bottle, he’d gone to hand the Ford over to Chrissie. If I’d had a clear view into that lunchtime bus, I’d have realized that she wasn’t on it. He’d kept her with him, all day. Then, for some reason — cards, booze, another woman — he’d decided to stay the night in Craignure.
She was a good driver. I’d had no intimation that they’d changed places until, closing up on the Ford as it prepared to negotiate that treacherous bend, I’d flicked the lights on as planned. Instantly, I’d seen her blonde head bent over the wheel and screamed my horror and despair into the dark night.
When I finally hit those switches again, it was too late.
When the lights went on, Chrissie was suddenly blinded by the glare from two powerful headlights blazing into her face. Where from? There was no mirror in the cab, there never had been. And the instinctive glance at the wing mirror I’d doctored would have convinced her there was nothing coming up from behind. So the instant, unequivocal message from her brain was not that she was being blinded by two headlights seen through a newly-fitted mirror, but that a heavy vehicle was hurtling head on
The ice and the camber had done the rest.
Just as I’d planned it for murderous Dougail Gaunt.
I took out a handkerchief and went over to the wing mirror. It was shattered, and I knew that somewhere down in those pine needles lay shards of carbon-covered glass. I flashed the torch a couple of times, but there was no reflection — how could there be? — and I kicked at the pine needles with my stiff left leg and then gave it up and started back up the hill.
I felt bleak, and I felt empty. And all the way up that hill from blonde, dead Chrissie, my leg ached and I thought ahead to Craignure, and the job that was still to be done.
It seemed that half our blotter reports lately had something to do with gambling.
Maybe it was the beautiful autumn in Korea, when the green leaves of summer turn to orange and yellow and brown and people realize that they are heading for that long cold winter we call death.
“Take a chance! You only go round once.”
