I wondered when I’d missed out on the bonding process that had gone on between these two. When had they excluded me, or had I excluded myself?
I eyed the area Elsa had been trying to protect. Casually, I walked a little way back along the road in the direction Blakemore must have been travelling when he’d come to grief, judging from skid marks.
I tried to work out just how he must have ridden that final corner. How I would have ridden it.
I would have approached, braking hard, out to the far right of my lane. It was blind. I wouldn’t have cut the apex onto the opposite side of the road and I wouldn’t have turned in and laid the bike down into it, wouldn’t have creamed in the throttle, until I could see my exit was clear.
The road surface was dry, the day was clear. How on earth had he miscalculated so badly? How had someone of his experience overrun so far that he’d ended up on the marbles and slithered into the safety barrier hard enough to launch him into orbit?
I shook my head, moved back further. OK, so Todd had claimed that Blakemore was a lunatic. How did that change the perspective? I suppose if I’d had that kind of absolute faith in my own invincibility I might have gone in a lot hotter, braked a lot later, and committed to the corner before my arc of visibility opened up.
I paced it out. There was no traffic on the road and I could walk my proposed line without having to dodge other vehicles. As I hit what would have been my perfect clipping point, right on the apex of the bend, something sparkled at my feet. I bent to examine it.
“What is it?”
I tilted my head up, and found both Jan and Elsa standing over me, frowning.
For a moment I mentally juggled the effects of telling them what was on my mind, or keeping it to myself.
“Broken glass,” I said at last. When I followed the skids to the barrier they tracked back to the position of the glass like leading lights to a harbour entrance. “It’s shaped, patterned – headlight or sidelight, most probably.”
It was Elsa, the ex-policewoman, who put it together fastest.
“He was hit by a car,” she said. She looked further down the road and her gaze narrowed. She strode away.
“What?” Jan demanded, and we both hurried after her.
“Look at this,” Elsa said. “More skid marks, a car this time, not a motorcycle, leading away from the initial point of impact.”
“Wait a minute,” Jan said. “You both think this was a hit and run, don’t you?”
I nodded. It wasn’t so hard to put it together, not once you followed the parallel black lines that swept across the road. The car driver, whoever he was, had braked hard enough to lock all his wheels solid and start to broadside, scrubbing off speed along with rubber from his tyres.
“Yes, look at this. He hits Mr Blakemore, loses control and makes a complete one hundred and eighty-degree slide,” Elsa said. I don’t know how long she was in the police, but she must have been called out to enough road traffic incidents to have learned to read the signs. “He comes to a stop there – see – over on the other side of the road. He was lucky he didn’t hit the far barrier.”
“Lucky – or skilful,” I said, my voice thoughtful. They looked at me sharply, but it wasn’t such a wild leap. After all, we’d all spent the previous week watching the likes of Figgis performing just such a move as this. A rapid change of direction after your vehicle came under attack. Viewed from that perspective, suddenly that chaotic slide became a textbook manoeuvre.
“He could just have been lucky,” Elsa said. There was a hint of mild censure in her tone, but it was laced with doubt, too.
“So why didn’t he stop?” I said. “Why didn’t he call the police himself?”
She paced across to the point where the car must have come to a halt, her brow furrowed in focus. “He is horrified that he has clearly hit someone. Maybe he sits there for a moment. He might have stalled his engine. His heart is thundering in his throat at what he has done.”
Jan threw me a sideways look at this flight of deductive fantasy. Elsa didn’t seem to notice her scepticism.
“Maybe he even gets out of his car, runs over to the barrier, and looks down at the wreckage he has caused. He looks and, like Mr Todd, he too assumes Mr Blakemore is already dead.”
Caught up in her snapshot of a life balanced on the edge of instant ruin, the picture began to unfold in my mind. “He thinks briefly of calling an ambulance, and the police, of facing the consequences of his momentary lapse of concentration,” I put in. Jan rolled her eyes as if to say, “Don’t you start.” I ignored her.
“Then it comes to him just how deserted is this stretch of road,” Elsa went on, nodding. She was right about that. During the time we’d been stopped not a single other car had passed us. “And he realises—”
“—There are no witnesses.” It was Jan who finished it, seeming to surprise herself as much as us. We turned to stare at her and she shrugged, embarrassed.
We walked back to where I’d first found the broken glass. There wasn’t much of it. Elsa nudged it with the toe of her boot.
“The damage to his car cannot have been severe,” she said. “He would still have been able to drive it away.”
“It wouldn’t have taken much to knock Blakemore off his line,” I said. “A glancing blow.” That was all it took to deflect something as narrow and jittery as a bike. To send it careering to disaster.
“So,” Elsa went on, her voice carrying contempt now for Blakemore’s unknown assassin, “he jumps back behind the wheel of his car and he runs like a rabbit.” She scanned the area again. “Haste makes him heavy-footed.” I followed her gaze and found two thick black lines to suggest that, in his efforts to escape the locality along with the blame, the scared driver had dumped the clutch and lit up his tyres like a drag racer.
We fell silent for a few moments while we replayed the scene, shaping it to fit the scenario we’d just created. It did fit, after a fashion. More off-the-peg than made-to-measure.
“We’re all assuming, of course,” I said quietly, “that this was just an accident.”
I felt their disbelief in the way they stiffened beside me. “What are you suggesting, Charlie?” Elsa asked. I tried to read an argument into her voice, but could only find surprise and not a little interest. Should I risk it?
“If you had to pick a good spot for an ambush along this road, where else would you go for?” I said. I paused while they thought about it.
We’d all driven this way several times during our rides out with the school instructors, who’d asked us all just such a question.
I couldn’t help the eerie feeling that somewhere along the line the men in the Peugeot had received the same training we had, and probably a good deal else besides.
They’d certainly seemed to know all about ambushes yesterday in the forest, even though that one had blown up in their faces. Perhaps they’d decided that taking the school men out one at a time was a less risky proposition.
But what about Blakemore’s threat?
Maybe they hadn’t taken his warning seriously. Or maybe they’d taken it very seriously indeed.
Fifteen
Blakemore didn’t make it.
He bowed out long before the emergency services reached the scene. He never regained consciousness, never made a sound, never made another movement. It was like his soul was out of there long before we ever reached the crash site. It just took his body a while to get the message.
Figgis stayed down in the ravine with him, laying blankets from the truck over the top of him, talking to him even though he was probably beyond hearing much of anything at all. The rest of us loitered up on the road, waiting for the ambulance. Waiting for Blakemore to die.