What You Left Behind (2 page)

We must be doing nearly a hundred when I feel a sharp shove in my ribs, hurling me sideways.

I’m flying. The ground is above me, below me, battering my back, my legs, my head, earth forced between my fingers, and smashed into my face. The bike is gone, stripped away.

Then the loud bang, the crashing thud of my skull inside the helmet as it comes to rest. A sharp pain grabs the length of my back. My left leg is twisted behind me. I can taste blood.

W
HEN
I
OPEN
my eyes, a tree is seared onto my mind, the negative of an image I’ll never forget.

My fingers claw at the cool, wet ground, reaching, searching for something, anything. I can feel the night air blowing on my face—does that mean I’m alive? I want to scream but can’t.

“Where are you?” It’s just a whisper.

I listen for a reply but hear nothing—nothing except … I take off my broken helmet, try to move, but everything hurts. The night is silent around us now with just the sound of the breeze rustling through the hedge above me. I am in the ditch.

“Hello?”

My hands come up to my head, but not without pain. I am shaking
uncontrollably as the tears pour down my face. I’m not sure if it’s from pain or fear or the urgent need for help. What have I done?

Please, God, let him be OK. Let him be OK
.

Then I spot him. A twisted creature curled and crumpled at the base of the tree. My first thought is that it’s someone else, that it can’t be him, that it’s the chewed-up carcass of a wild animal. But as I slowly drag myself to my feet and hobble toward the tree, I recognize the green shorts and stripy T-shirt. The flip-flops are nowhere to be seen. The motorbike lies a few feet from him, bent into a barely recognizable chunk of red-and-orange metal.

I drop to my knees. He isn’t moving.

“Wake up. Talk to me!”

My hand goes out to his shoulder. He is still warm. He is covered in blood. One side of his head is gone.

I shake him, letting out a noise that doesn’t sound like me.

There is a purplish bone pushing through the skin of his right forearm and his neck is snapped too far back. His skull is open and fresh, the contents scenting the night air. I can’t make myself think of the word
dead
, even though it’s pushing up my throat like a hand emerging from a grave.

Stay sane, I think. Keep calm. Take his pulse. Check his breathing. Call for an ambulance … phone the police … flag down a car …

I stand up, fighting the pain that grips me, trying to make the darkened landscape around me stop spinning. Everything seems bigger, scarier, twisted and evil, as if the trees are gathering and marching toward me and the hedgerows are curling around to grab me.

Evil, evil person
, the countryside is whispering.

I have no idea what to do.

I could call an ambulance or the police, but they’ll arrest me, throw me in a cell for the rest of my life. It’s what I deserve.

I was driving. I was drinking. We stole a bike. Now the man I love is dead.

Then something clicks inside me. It’s as if he’s telling me what to do.

I go back to the ditch and retrieve the buckled helmet I was wearing, tucking it under my arm. And then I limp away. I don’t look back. I don’t want the memories that will haunt me, torment me in my dreams, soak my bed with night sweats. As far as I’m concerned, I was never a part of this.

I stop again—my feet unable to move for a second. There’s a car approaching. Panicking, I see a gate leading into a field and scramble over it, chucking the helmet ahead of me. Headlights arc above me just as I drop down behind the hedge, illuminating everything dark in my mind. I hear the engine slow, imagine the driver’s horror when he sees the scene.

Making sure I stay close to the hedge, crouching, hobbling, escaping, I disappear into the night. What will happen to me now, I have no idea.

1

Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher slowed as she pulled off the main road. The journey from Birmingham was less than an hour but still long enough for her to make it only two or three times a year.

There was no space in her life for regrets and should-haves; therefore time spent with her younger sister in the country was usually limited to Christmas, birthdays, or the routine summer holiday visit, as she was doing now. An entire week away from work suddenly seemed like an awfully long time. Or was it that an entire week in her sister’s company was daunting?

She loved Jo, had always protected her, watched out for her, picked her up and dusted her off, but there was usually a price. Lorraine wondered what it would be this time.

She glanced down at her daughter’s lap. “Don’t you feel sick?” Stella had been staring at her phone for the last forty-five minutes, texting, tapping messages into Facebook, playing games.

Lorraine had been hoping to catch up with her, find out about her end-of-term test results, see how she was getting on with her Geography project, but instead she’d ended up filling the rumbling void of the M40 with a program on Radio 4, which was now coming to an end. Stella had not been pleased by the early start, and had had to be cajoled into the car, still in her pajama bottoms and an old sweatshirt, with the promise of hastily made bacon sandwiches and chips for breakfast.

“Dad would have a fit if he could see this lot,” Stella giggled as they’d wrapped the food in foil and dropped various other junk into a carrier bag.

“Then we won’t tell him, will we?” Lorraine said, feeling slightly smug.

“Dad can force Grace to eat his organic yogurt and bucketloads of berries later,” Stella said, also enjoying the subterfuge.

Lorraine had said goodbye to her older daughter the night before, knowing she wouldn’t be up before they left. Grace was meeting a friend later and they were off to an athletics camp. She’d been looking forward to it for ages.

Their week together would be, Jo had said on the phone a few days ago, just like old times. Lorraine hadn’t said anything, but that’s exactly what worried her. “Old times” implied Jo getting herself into an emotional pickle, making ludicrous decisions and bad choices—and, as ever, Lorraine bailing her out.

She’d always called her a restless soul. Jo, it seemed, was never satisfied with what she had.

“Why do you have to drive so bumpy?” Stella asked.

Lorraine rolled her eyes and smiled. “It’s not my driving, it’s these country lanes. We’re not in the city now, you know. If you look up from that phone you’d see … cows or something.”

She flicked her hand toward the windshield. Endless fields dotted with dark green wooded areas, ripening crops scattered across the undulating earth, and the meandering lane tacked onto the farmland spanned the breadth of their view. Everything was vibrant and lush, as if it had been colored in from an entirely different palette from that of their built-up neighborhood in Moseley.

If she was honest, Lorraine envied her sister still living in the country. It was where they’d both grown up. Moving to Birmingham at the age of eighteen had been an escape for her at the time—twenty-five years ago now—and she admitted the city was in her blood, part of her life, a place she couldn’t imagine not being in.

But these Warwickshire villages, especially her childhood home of Radcote, would never leave her heart. The mellow ginger stone of the local buildings, the low brows of thatched cottages, the cow parsley verges, the tiny post office with its musty wooden floor and big jars of penny candy on crooked shelves, the landmark churches with their towers and spires marking the route on endless summer bike rides—it was all tattooed on her heart.

As the road narrowed and curved, bending between farms and livestock, crops and Dutch barns with stacks of hay, Lorraine wound down the window and breathed in deeply, tasting the air. It was sweet and slightly cloying. Just how she remembered it. Already she felt the feeling of coming home seeping into her skin.

She smiled. This week was going to be just what she needed. A damned good rest.

She indicated right and turned down an even narrower lane. The hedges pulled in close, cloaking their passage with varying shades of green, as well as brighter patches of white or yellow flowers. Every so often they passed a gateway with a crusted muddy entrance where tractors had been coming and going.

“What happens if another car comes?” Stella asked, dropping her phone into her bag. Her arms were folded across her stomach as if she might be sick at any moment.

“One of us has to back up to a passing point,” Lorraine stated.

“But what if no one will?”

“Then I guess we sit there all day,” Lorraine replied, quite used to her daughter’s endless questions. Occasionally her wayward line of thought would contain a shred of what seemed like brilliance or unusual insight, which prevented Lorraine from silencing her when other mothers might have grown impatient. As far as she was concerned, Stella could babble on. It was white noise that she enjoyed, a welcome contrast to her job. “But people are generally friendly in the countryside.”

“What if they have a gun?”

“Well, you’re in trouble then,” she said, speeding up again as the lane straightened into a more drivable stretch. “Know what they call this road?” Lorraine asked, pointing ahead. It used to scare her as a kid, give her a creepy yet slightly irresistible feeling. She’d always pedaled that bit harder when cycling along it to the next village to visit a friend.

“A road?”

“Devil’s Mile,” Lorraine said, with a slight growl to her voice. Before Stella had a chance to ask, she added, “I have no idea why.”

“Probably because the Devil lives here or something,” Stella said matter-of-factly. She was obviously feeling less nauseous all of a sudden as the phone came out of her bag again in response to the bleep of an incoming text. “It would liven this place up a bit if he did. It looks dead boring.”

“There’s another straight road not far from here called the Fosse Way,” Lorraine continued.

She’d been going to explain about the Roman road’s route but slowed at the sight of a dozen or so wilted bunches of flowers laid at the base of a tree to their left. There were a couple of notes and cards pinned to the trunk, drooping and soggy from all the recent rain. Lorraine hated seeing these temporary shrines to lost loved ones. Usually these cases were tragic accidents rather than anything
sinister, but occasionally she’d have to deal with the cleanup, the painful aftermath of assessing what had happened when Traffic, the first officers on the scene, called her in. She’d worked a number of times with the Serious Collision Investigation Unit when initial findings weren’t entirely clear-cut and a more disturbing outcome was suspected.

She glanced in the rearview mirror at the faded floral tribute as they passed and wondered if it was anyone local.

“Very sad,” she said.

“What is?”

“Those flowers. Someone must have died in an accident.”

Lorraine flicked the indicator again and turned down the final lane that would take them to Radcote.

“Maybe the Devil killed someone,” Stella said, pulling open another bag of chips and stuffing a handful into her mouth.

“I
CAN
’
T BELIEVE
you didn’t bloody tell me,” Lorraine said, easing out of the sisterly embrace. “It’s pretty up there as family crises go.”

They’d barely got out of the car before Jo had emerged from the front door, picking her way across the gravel with bare feet, cotton skirt swishing at her ankles. She was at her sister’s side, unperturbed by Stella’s indifference to their arrival, and had simply stated, calm as anything, “Malc’s buggered off.”

“When?” Lorraine beeped the car locked, thrust a bag at Stella to carry, and walked across the drive with Jo.

“Two months ago.”

“Two months? And it didn’t occur to you to pick up the phone and tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you. You’re always so busy.”

Lorraine felt a surge of familiar guilt. Her work spilled into family time, into
everything
. It was the way it was, always had been. Yet
Jo was making it sound as though the breakup was somehow her fault.