Darren Wallace guided each of them to a chair at the table in the waiting room. Fernanda sat down, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her handbag and lit one.
Politely Darren Wallace said, ‘I’m very sorry, but smoking is not permitted in here. You can go outside.’
She took a deep drag, stared at him, as if he had not said a word, and blew the smoke out, then took another drag.
Branson diplomatically passed his empty coffee cup to her. ‘You can use that as an ashtray,’ he said, giving a tacit nod to Wallace and then to his colleagues.
Her husband spoke quietly but assertively, with a slight Brooklyn accent, as if suddenly taking command of the situation, looking at each of the police officers in turn.
‘My wife and I would like to know exactly what happened. How our son died. Know what I’m saying? We’ve only heard secondhand. What are you able to tell us?’
Branson and Bella Moy turned to Dan Pattenden.
‘I’m afraid we don’t have a full picture yet, Mr and Mrs Revere,’ the Road Policing Officer said. ‘Three vehicles were involved in the accident. From witness reports so far, your son appears to have come out of a side road on to a main road, Portland Road, on the wrong side, directly into the path of an Audi car. The female driver appears to have taken avoiding action, colliding with the wall of a cafe. She subsequently failed a breathalyser test and was arrested on suspicion of drink driving.’
‘Fucking terrific,’ Fernanda Revere said, taking another deep drag.
‘At this stage we’re unclear as to the extent of her involvement in the actual collision,’ Pattenden said. He peered down at his notepad on the table. ‘A white Ford Transit van behind her appears to have travelled through a red stop light and struck your son, the impact sending him and his bicycle across the road, into the path of an articulated lorry coming in the opposite direction. It was the collision with this vehicle that probably caused the fatal injuries.’
There was a long silence.
‘Articulated lorry?’ asked Lou Revere. ‘What kind of a vehicle is that?’
‘I guess it’s what you would call a truck in America,’ Glenn Branson said helpfully. ‘Or maybe a tractor- trailer.’
‘Kind of like a Mack truck?’ the husband asked.
‘A big truck, exactly.’
Dan Pattenden added, ‘We have established that the lorry driver was out of hours.’
‘Meaning?’ Lou Revere asked.
‘We have strict laws in the UK governing the number of hours a lorry driver is permitted to drive before he has to take a rest. All journeys are governed by a tachometer fitted to the vehicle. From our examination of the one in the lorry involved in your son’s fatal accident, it appears the driver was over his permitted limit.’
Fernanda Revere dropped her cigarette butt into the coffee cup, then pulled another cigarette from her handbag and said, ‘This is great. Like, this is so fucking great.’ She lit the cigarette contemptuously, before lowering her face, a solitary tear trickling down her cheek.
‘So, this white van?’ her husband queried. ‘What’s this guy’s story? The driver?’
Pattenden flipped through a few pages of his pad. ‘He drove on without stopping and we don’t have a description of him at this moment. There is a full alert for the vehicle. But we have no description of the driver to go on. We are hoping that CCTV footage may provide us with something.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Fernanda Revere said. ‘You have a drunk driver, a truck driver who was over his permitted hours and a van driver who drove away from the scene, like a hit-and-run. I have that right?’
Pattenden looked at her warily. ‘Yes. Hopefully more information will emerge as we progress our enquiries.’
‘You
Pattenden looked at her. ‘I can’t begin to imagine how you feel, Mrs Revere. All that I, my Road Policing Unit and the Collision Investigation Unit can do is try to establish the facts of the incident as best we can. I’m deeply sorry for you both and for all of your relatives. I’m here to answer any questions you may have and to give you assurances that we will do all we can to establish the facts pertinent to your son’s death.’ He passed her his card. ‘These are my contact details. Please feel free to call me, any time, twenty-four-seven, and I’ll give you whatever information I can.’
She left the card lying on the table. ‘Tell me something. Have you ever lost a child?’
He stared back at her for some moments. ‘No. But I’m a parent, too. I can’t imagine what it would be like. I can’t imagine what you are going through and it would be presumptuous to even try.’
‘Yeah,’ she said icily. ‘You’re right. Don’t even try to go there.’
26
Tooth and his associate, Yossarian, sat out on the deck area of the Shark Bite Sports Bar, overlooking the creek at the south end of Turtle Cove Marina, on Providenciales Island. Thirty miles long and five wide, Provo, as it was known to the locals, sat in the Caribbean, south of the Bahamas. It was the main tourist island in the Turks and Caicos archipelago, although it was still mostly undeveloped and that suited Tooth. The day it got too developed, he planned to move on.
The evening air was thirty-six degrees and the humidity was high. Tooth, dressed in denims cut off at the knees, a T-shirt printed with a picture of Jimmy Page and flip-flops, was perspiring. Every few minutes he slapped at the mosquitoes that landed on his bare skin. He was smoking a Lucky Strike and drinking a Maker’s Mark bourbon on the rocks. The dog sat beside him, glaring at the world, and occasionally drank from a bowl of water on the wood- planked floor.
It was Happy Hour in the bar and the air-conditioned interior was full of expat Brits, Americans and Canadians who mostly knew each other and regularly got drunk together in this bar. Tooth never talked to any of them. He didn’t like talking to anyone. It was his birthday today, and he was content to spend it with his associate.
His birthday present to himself was to have his head shaved and then fuck the black girl called Tia, whom he visited most weeks in Cameos nightclub on Airport Road. She didn’t care that it was his birthday and nor did Yossarian. That was fine by him. Tooth didn’t do
There was a roar of laughter from inside the bar. A couple of weeks ago there had been gunshots. Two Haitians had come in waving semi-automatics, yelling at everyone to hit the deck and hand over their wallets. A drunk, pot-bellied expat English lawyer, dressed in a blazer, white flannels and an old school tie, pulled out a Glock.45 and shot both of them dead. Then he had shouted at the bartender for another pink gin.
It was that kind of a place.
Which was why Tooth chose to live here. No one asked questions and no one gave a damn. They left Tooth and his associate alone and he left them alone. He lived in a ground-floor apartment in a complex on the far side of the creek, with a small garden where his associate could crap to its heart’s content. He had a cleaning lady who would feed the dog on the occasions, two or three times a year, when he was away on business.
The Turks and Caicos Islands were a British protectorate that the British did not need and could not afford. But because they sat strategically between Haiti, Jamaica and Florida, they were a favoured stopover for drug runners and illegal Haitian immigrants bound for the USA. The UK made a pretence of policing them and had put in a puppet governor, but mostly they left things to the corrupt local police force. The US Coast Guard had a major presence here, but they were only interested in what happened offshore.
Nobody was interested in Tooth’s business.
He drank two more bourbons and smoked four more cigarettes, then headed home along the dark, deserted road with his associate. This might be the last night of his life, or it might not. He’d find that out soon enough. He truly didn’t care and it wasn’t the drink talking. It was the hard piece of metal in the locked closet at his home that would decide.
Tooth had quit school at fifteen and drifted around for a while. He fetched up in New York City, first doing shift
