Concrete Island Read Free

doctor’s warm and comfortable apartment, he had felt almost suffocated.
    Standing up, Maitland edged sideways across the slope. Ten feet above him was the hard shoulder of the motorway, and the palisade of wooden trestles. Maitland tossed his briefcase up the slope. Moving like a crab on his feet and forearms, he climbed the more shallow soil, reached both hands on to the concrete shoulder and pulled himself on to the road.
    Exhausted by the climb, Maitland sat down unsteadily on a wooden trestle. He brushed the dirt on his hands against his trousers. The briefcase and raincoat lay at his feet in a grimy bundle like the luggage of a tramp. Sweat bathed his shirt inside the jacket, soaking through the fabric. The blood was thick in his mouth, but he sucked it back without a pause.
    He stood up and turned to face the oncoming traffic. Three lines of vehicles sped towards him. They emerged from the tunnel below the overpass and accelerated along the fast bend. The rush-hour had begun. Magnified by the roof and walls of the overpass, the noise reverberated off the concrete roadway around Maitland, drowning his first shouts. Now and then an interval of fifty feet appeared between the speeding vehicles, but even during these first minutes as Maitland stood there, waving his briefcase and raincoat, the hundreds of cars carrying their homeward drivers pressed closer together, almost bumper to bumper.
    Maitland lowered the briefcase, watching the traffic roar past him. The red pinewood trestles had been knocked back by the speeding vehicles into a loose line. Lower in the western sky, the strong sun shone directly into the drivers’ eyes as they emerged from the overpass into the fast right-hand bend.
    Maitland looked down at himself. His jacket and trousers were stained with sweat, mud and engine grease – few drivers, even if they did notice him, would be eager to give him a lift. Besides, it would be almost impossible to slow down here and stop. The pressure of the following traffic, free at last from the long tail-backs that always blocked the Westway interchange during the rush-hour, forced them on relentlessly.
    Trying to position himself more conspicuously, Maitland edged along the narrow road shoulder. No pedestrian or emergency verge had been provided along this fast bend, and the cars speeding past him at sixty miles an hour were no more than three or four feet away. Still carrying the raincoat and briefcase, he moved along the line of trestles, steering each one out of his way. He waved his hat in the exhaust-filled air, shouting over his shoulder into the engine noise.
    â€˜Emergency…! Stop…! Pull over…!’
    Two trestles kicked together by a passing truck blocked his way. The lines of traffic swept by, swerving under the route indicators towards the junction ahead. Brake lights pumped, and the sunlight flared off the windshields in electric lances.
    A horn blared warningly behind Maitland as he climbed around the trestles. A car plunged within inches of his right hip, an angry passenger whirling in a window. Maitland pulled himself back, and saw the white hull of a police car in the far lane. It was moving at a steady fifty miles an hour, a few feet behind the bumper of the car in front, but the driver looked over his shoulder at Maitland.
    â€˜Slow down…! Police…!’
    Maitland waved both the hat and briefcase, but the police car had been carried away by the rush of traffic. Trying to follow it on foot, Maitland was almost hit by the fender of a passing taxi. A black limousine swept towards him out of the tunnel, the uniformed chauffeur seeing Maitland at the last moment.
    Realizing that he would be crushed against the trestles, Maitland moved away from them. His right hand smarted from a passing blow. The skin had been torn by a piece of sharp windshield or wing-mirror trim. He wrapped the blood-stained handkerchief around it.
    Three hundred yards away, beyond the eastern