and carrying out the murder of his parents. Yet the alternative was that John Reavley’s sharp and logical mind had slipped out of his control and sent him running from a threat that was not real, dreaming up horrors. That was worse. Joseph refused to believe it.
“And if it wasn’t an accident?” Why was it so difficult to say that?
Matthew stared at the last light as the sun kindled fire in the clouds on the horizon, vermilion and amber, tree shadows elongated across the fields. The smell of the twilight wind was heavy with hay, dry earth, and the sweetness of mown grass. It was almost harvest time. There were a handful of scarlet poppies like a graze of blood through the darkening gold. The hawthorn petals were all blown from the hedgerows, and in a few months there would be berries.
“I don’t know,” Matthew answered. “That’s the thing! There’s nobody to take it to, because we have no idea whom to trust. Father didn’t trust the police with this, or he wouldn’t have been bringing it to London. But I still have to look at it. Don’t you?”
Joseph thought for a moment. “Yes,” he admitted. “Yes. I have to know.”
The following afternoon, July 3, Matthew and Joseph stopped by the police station at Great Shelford again and asked if they could be shown on the map exactly where the accident had occurred. Reluctantly the sergeant told them.
“You don’t want to go looking at that,” he said sadly. “Course you want to understand, but there ain’t nothing to see. Weren’t no one else there, no brangle, no buck-fisted young feller drunk too much an’ going faster than he ought. Let it go, sir, that’s moi advoice.”
“Thank you,” Matthew replied with a forced smile. “Just like to see it. There, you said?” He put his finger on the map.
“That’s right, sir. Going south.”
“Had accidents there before?”
“Not as Oi know of, sir.” The sergeant frowned. “Can’t say what happened. But then sometimes that’s just how it is. Them Lanchesters is good cars. Get up quite a bit of speed with them. Fifty miles an hour, Oi shouldn’t wonder. A sudden puncture could send you off the road. Would do anyone.”
“Thank you,” Joseph said briskly. He wanted to end this and face looking at the scene. Get it over with. He dreaded it. Whatever they found, his mind would create a picture of what had happened there. The reality of it was the same, regardless of the cause. He turned away and walked out of the police station into the humid air. Clouds were massing in the west, and there were tiny flies settling on his skin, black pinpricks—thunder flies.
He walked to the car and climbed in, waiting for Matthew to follow.
They drove west through Little Shelford and Hauxton and on toward the London road, then turned north to the mill bridge. It was only a matter of three or four miles altogether. Matthew held his foot on the accelerator, trying to race the storm. He did not bother to explain; Joseph understood.
It was only a matter of minutes before they were over the bridge. Matthew was obliged to brake with more force than he had intended in order not to overshoot the place on the map. He pulled in to the side of the road, sending a spray of gravel up from the tires.
“Sorry,” he said absently. “We’d better hurry. It’s going to rain any minute.” He swung out and left Joseph to go after him.
It was only twenty yards, and he could see already the long gouge out of the grass where the car had plowed off the paved road, over the verge and the wide margin, crushing the wild foxgloves and the broom plants. It had torn up a sapling as well and scattered a few stones before crashing into a clump of birch trees, scarring the trunks and tearing off a hanging branch, which lay a few yards further on, its leaves beginning to wither.
Matthew stood beside the broom bushes, staring.
Joseph caught up with him and stopped. Suddenly he felt foolish and more vulnerable with every moment. The police sergeant was right. They should not have come here. It would have been far better to leave it in the imagination. Now he could never forget it.
There was a low rumble of thunder around the western horizon, like the warning growl of some great beast beyond the trees and the breathless fields.
“We can’t learn anything from it,” Joseph said aloud. “The car came off the road. We won’t ever know why.”
Matthew ignored him, still staring at the broken wake of the crash.
Joseph followed his gaze. At least death must have been quick, almost instantaneous, a moment of terror as they realized they were out of control, a sense of insane, destructive speed, and then perhaps the sound of tearing metal and pain—then nothing. All gone in seconds, less time than it took to imagine it.
Matthew turned and walked back to the road, beside the churned-up wake, careful to avoid stepping on it— not that there was anything more than broken plants. The ground was too dry for wheel tracks.
Joseph was on the edge of repeating that there was nothing to see when he realized that Matthew had stopped and was staring at the ground. “What is it?” he said sharply. “What have you found?”
“The car was weaving,” Matthew answered. “Look there!” He pointed to the edge of the road ten yards further on, where there was another clump of foxgloves mown down. “That’s where it came off the road first,” he said. “He tried to get it back on again, but he couldn’t. A puncture wouldn’t do that, not that way. I’ve had one—I know.”
“It was more than one,” Joseph reminded him. “All the tires were ripped.”
“Then there was something on the road that caused it,” Matthew said with conviction. “The possibility of getting four spontaneous punctures at the same moment isn’t even worth considering.” He started to run until he was level with the first broken foxgloves, then he slowed and began to search the ground.
Joseph followed after him, looking from right to left and back again, and then beyond. It was he who first saw the tiny scratches on the tarmacadam surface. He glanced sideways and saw another less than a foot away, and then another beyond that.
“Matthew!”
“Yes, I see them.” Matthew reached the line and bent to his knees. Once he had found them, it was easy to trace the marks right across the road, each less than the width of a car tire from the next. They were only slight scars, except in two places about axle-width apart, where they were deeper, actual gouges in the surface. In the heat of this summer, day after day of sun, the tar would have been softer than usual, more easily marked. In winter there might have been nothing.
“What were they?” Joseph asked, racking his mind for what could have torn tires on a moving car and left this track behind, yet not be here now, nor have been found embedded in the tires themselves. Except, of course, no one had been looking for such things.
Matthew stood up, his face white. “It can’t be nails,” he said. “How could you put nails on a road to stay point upward and catch only the car you wanted, and not leave them in the tires for police to find if they looked?”
“Wait for them,” Joseph answered, his heart knocking in his chest so violently his body shook. A cold, hurting rage engulfed him that anyone could cold-bloodedly place such a weapon across the road, then crouch out of sight, waiting for a car with people in it, and watch it crash. He could hardly breathe as he imagined them walking over to the wreck, ignoring the broken and bleeding bodies, perhaps still alive, and searching for a document. And when they did not find it, they left, simply went away, carefully taking with them whatever had caused the wreck.
He hated them. For a moment the heat of it poured over his skin in sweat. Then he found himself shivering uncontrollably, even though the air was hot and still, damp on the skin. More thunder flies settled on his face and hands.
Matthew had gone back to the side of the road, but opposite from the place where the car had swerved off. On this side there was a deeper ditch, thick with primrose leaves. There was a thin, straight line where they were torn, as if something sharp had ripped through them right from the tarmacadam edge all the way across to the ditch and beyond.
Dizzily, his vision blurred except for a crystal clarity at the center. Through it Joseph saw a birch sapling next to the hedge. A frayed end of rope hung from the trunk, biting into the bark about a foot from the ground. He could imagine the force that had caused that. He could see it—the yellow Lanchester with John Reavley at the wheel and Alys beside him, possibly at something like fifty miles an hour, striking it . . . striking what?
