Читать книгу The Confessions Series - Ash Cameron - Страница 14

If someone says don’t look, you automatically get the urge to do just that, especially when it’s a mangled car wreck.

There was a fatal accident at the bottom of a very busy junction, on the corner where a street market began. Shops and a pub and a betting shop lined the parade. One of those heavy super-armoured vans that are used to convey money had taken out a blue Volvo estate.

I was instructed to make sure nobody went past the police tape. After six hours, I was weary.

‘But I live down there!’ said an old man.

‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait,’ I said.

‘I only want to go a hundred yards,’ said a man with a dog.

‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait.’

A woman with shopping bags approached. ‘I have to collect something before the supermarket shuts.’

‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait.’

And so it carried on. I deflected all the pleas and fended off those who’d come to gawp. It was tricky as the van was laden with cash and it had to be gathered up and accounted for.

An irate woman approached and wouldn’t accept that she wasn’t going through. She was insistent, persistent and annoying.

My legs were aching, I was desperate for the loo, the forensic examination would be another few hours, and the PC assigned to take over from me hadn’t turned up. I was grumpy and I wanted to go home.

‘I don’t care if you’re the Queen of England, you ain’t going down that road!’ I rationalised it was human nature to lose it, all things considered. ‘A man has been killed in that car this afternoon.’

She dropped her handbag and fell to the floor. She screamed and held her head in her hands and howled, oh how she howled.

I shouldn’t have spoken to her like that. It was no excuse that I hadn’t known it was her husband’s car. I had just delivered the cruellest of death messages.