Anna scrambles up the bank. She’s looking down the motorway at the oncoming traffic when a red car catches her eye, weaving its way between the lanes in true boy-racer style. Instinctively, she throws a hand up, urging him silently to slow down, stop, but of course he can’t see her, can’t read her mind.
She looks round for Lucy, to share her fears with her, but Lucy’s not with her. Not behind her. She looks at the abandoned car in horror to see that Lucy is still getting out.
Almost in slow motion, she watches the red car undertake a lorry and move into the inside lane, the so-called smart lane, the so-called hard shoulder, and she’s willing him to see the Mini, and she’s screaming at Lucy to get out before it’s too late, but the lorry is there to his right and she can almost feel the desperate calculations his brain must be making, before it’s too late and he’s crashed straight into the back of the stationary car.
Anna ducks, recoiling from the bang, the crash of broken glass, the roaring noise of cars around them. Lucy. Where is Lucy? She scrambles back down the slope.
Lucy is just beyond the barrier, lying on the ground in a crumpled heap, buried in the long grass. Anna rushes to her, putting her hand on her neck to see if there’s any pulse. It’s there. Faint, but there.
Lucy’s eyes flicker open at Anna’s touch. ‘What happened?’ she says.
‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ Anna says. ‘A car smashed into ours. You must have been thrown clear. Can you move everything?’
Lucy shakes her head. ‘I’ve done something to my shoulder,’ she says. ‘I can’t move it. And it really fucking hurts.’
Anna exclaims in sympathy. Her hands are shaking now as the adrenaline spike starts to wear off. Horror is surging in to replace it, a visceral terror that’s griping at her guts, tearing into her brain, nothing there but a silent scream. Lucy is shaking too, great tremors rolling through her.
Despite Anna’s shock, though, her brain’s running crystal clear.Concentrate, damn it. She needs to focus. Then it comes to her, cold certainty. They need to get the hell out of here. Right now. No waiting to find out what’s happened, no telling the police about the engine stalling. No checking the driver of the other car. They don’t have the time.
They. Lucy is grey with pain, beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead. There’s no way she’s in a fit state to make a run for it.
‘We need to get up the hill before anyone sees us,’ Anna says. ‘Let’s just get a bit further out of here, and then we’ll call Rachel.’
‘I don’t think I can walk,’ Lucy says.
‘I’ll help you.’ Anna puts her arm under Lucy’s shoulders, avoiding the injury, and urges her to her feet.
‘But what about . . .?’ Lucy says, waving her hand at the wrecked car on the motorway.
‘We’ve got somewhere to be. This is done. We’ll talk to the police later.’ They don’t have time to argue.
Anna half drags, half carries Lucy up the slope to the top, where it opens into a field. They’re very near the slip road off the motorway, and Anna reckons that there must be a service station somewhere close by where she can leave Lucy safely.
‘I’m calling Rachel,’ she says. ‘Then I’m going to hitch. It’s the only way.’
‘Hitch?’ Lucy says. She’s going into shock. They’ll need to find some sugar for her, a hot drink, get her to sit down and try and process what’s happened. Deal with her injury.
‘We don’t have a car anymore, and we can’t exactly nick one. Not unless we want to find ourselves picked up immediately.’
‘We’re going to get arrested whatever we do,’ Lucy says. ‘We’ve just abandoned a crashed car.’
Time to get assertive. ‘We’re in this now. It’s Macbeth, right? Too far through the blood bath to turn back. That’s my view. But if you think there’s a better way, go back down there now, wait for the police. They’ll be here any minute.’
They face each other for a moment, the sound of sirens growing ever louder in the air. Anna is desperate to get moving, but she can’t leave Lucy.
Lucy reaches a decision. ‘OK. We’ll try and get this sorted. But after it’s all done, we’re going to go to the police and tell them what happened with the car.’
‘Sure,’ Anna says, happy to promise whatever it takes. She’ll deal with it later. By then, it’ll be the least of her problems; the breaches in her parole licence are enough on their own to send her straight back inside.
This is a moment when she could disappear. She’s out of Oxford, away from London and the strictures of probation. She could hitch a ride and go far, far away from all this mess. It’s not like she’s any closer to solving the mystery around Kelly. All she’s done is throw herself headlong into a pile of someone else’s mess.
She knows she can’t escape, though. And more to the point, now Tom is added to the list, too. He was kind to her. She owes him answers, if there are any to be found.That’s tough, the words of compassion he spoke to her when she told him why she was in prison in the first place.
She stops walking. Now it hits her like a truck, what she’s running away from. The smell of burned oil, overheated metal, scorched rubber, the noise of the crash itself – it’s thrown her into the past. Not to when she was hit outside prison. Not then. Earlier. Much earlier. Another deafening impact. Another mangled car.
‘I need to sit down for a moment,’ she says to Lucy. ‘I’m sorry. I just need . . .’
The shock is hitting her in waves now. Her head’s empty of everything other than the accident that ended her life as she knew it, the sounds of the different cars crashing intermingling in her mind, the screeching of brakes.
