‘You want to come with me? Sounds like Mrs Revere’s involved in a wreck up ahead. They’ve closed the road.’
‘An accident? Fernanda Revere?’
‘Yup,’ he said grimly, and opened the door for her.
The words flooded her with dread. She climbed out shakily and the night air suddenly seemed a lot chillier than ten minutes ago. She pulled her mackintosh tightly around her as she followed the detective past a line of cars towards a stationary police car that was angled across the road, its roof spinners hurling shards of red light in every direction. A row of traffic cones was spread across the road behind it.
An accident. The woman would be blaming her. Everyone would be blaming her.
A cacophony of sirens was closing in on them. Just beyond the patrol car now, she could see the mangled wreckage of a car partially embedded in the front of a halted white truck. Carly stopped. This wasn’t just a minor bump, this was major. Massive. Horrific. She turned away, towards Lanigan.
‘Is she OK?’ Carly asked. ‘Have you heard if she’s OK? Is she injured?’
The sirens got louder.
He strode on, through the cones, saying nothing. Carly hurried after him, feeling like a thousand different knots were being tightened inside her all at the same time. She tried to look away from the accident, but at the same time she was mesmerized by it, kept looking, looking, staring.
A cop was standing in their way, blocking their path. A young plump man wearing glasses and a cap that was too big for him. He looked about eighteen years old and waiting to grow into his uniform.
‘Stay back, please, folks.’
Lanigan held up his police shield.
‘Ah, right. OK. OK, sir.’ Then he pointed questioningly at Carly.
‘She’s with me,’ the Detective Investigator said.
He waved them past, then turned in confusion as an ambulance and fire tender screamed to a halt.
Over to her right, Carly saw a man in a boiler suit walking around unsteadily, as if he were disoriented. He was in shock, she realized. Ahead of her, Lanigan had pulled out a torch and switched it on. In the beam she saw what might have been a grim tableau in a museum of modern art.
The front wheels of the truck had been pushed back several feet by the impact, so that they were right underneath the cab. The side of the gold Porsche facing them had been so badly buckled that the front and rear of the car were almost at right angles to each other. The destroyed vehicle resembled a crudely sculpted artistic impression of a snow plough, as if it was actually part of the front of the truck.
Carly smelled the stench of vomit, then heard a retching sound. There was a smell of petrol, too, and of oil, but another deeply unpleasant, coppery smell mixed in.
‘Jesus!’ Lanigan exclaimed. ‘Oh shit!’
He stepped back and put out an arm to prevent Carly from seeing the same sight. But he was too late.
In the torch beam Carly saw a pair of legs, covered from the knees down by turquoise tracksuit bottoms, but the top part was naked. A mess of crimson, black, dark red and bright red was splayed out around the crotch. Out of the middle of it rose, for about eighteen inches, what looked like a giant white fish bone.
Part of the woman’s spine, she realized, clutching the detective’s arm involuntarily, her stomach rising up into her throat. Fernanda Revere had been cut in two.
Carly turned away, quaking in horror and shock. She staggered a few yards, then fell to her knees and threw up, her eyes blinded by tears.
84
A large whiskey at the hotel bar, followed by two glasses of Pinot Noir, helped calm Carly down a little, but she was still in shock. Detective Investigator Lanigan drank a small beer. He looked fine – as if he saw stuff like that accident all the time and was immune to it. Yet he seemed such a caring man. She wondered how anyone could ever get used to something as horrific as that.
Despite the woman’s rudeness to her, she felt a desperate sadness for Fernanda Revere. Lanigan told her she didn’t need to feel any pity, because this was a woman with blood on her hands, and from a brutal family living high off the spoils of violence. But Carly could not help it. Whatever her background had been, Fernanda Revere was still a human being. A mother capable of intense love for her son. No one deserved to end up the way she had.
And Carly had caused it.
The Detective Investigator told her she should not think that way. Fernanda Revere had no business getting into a vehicle in the state she was in. She didn’t have to drive away, that was her choice. She could, and should, have simply told Carly to leave. Driving away – and doing so drunk – was not a rational act.
But Carly still blamed herself. She could not help thinking, over and over, that she had caused it. That if she had not gone to the house, Fernanda Revere would still be alive. Part of her wanted to drive straight back out to the Hamptons and try to apologize to Lou Revere. Pat Lanigan nixed that one fast and hard.
They stood outside for a long time while he smoked another cigar and she smoked her way through half a pack of cigarettes. The question neither of them could answer was What happens next?
She felt utterly bewildered. How was Fernanda Revere’s husband going to react? The other members of the woman’s family? When she had boarded the plane to come here, she knew she had a difficult task ahead of her. But she had never, remotely, thought of a consequence like this. She lit another cigarette with a trembling hand.
‘I think now, Carly, you’re going to have to think pretty seriously and quickly about entering a witness protection scheme,’ Pat Lanigan said. ‘I’m going to see that you have someone guarding you all the time you’re here, but people like the Reveres have long memories and a long reach.’
‘Do you really think I’d ever be truly safe in a witness protection scheme?’
‘You can never say one hundred per cent, but it would give you your best chance.’
‘You know what it means? To move to another part of the country, just you and your child, and never see any of your family or friends again, ever. How would you like to do that?’
He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t like it too much. But if I figured I didn’t have any option, then I guess it would be better than the alternative.’
‘What – what alternative?’
He gave Carly a hard stare. ‘Exactly.’
85
The air-conditioning was too cold and too loud, but nothing Carly did to the controls in her hotel bedroom seemed to make any difference. She couldn’t find any extra bedding either, so had ended up almost fully clothed, under the sheets, tossing and turning, a tsunami of dark thoughts crashing through her mind.
Shortly after 6 a.m. and wide awake, she slipped out of bed, walked across to the window and opened the blinds. Light flooded in from a cloudless dark blue sky. She watched a jet plane climb into it, then dropped her gaze on to a sprawling mess of industrial buildings and a busy road, thirty floors below.
Her head was pounding. She felt queasy and very afraid. God, how she desperately wished Kes was here now, more than ever. Just to talk this through with him. He was bigger than any shit the world could throw at him. Except that damned white stuff that had encased and suffocated him.
Shit happens, he was fond of saying. He was right. His death was shit. Her accident was shit. Fernanda Revere’s death was shit. Everything was shit.
But most of all, the idea of walking away from her life and going into hiding, forever, was total and utter shit. It wasn’t going to happen. There had to be a better solution.
Had to be.
Suddenly her mobile phone rang. She hurried across and picked it off her bedside table, staring at the display. It simply said, International.
‘Hello?’ she answered.
‘Hi, Carly?’ It was Justin Ellis and his voice was sounding strange.