Dead Man's Grip Read Free Page B

turned red.
    For an instant, in panic, she thought it must be her who was on the wrong side of the road. She swung the steering wheel hard to the left, stamping on the brake pedal, thumping over the kerb, missing him by inches, and skidded, wheels locked, across the wet surface.
    Empty chairs and tables outside a café raced towards her as if she was on a scary funfair ride. She stared, frozen in horror, gripping the wheel, just a helpless observer as the wall of the café loomed nearer. For an instant, as she splintered a table, she thought she was going to die.
    ‘Oh shittttttttttt!’ she screamed as the nose of her car smashed into the wall beneath the café window and a massive explosion numbed her ears. She felt a terrible jolt on her shoulder, saw a blur of white and smelled something that reminded her of gunpowder.
Then she saw glass crashing down in front of the buckled bonnet of the car.
    There was a muffled barrrrrrrrrrppppppppp , accompanied by a slightly less muffled banshee siren.
    ‘Jesus!’ she said, panting in shock. ‘Oh, God! Oh, Jesus!’
    Her ears popped and the sounds became much louder.
    Cars could catch fire, she’d seen that in films. She had to get out. In wild panic, she hit the seat-belt buckle and tried to open her door. But it would not move. She tried again, harder. A baggy white cushion lay on her lap. The airbag, she realized. She wrenched the door handle, her panic increasing, and shoved the door as hard as she could. It opened and she tumbled out, her feet catching in the seat belt, tripping her, sending her sprawling painfully on to the wet pavement.
    As she lay there for an instant she heard the banshee wail continue above her head. A burglar alarm. Then she could hear another wailing sound. This time it was human. A scream.
    Had she hit someone? Injured someone?
    Her knee and right hand were stinging like hell, but she barely noticed hauling herself to her feet, looking first at the wreckage of the café and then across the road.
    She froze.
    A lorry had stopped on the opposite side. A huge artic, slewed at a strange angle. The driver was clambering down from the cab. People were running into the road right behind it. Running past a mountain bike that had been twisted into an ugly shape, like an abstract sculpture, past a baseball cap and tiny bits of debris, towards what she thought at first was a roll of carpet lying further back, leaking dark fluid from one end on to the rain-lashed black tarmac.
    All the traffic had stopped, and the people who had been running stopped too, suddenly, as if they had become statues. She felt she was staring at a tableau. Then she walked, stumbling, out into the road, in front of a stationary car, the high-pitched howl of the siren almost drowned out by the screams of a young woman holding an umbrella, who was standing on the far pavement, staring at that roll of carpet.
    Fighting her brain, which wanted to tell her it was something different, Carly saw the laced-up trainer that was attached to one end.
    And realized it wasn’t a roll of carpet. It was a severed human leg.
    She vomited, the world spinning around her.

8
    At 9 a.m. Phil Davidson and Vicky Donoghue, dressed in their green paramedic uniforms, sat chatting in the cab of the Mercedes Sprinter Ambulance. They were parked on a police bay opposite the taxi rank at Brighton’s Clock Tower, where they had been positioned by the dispatcher.
    Government targets required that ambulances reached Category-A emergencies within eight minutes, and from this location, with a bit of aggressive driving, they could normally reach anywhere in the city of Brighton and Hove well within that time.
    Ninety minutes into their twelve-hour shift, the rush-hour world passed by in front of them, blurred by the film of rain on the windscreen. Every few minutes Vicky flicked the wipers to clear their view. They watched taxis, buses, goods vehicles passing by, streams of people trudging to work, some huddled beneath