Dead Man's Grip

car.
    Her little Golf had been found twenty-four hours later in a bay at the short-term car park at Gatwick Airport. There were two transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one for £7.50 at Boots and the other for £16.42 for petrol from the local branch of Tesco. She had taken no clothes and no other belongings of any kind.
    He was finding the process of filling in these forms therapeutic in a way. Finally he was starting to feel some kind of closure. And with luck the process would be complete in time for them to get married before their child was born.
    He sighed, his heart heavy, and squeezed her hand again.
    Please be OK, my darling Cleo. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you, I really couldn’t.

12
    In his eight years’ experience with the Road Policing Unit, PC Dan Pattenden had learned that if you were the first car to arrive at a crash scene, you would find chaos. Even more so if it was raining. And to make matters worse, as he hurtled along Portland Road on blues and twos, because of budget cuts, he was single-crewed.
    The information he was receiving on his screen and over the radio was chaotic, too. The first indication that the accident was serious was the number of people who had phoned to report it – eight calls logged by the Control Room so far.
    A lorry versus a bicycle; a car also involved , he had been informed.
    A lorry versus a bicycle was never going to be good news.
    He began slowing down as he approached, and, sure enough, what he observed through the rain-spattered windscreen was a scene of total confusion. An articulated refrigerated lorry facing away from him and an ambulance just beyond it. He saw, lying in the road, a buckled bicycle. Broken reflector glass. A baseball cap. A trainer. People all over the place, most frozen with shock but others snapping away with their mobile phone cameras. A small crowd was gathered around the rear offside of the lorry. On the other side of the road a black Audi convertible, with a buckled bonnet, was up against a café wall.
    He halted the brightly marked BMW estate car at an angle across the road, the first step to sealing off the scene, and radioed for backup, hoping to hell that it would arrive quickly – he needed about twenty different pairs of hands all at once. Then, tugging on his cap and his fluorescent jacket he grabbed an Accident Report pad and jumped out of the car. Then he tried to make a quick assessment of the scene, remembering all the elements that had been drummed into him from his initial training, his refresher courses and his own considerable experience.
    A rain-drenched young man in a tracksuit ran over to him. ‘Officer, there was a van, a white van, that went through a red light, hit him and drove off.’
    ‘Did you get the van’s licence number?’
    He shook his head. ‘No – sorry – it all happened so fast.’
    ‘What can you tell me about the van?’
    ‘It was a Ford, I think. One of those Transit things. I don’t think it had any writing on it.’
    Pattenden made a note, then looked back at the young man. Witnesses often disappeared quickly, especially in rain like this. ‘I’ll need your name and phone number, please,’ he said, writing the information in his pad. ‘Could you jump in the car and wait?’
    The young man nodded.
    At least he might stay around if he was warm and dry, Pattenden reasoned. He passed the information to the Control Room, then sprinted over to the lorry, clocking a severed leg lying in the road but ignoring it for the moment, and knelt beside the paramedics. He looked briefly at the mangled, unconscious cyclist and the coiled intestines on the road, and the blood, but was too wrapped up in all he had to deal with to be affected by it at this moment.
    ‘What can you tell me?’ he said, although he barely needed to ask the question.
    The male paramedic, whom he recognized, shook his head. ‘Not looking good. We’re losing him.’
    That was the only information the police constable required at this moment. All road fatalities were viewed as potential homicides, rather than accidents, until proved otherwise. As the only officer present, his first duty was to secure the area around the collision as a crime scene. His next was to try to ensure that no vehicles were moved and to stop witnesses from leaving. To his relief, he could now hear the distant wail of sirens as, hopefully, more vehicles approached.
    He ran back to his car, calling out