One Eye Open

by Paul Finch

Genres: Crime Fiction; Domestic Thrillers

Synopsis

If the lies don't kill you, the truth will

An electrifying, high-octane thrill ride; the new must-read standalone from a Sunday Times bestseller. Dark, gritty and always at the edge of your seat, this unforgettable new outing from master storyteller, Paul Finch, will appeal to fans of Peter James, Mark Billingham and Angela Marsons.

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Readers love ONE EYE OPEN:
"Finch does it again! Tightly plotted, well written and pacy as hell" - Netgalley Review
"Excellent thriller with great characters." - Netgalley Review
"Paul's writing yet again catapults you straight into the book..." - Netgalley Review

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YOU CAN RUN

A high-speed crash leaves a man and woman clinging to life.
Neither of them carries ID. Their car has fake number plates.
In their luggage: a huge amount of cash.
Who are they? What are they hiding?
And what were they running from?

YOU CAN HIDE

DS Lynda Hagen, once a brilliant detective, gave it all up to raise her family.
But something about this case reignites a spark in her...

BUT YOU'LL ALWAYS SLEEP WITH...

What begins as an investigation soon becomes an obsession.
And it will lead her to a secret so dangerous that soon there will be nowhere left to hide.

ONE EYE OPEN

Release date: August 20, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 448

Sample

1

6 January (Monday)

Blood.

Blood everywhere.

A virtual explosion of it. Bits of hair in it, bits of glass. The vile stuff thick and clotting, sticky rather than runny but spattered in every direction.

It was the very last thing Alan had anticipated when he’d set out that morning, despite his depressed state. He doubted there was any part of the calendar more drab or colourless than the first few days following Christmas and New Year. As he walked Angus across the meadow towards the line of leafless woods, the yellowed grass beneath his boots was crunchy with frost, the sky a lid of concrete. The dog was happy enough, of course. A springer spaniel, four years old but heavier set than he ought to be, he romped ahead, stopping every few yards to sniff, his tail wafting so hard that his bottom wagged in sync with it.

Alan didn’t get to see enough of Angus. But that was the way of it when you were away at university. That was also the reason for Angus’s weight gain. It wasn’t unsightly as such, not yet. But each time Alan came home for the holidays, the dog was bigger around the belly and backside. It was unavoidable, he supposed, with only his mum to take the little fella out. Crippled by arthritis, the best she could manage these days was to let him out through the back door.

Perhaps that was another reason why Alan ought to kick uni.

He sighed, scrubbing at his hair. Ahead of him, the outer line of trees was less than fifty yards off. In the milky morning light, they were dank, skeletal.

He wasn’t enjoying the course, plus he was sharing a flat with someone who, when he’d interacted with him in the students’ bar, had been one of the good guys, but who once you got up close and personal with was an irritating oaf.

But he could have lived even with that, he supposed, if it hadn’t been for the cash issue. Alan had his student loan and his student grant, so his fees and his rent were taken care of, but for everything else, for the fun stuff, he had nothing in the kitty. Christ, he was sick of being broke.

His head snapped up. It suddenly struck him that Angus wasn’t here anymore.

He looked around. The meadow was empty. Which left the woods some twenty yards to his right. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem. What gallivanting pooch could resist snuffling around in the trees? What harm could it do? Not much, except that not too far back in the woods was the A12, the high-speed dual carriageway connecting Ipswich to Colchester.

‘Angus!’ Alan shouted. ‘Where are you, boy?’

No friendly yelp echoed in response.

‘Angus!’

Throughout the holidays, Alan had walked Angus across this meadow and along the edge of the woods, and though the dog had ducked in and out of the trees, he’d never once shown an inclination to go deeper than that. But even if he had, it still wasn’t worth panicking; yes, the A12 was accessible – there was no fence – but the high-speed road sat atop a steep embankment, which itself was deep in dead but thickly enmeshed vegetation. Most likely, the dog wouldn’t even try to get up there.

But wherever he was, he wasn’t here.

‘Angus?’ Alan ventured into the trees. The undergrowth was knee-deep, but dead and brittle. It crackled and crunched as he waded through it. ‘Angus?’ He tried to keep the unease from his voice, but where was the damn brute? ‘Angus!’

He moved quicker now, veering towards the A12, which at last was becoming visible, its bracken-clad slope materialising through the trees like a distant rampart. Alan heard again his late father’s warning words.

‘He’s a lively one. So keep him on the lead when you walk him across the fields … that road’s closer than you think.’

Without warning, the dog scuttled out from the foliage.

As always, he seemed hugely pleased with himself. His big, slobbery maw had curved into a canine grin as he tried to hang onto the latest treasure he’d found.

Alan slid to a halt, laughing with relief.

And then had to look closer.

The spaniel was dabbled with mud and hung with thorns, leaves and fragments of twig. Nothing unusual about that. It was the treasure he was carrying.

Alan had initially considered it ‘treasure’ because that was how the dog would regard it. Whatever it was – a knobbly branch, a lost tennis ball or discarded toy – they’d all proved so priceless to Angus in the past that he’d energetically ducked and dived to resist Alan’s efforts to wrest them loose; there was no game he liked better.

The big difference this time was that it was treasure.

‘Okay … sit, yeah?’ Alan said. ‘Sit!’

He hunkered down, enforcing the command with stern body language.

Angus obeyed, flopping onto his belly, eyes bright, offering only token resistance when Alan tried to work the object free from his jaws.

Alan hadn’t been mistaken, and he was stunned. He glanced up, wondering which way Angus had come from, locking on a mass of holly to his left. Venturing forward, he pushed the spikey boughs apart. Eager to take point, Angus shoved his way past. Alan wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find on the other side. Perhaps a half-dug pit that someone had given up on. Maybe a burst-open hessian sack.

But not this.

Not in the middle of the woods.

Not a vehicle … even if it was mangled, twisted and wedged against a tree trunk, the force of which impact had caused the tree to splinter across the middle and sag part-way over.

Alan didn’t think he’d ever seen a car as comprehensively smashed: concertinaed bodywork, an imploded windscreen, a crumpled bonnet from beneath which the engine had all but disgorged itself, its vital fluids leaking from a spaghetti-like tangle of melted, hissing tubes.

Finally, he took in the bodies.

Two, he thought dazedly. One on either side. Each hanging upside down from its respective doorway.

And blood. That blood, which seemed to be literally everywhere.

2

6 January (Monday)

Lynda understood why her kids were less than motivated that first morning of the spring term. It was 7.30 when the alarm went off, but the meagre light penetrating the bedroom was so dull that she could only locate the clock on the dresser because of its glowing digits. The central heating had been on half an hour, but the room was still chilly.

Don mumbled something, a motionless hump in the dimness.

‘Coming down for breakfast?’ Lynda asked, pulling a dressing gown over her nightie.

He didn’t reply, which was the usual. She checked the radiator with her fingertips before heading out and trekking along the landing, banging first on Daniella’s bedroom door. ‘Come on, miss … back to school. Start getting ready.’

A muffled groan responded.

Charlie’s door was already open. Glancing in across the pile of new Christmas toys, Lynda found her diminutive six-year-old already sitting up in bed, his blond hair ruffled. He regarded her with a bleak expression. And coughed. Three times in a row.

‘The holiday TV’s over, Charlie,’ Lynda said. ‘What’re you going to do all day, sit watching quiz shows?’

‘I might learn something.’ His voice was feeble, purposely pained. ‘Grandpa Jack says you can learn things from quiz shows.’

‘You’ll learn everything you need to at school.’

Downstairs, Lynda hit the lights and pulled the curtains open in the living room. Outside, a pale, bloodless dawn was filtering across the estate. She used the remote to switch the satellite on, jumping to Nicktoons. On the way through the dining room to the kitchen, she gazed despairingly at the dining table, which was buried under a deluge of notebooks, scribbled paperwork and mugs of half-drunk coffee. In the midst of the mess, Don’s laptop was still plugged in, despite her having raised repeated concerns about his habit of leaving gadgets on to charge up overnight.

She flipped the kettle on, threw some bread into the toaster and, digging the iPhone from her dressing gown pocket, checked her messages. Some twelve minutes later, having drunk her coffee and eaten her toast, Lynda stumped back to the bottom of the stairs and called Daniella and Charlie again.

‘I have to go to work,’ she added loudly. ‘And you know your dad’s too busy to take you. If you don’t come down now, you’ll have to walk … and it’s miserable as sin out there.’

She was preparing two bowls of cereal when Daniella appeared, looking as uncomfortable as possible to be back in her school uniform. Charlie entered the lounge a short time after, seeming groggy, still attempting to affect ill health.

‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ Daniella said, eyes locked on the TV screen as she munched her flakes. ‘That we’ll have to walk to school. It’s not even light outside yet.’

‘It’s light enough,’ Lynda replied.

‘You know it wouldn’t be safe for us. You’re a police lady. You should know that better than anyone. And it’s cold too. We might not just get murdered. We might freeze.’

Before Lynda could respond, a text buzzed in her dressing gown pocket. She saw that it was from Clive Atkins.

Call me when you’re up. It’s important.

She headed for the hall. ‘Eat up, you two. And then brush your hair and make sure you’ve got everything you need.’ On her way upstairs, she phoned Clive.

‘It’s after eight,’ she said. ‘Why would you think I wouldn’t be up? I’ve got two kids to get ready for school.’

‘Yeah, sorry,’ he replied. Muffled traffic hummed in the background. ‘Holidays are over, aren’t they?’

She entered the bedroom. ‘When did I last have a lie-in, anyway?’

Her young DC could be annoyingly priggish. It wasn’t that he was deliberately offensive, but he was so precise and correct in his behaviour at work that he sometimes took it as read that no one else ever was.

‘Sorry about that … Look, don’t come to the office.’

‘Why not?’ she asked, seeing that Don was now seated upright in bed, his hair a mop as he rubbed at the back of his neck.

‘We’ve copped for a job. And it’s a big one.’

Lynda put him on speaker, and propped the phone on the dresser, as she slung her gown and nightie onto the bed and grabbed some underwear from the drawers. ‘Tell me.’

‘There was a smash on the A12 last night. Only one vehicle involved as far as we can tell, but unusual circs. Rachel wants us over there straight away.’

‘Are we talking critical incident?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Not yet?’

‘We’ve got two seriously injured, male and female. Alive at present, though unconscious. It could still turn into a double-fatal.’

Lynda had already climbed into her jeans. She pulled on a T-shirt and sweater and groped around in the half-light for her lace-up boots. ‘Where is it?’

‘Four miles north of the A120, southbound. You won’t be able to miss it.’

‘You there now?’

‘Almost. I’ve got you a radio and signed you on.’

‘Okay. Just hold the fort. I’ll be with you in twenty.’

‘Wilco.’ He cut the call at his end.

‘So, I don’t get a lie-in this morning, either?’ Don grunted.

Lynda tied her laces, before standing up and moving to the wardrobe. ‘Do you need one?’

There was no immediate response. She glanced around as she put her anorak on.

‘What I need is a break.’ He didn’t bother looking round as he padded naked into the en suite.

Despite his forty years, he was still tall, lean and in relatively good shape, his bare bottom tight and round. It might have been an erotic sight in any other circumstance, but he’d only taken to going to bed nude recently because he sweated so much when he was asleep. It had reached a stage where he was getting through several pairs of shorts a night. The reason, the doctor said, was stress. But then that was always the reason with Don. It had been the same during his final months with Major Investigations. The problem had subsided a little after he’d accepted the medical retirement package. But now, two years on, he was still unable to sell Nick ’Em, his warts-and-all exposé of life at the sharp end of British policing, and his presence in society was fast receding from view (in Don’s mind, at least).

‘You go, it’s all right.’ He stood in front of the sink, gazing at his unshaved reflection. ‘I’ll drop them off.’

Lynda checked that her gloves were in her anorak pockets, before moving to the bathroom door. ‘It’ll happen, Don.’

‘In that case, everything’ll be fine, won’t it?’ he said.

He didn’t bother looking round at her.

3

6 January (Monday)

Lynda had turned thirty-six two months ago, but didn’t think the years, or her two pregnancies, had been cruel. Her shoulder-length brown hair was still thick and lush, she hadn’t wrinkled up very much yet, and if she wasn’t naturally slim anymore, she was at least trim – the result of punishing sessions in the gym whenever she could find the time.

She’d been an officer with Essex Police for sixteen years now. The first two she’d spent in uniform, before joining CID in 2005, where she’d met and been swept off her feet by the handsome, debonair Detective Sergeant Don Hagen. Once they’d become involved, they’d moved to separate subdivisions so as not to let their feelings for each other get in the way of work. It had been a good plan, their courtship and 2006 marriage passing off without a hitch. In 2007, when Lynda returned from maternity leave, having given birth to Daniella, she’d remained a detective – in fact she was now a detective sergeant herself – but had accepted reassignment to the Essex Roads Policing Division, in other words ‘Traffic’, specifically the SCIU, or Serious Collision Investigation Unit, so that she could work nine-till-five, Monday-to-Friday.

Her phone rang, interrupting her thoughts.

‘It’s me,’ Clive said via the hands-free, HGVs rumbling past him. He had to shout to be heard. ‘How are you doing?’

‘I’m stuck in a jam on a backroad between Lawford and Dedham,’ Lynda said. ‘Presumably this is because you’ve closed off the A12 southbound?’

‘Correct. There’s a diversion along the B1029.’

Lynda was more than a little irritated, but she supposed that even had he warned her there’d be traffic chaos all the way in, there was no easy route around it, even by activating the blues and twos wired into her Qashqai’s exterior lighting system, which she’d already done.

‘Listen, Clive … we can’t close the A12 all day.’

‘I agree. Especially as I’m here now, and it doesn’t look as if there was any obvious collision on the road itself.’

That puzzled her. ‘So, what exactly have we got?’

‘Beige Ford Mondeo, 2-litre. Looks as if it came off the dual carriageway at high speed – extraordinary speed, I reckon. The side barrier’s been flattened like cardboard. Then it went down the slope into the woods on the east side of the road. No trace of any other vehicle involved. Not yet. The sooner we get Aziz on the plot, the better.’

Aziz Khan, an ex-Traffic man of thirty years’ experience in his own right, was now their resident Forensic Collision Investigator and an expert in vehicular accident reconstruction. He ought to be arriving soon, though doubtless he too was stuck in the gridlock of cars.

‘What about the two casualties?’ Lynda asked.

‘Male and female,’ Clive said. ‘Both in their mid-thirties, I’d say. Unidentified so far. Both removed to Colchester General with severe head injuries. They were out cold when the ambulance arrived and remained that way even when the paramedics were carting them up the slope – and that was a job and a half, I’ll tell you.’

‘What do you mean unidentified?’

‘Well … they were lacking any documentation. No wallets or purses containing credit cards, driving licences or whatever. No handbag. Didn’t even have mobile phones on them, except for a throwaway cheapie.’

‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’

‘There’s odder stuff, but …’ He was distracted by someone talking to him. ‘Yeah, I’ll come in a sec,’ he said. ‘You still there, Lynda?’

‘What about the vehicle registration? Can’t you ID them that way?’

‘Like I say, there’s odd stuff here. I’ll bring you up to speed when you arrive. How long do you think you’ll be?’

Lynda glanced at the clock on her dash. ‘ETA ten.’



Even on a dreary January morning, Detective Constable Clive Atkins managed to look smart. He was ten years younger than Lynda, and a tall guy of mixed-race origin, handsome, and always clean-shaven. His suits and ties hung well on him even with a heavy, hi-vis POLICE jacket worn over the top.

Lynda pulled on her own jacket as she approached along the blacktop. Navigating the standing jams of traffic on the country lanes between here and Manningtree had taken forty minutes when it should have taken ten, even with her lightshow activated. When she’d reached the A12, she’d cut north along the southbound carriageway, this section now empty, of course, parking beyond the incident tape, next to Clive Atkins’ grey Peugeot 308, just short of the designated control vehicle, a Traffic Range Rover. This was unmanned but still occupied the middle of the two-lane carriageway, its beacon swirling.

‘There’re going to be a lot of upset commuters,’ Lynda said, accepting a radio and pulling on her gloves. The sun was aloft, but no more than a dim radiance amid clouds the colour of dishwater. The frost along the verges had melted, but the air was piercingly cold.

‘Rachel’s been on to Chief Superintendent Templeton,’ Clive replied, falling into step alongside her. ‘We’ve got till twelve noon. After that, he wants to review.’

‘No pressure then. Who’s Road Scene Manager?’

‘Gina Tubbs. She was first on the scene and recommended the case for investigation.’

Lynda nodded. Traffic Sergeant Gina Tubbs was usually on the money with these things.

They walked north along the southbound. Beyond the central barrier, northbound vehicles moved freely, though cars slowed as they passed. This section of the A12 passed through open countryside. It was also elevated at this point, with low-lying fields, meadows and woodland on either side of it.

‘Like I say, no obvious sign there was a collision on the road,’ Clive said.

A point came up on their right where a portion of the roadside barrier, perhaps thirty feet or so, had vanished, and now was replaced by a taut line of incident tape. Gina Tubbs stood to one side, huddled under her hi-vis slicker, her white TRAFFIC hat tilted down as she scribbled on a pad. Beyond the missing barrier, Lynda saw a tangle of splintered shrubs and saplings.

‘The accident seems to have occurred last night,’ Clive added. ‘Which I presume is why no one reported it until this morning.’

‘Who did report it?’ Lynda asked.

‘Some local guy. He was walking his dog.’

‘What time was that?’

‘Not long after seven.’

‘Only two people on board the Mondeo?’

‘Yeah. The bloke was driving, the girl riding.’

‘Both still unconscious?’

‘That’s the last word from the hospital. Being prepped for surgery as we speak.’

‘Did the paramedics give any indication how bad they were?’

‘Sounds like the female’s got a severe skull trauma. We could be close to losing her. The male …?’ Clive shrugged.

Lynda turned, checking back across the whole breadth of the road. Normally, even if there’d been only a minor collision, its surface would be scattered with fragments of glass and splintered alloy. But there was nothing obvious. She turned back to the Road Scene Manager. ‘Morning, Gina.’

‘Lynda,’ Tubbs replied.

‘Your lot are going to have a busy day, I think.’

‘Tell me about it. We’ve already got queues on B-roads that most people didn’t even know existed till this morning.’

Lynda approached the tape. Two strips of the grass verge underneath the barrier had been churned to black pulp. Snapped struts were all that remained of the barrier itself. The undergrowth behind had been pulverised: smaller trees smashed and bushes uprooted. She leaned forward to gaze down a sloping trail of such destruction, which was further defined by strips of fluttering incident tape tied between the trees on either side.

‘That’s Little Crickledon Wood, down there,’ Clive said. ‘It’s only a coppice really. Runs along the bottom of the embankment for a couple of miles.’

At the far end of the damage trail, perhaps twenty feet below their position, but a good thirty yards from the foot of the embankment, Lynda could just about distinguish the battered wreck of a beige vehicle glinting through the devastated foliage.

She glanced back at the road. ‘Am I right in thinking there’s a distinct absence of skid marks here?’

‘That struck me too,’ Clive replied.

‘And me,’ Tubbs said.

‘So, they didn’t try to brake?’ Lynda asked.

Clive shrugged again.

‘Checked for traces of oil on the road?’ she wondered.

‘No sign of it from a cursory exam.’

‘Ice?’

‘It got down to minus three last night,’ Tubbs said. ‘But even if they hit black ice, you’d still think they’d have tried to brake.’

Lynda walked the length of the shattered barrier. Clive followed. Behind them, Tubbs resumed her writing.

‘Attempted suicide?’ Lynda suggested.

Clive was non-committal. ‘We’ve seen it before, but … it’d be quite a way to go, with no certainty you’d go quickly or even at all. Plus, it’s difficult to imagine two of them wanting to give it a whirl.’

She mused. ‘Maybe it was only the driver who wanted to end it. And the poor passenger got taken along for the ride.’

Clive grimaced.

They straddled the barrier on the right side of the tape, and commenced clambering downhill, keeping clear of the path of destruction, but blundering from tree to tree just to stay upright.

‘What’s this other thing you wanted to tell me, anyway?’ Lynda said, as they arrived on the flat. ‘Concerning the IDs, or lack thereof.’

‘Oh,’ Clive replied, ‘the car was running on dummy plates.’

She glanced back at him. ‘Come again?’

He checked his pocket book. ‘That index, Oscar-Sierra-nine-six-one-Hotel-Uniform-Bravo, is a professionally made duplicate. I ran it straight away. Belongs to an identical vehicle currently in the ownership of Mr Harold Ball in Bournemouth.’

‘This Mondeo is a clone?’

‘Seems like it.’

Lynda pushed through a few tangles of desiccated undergrowth. The wreck lay in front of them, encircled by an extra cordon of tape. The car had been scrunched out of shape by the front-end impact on a mature sycamore, which had split crosswise and half toppled onto the Mondeo’s roof, compressing it downward. The engine hung out in pieces from under the bonnet. Every window had gone, and what she could see of the interior was crammed with shattered branches. All four doors hung buckled and twisted, having burst open on impact. The closest of the front two was the driver’s door; congealed blood was much in evidence, streaking the door inside and out, spattering what she could see of the car’s interior.

Another Traffic officer, Tim Philbin, a burly guy in his early thirties, with a dense brown beard and thick, horn-rimmed glasses, stood close by with a clipboard. He nodded to them, made a note on his log and offered it for them to sign. They both complied, before pulling their woollen gloves off and replacing them with latex disposables. Lynda walked around the cordon’s exterior.

‘This is definitely not Harold Ball’s car?’ she asked.

‘Definitely not,’ Clive confirmed. ‘He’s a retired gent and his car’s currently sitting in his garage. He was good enough to show the local divisional lad who went around to check.’

On the other side of the car, the passenger door was equally stained with dried blood, as was the dashboard when Lynda leaned over the tape.

‘We haven’t gone over it in close-up yet,’ Clive said. ‘But I’d like to bet the ID number’s been changed.’

Lynda nodded. ‘So, we’re talking chop-shop … or something similar?’

‘Seems possible.’

‘How intriguing.’

‘There’s also this.’ Clive signalled to Philbin, who approached and offered something to Lynda. It was a transparent plastic evidence sack containing what looked like a bundle of £20 notes bound with elastic bands. ‘This was found in the vicinity of the wreck,’ Clive added.

‘Specifically, where?’

‘We don’t know. The guy who was walking his dog …’ Clive checked his notes again. ‘Name’s Alan Langton. His dog found it. The dog was already running around with the money in its mouth when Langton got here.’

‘I assume we’ve not counted it?’

‘Thought I’d leave that to Forensics. But if they’re all twenties, I reckon there’s at least a thousand quid there.’

Lynda pondered that as she wandered around outside the cordon, eyes glued to the ground. She followed the outer circumference of the taped-off area, starting on the north side, then the east, then the south, and then back again, each time moving three or four yards further out, covering a wider and wider arc of woodland. Clive followed her.

Briefly, her eyes were drawn to a scattering of white, flaky material at the foot of a silver birch. But it turned out to be a few fragments of torn wood and tree bark.

‘A grand just lying here,’ she mused. ‘A car that doesn’t exist, which swerves off the road at high speed for no obvious reason. No immediate sign that another car was involved … at least there was no impact to cause the swerve. And then the driver doesn’t even brake.’

‘Told you it was odd.’

‘You did.’ They climbed back up the slope. ‘What’s this guy Langton like?’

‘Gina Tubbs interviewed him. No statement yet, though.’

At the top of the slope, Tubbs was still engaged in paperwork.

‘What’s the story with Langton?’ Lynda asked.

‘He was back at his house when I went to see him,’ Tubbs said. ‘In a bit of a state.’

‘Define “a bit of a state”?’

‘Shaking, pale. Drinking coffee like there was no tomorrow. Didn’t think I’d have much joy getting a coherent statement off him. Not yet anyway. He’s not going back to uni till tomorrow. I’m calling back later on.’

Lynda wandered a few yards north. ‘Something I want you to do for me, Clive.’

He walked up behind her. ‘No probs.’

‘Find out how many Ford Mondeos have been reported stolen and never recovered in the Essex Police Force area. Go back five years. Not just beige, of course. Any colour.’

He nodded. ‘CCTV?’

‘I’ll start that ball rolling.’ She advanced again because something else had caught her attention. ‘Do that in a minute. What do you think of this?’ She walked more quickly. ‘And this?’

Clive hurried to catch up. Some fifty yards north of the flattened barrier, a lengthy smear of rubber arced across the blacktop. Twenty yards further on, Lynda stopped next to another; this one zigzagged in a different direction. There was yet another one close behind that, though thus far there was no rhyme or reason to the pattern.

Clive shrugged. ‘Could be relevant.’

‘The sooner the lab rats get here, the better,’ Lynda said. ‘These marks lead up to our incident, but we need to know if they’re connected.’

They walked on several hundred yards, encountering further such smears and smudges on both lanes, all of which indicated abrupt braking, swerving and skidding. Even though Photographic were en route, no doubt mired in the traffic like everyone else, Lynda took several pictures on her mobile. Half a mile from the crash site, the central barrier displayed what looked like recent damage, the white-painted metal gashed and scraped.

Lynda photographed this too, and then dug some tweezers from her pocket. Picking one or two flakes of metallic beige paint from the gouge marks, she slipped them into an evidence envelope and held them to the light.

‘Bits of glass on the road surface here too,’ Clive said.

‘Bag them,’ she replied.

The glass in itself told them nothing. There was broken glass the length of Britain’s highways, but quite clearly something had been happening here.

‘Our guy was all over the road, wasn’t he?’ she observed.

Clive glanced back. ‘And over quite a distance. I hope Aziz Khan’s got his whole team with him. If we’ve only got till lunchtime, they’ll have to go up and down this carriageway on their hands and knees in double-quick time.’

‘We’re going to need an extension on that,’ Lynda replied. Again, she scanned the repeating crisscross of melted rubber stripes. ‘You know, I’ve seen this kind of thing before.’

‘Yeah?’

‘2013 … RTA on the A414 near Harlow. No other vehicles involved, but the couple in the car were fighting.’

‘Fighting?’

‘Physically. The driver lost control, clipped the kerb, rolled his Porsche over four lanes.’

‘We don’t know there’s no other vehicle involved in this one yet.’

‘That’s true. Compelling case to kick off the New Year, eh?’

Clive didn’t seem enamoured by the prospect, which was not atypical. In complement to his smart appearance and conscientious attitude, he was a worker bee. You could always rely on Clive to get a job done. But he didn’t like complications.

‘What’s up?’ She nudged him. ‘You don’t like a challenge now and then?’

‘Gives us something to get our teeth into, I suppose.’

4

6 January (Monday)

‘You’ve got th