One wrong turn, p.1
One Wrong Turn, page 1
ONE WRONG TURN
C. M. EWAN
Contents
Saturday Morning: 10.56 a.m.
1
2
3
Saturday Morning: 11.04 a.m.
4
Saturday Morning: 11.28 a.m.
5
Saturday Afternoon: 12.06 p.m.
6
Saturday Afternoon: 12.09 p.m.
7
Saturday Afternoon: 1.29 p.m.
8
Saturday Afternoon: 2.18 p.m.
9
Saturday Afternoon: 3.49 p.m.
10
Saturday Afternoon: 4.06 p.m.
11
Saturday Evening: 6.18 p.m.
12
Saturday Evening: 6.22 p.m.
13
Saturday Evening: 6.23 p.m.
14
Saturday Evening: 6.26 p.m.
15
Saturday Evening: 6.30 p.m.
16
Saturday Evening: 6.33 p.m.
17
Saturday Evening: 6.35 p.m.
18
Saturday Evening: 6.37 p.m.
19
Saturday Evening: 7.20 p.m.
20
Saturday Night: 10.11 p.m.
21
22
Saturday Night: 10.13 p.m.
23
24
Saturday Night: 10.15 p.m.
25
26
Saturday Night: 10.17 p.m.
27
28
29
Saturday Night: 10.19 p.m.
30
Saturday Night: 10.22 p.m.
31
Saturday Night: 10.24 p.m.
32
33
34: Ben
35
36: Ben
37
Saturday Night: 10.28 p.m.
38
39
40
41
42: Ben
43
Saturday Night: 10.31 p.m.
44
Saturday Night: 10.34 p.m.
45
Saturday Night: 10.38 p.m.
46
Saturday Night: 10.47 p.m.
47
48: Ben
49
50
51: Ben
52
53
Saturday Night: 10.51 p.m.
54
Saturday Night: 10.58 p.m.
55
Saturday Night: 10.59 p.m.
56
57
Saturday Night: 11.02 p.m.
58
59: Ben
60
61
62
63: Ben
64
65
66
67: Ben
68
69
70
71: Ben
72
73
74
75
76: Ben
77
78
79: Ben
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
Saturday Night: 11.24 p.m.
89: Eighteen Months Later
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For Jo, Jess and Jack.
My favourite car journeys are with you.
Saturday Morning
10.56 a.m.
Samantha Clarke knew the moment they reversed out of their space in the hotel car park that something was wrong.
Not that it came as a surprise. She’d been living on her nerves for weeks, her senses attuned to the slightest threat. And there had been a lot of warnings. Some big, others small. Some had been so subtle and insidious that she might almost have missed them, until she didn’t.
And now? What was it she was sensing?
Samantha looked across at her husband, Paul, freshly showered and shaved, redolent of the cheap deodorant he’d doused himself with (in a failed attempt to mask his stress-and-fear pheromones), dressed smart-casual in his weekend dad attire of a zip-neck jumper over a blue Oxford shirt, dark trousers, dress shoes. He appeared almost normal – a glimpse of the before Paul – if you didn’t look too closely at the rash on his neck from shaving too hastily, the bagged pouches under his eyes, or the strained, faraway gaze he’d adopted lately.
But nothing Samantha saw twitched her fight-or-flight antennae. Which meant this wasn’t about Paul.
Lila, then?
A cramping in her chest as she whirled around to gaze at their baby girl strapped into the child seat behind them.
But no, it couldn’t be Lila because Samantha could see her giggling happily and kicking her feet in her lemon-yellow onesie, her tiny hands grasping for the diamonds of winter sunlight being reflected by the circular mirror strapped to the headrest above her.
But it was undeniably something. A low hum of disquiet. An awareness that things were out of kilter or off balance in some hard-to-pinpoint way.
She almost had it then. It was—
‘The nappy bag!’
Paul hit the brakes. ‘What?’
‘We left Lila’s changing bag in our room. Unless you put it in the boot?’
Paul’s face was ashen and drawn, and there was a blood blister on his bottom lip from where he’d been chewing it. His spectacles were askew, one lens smudged by a wayward thumbprint.
‘Didn’t you?’ he asked.
‘No, I forgot.’
Paul closed his eyes and seemed to swallow something sickly, then he checked all around – through the windscreen, in his mirrors – before unclipping his seat belt and popping his door.
‘I’ll go back and get it,’ he said.
‘Should we come, too?’
A pained glance at Lila, and Paul shook his head, no. But as he slipped out of the car and gauged the distance to the hotel entrance, he seemed to flinch and then freeze, like a man who’d heard the deadly click of a landmine he’d accidentally stepped on.
‘Paul?’
‘It’s OK,’ he told her, in a voice that sounded a very long way from OK. ‘Lock the doors after I’m gone. And sound the horn if anyone comes near. I’ll be as fast as I can be, I promise.’
1
‘I don’t like this.’
I was talking about the driving conditions. It was late on Saturday night and we were surrounded by darkness and thick fog. Visibility was poor verging on terrible. The road we were travelling on out of Fowey was unlit and narrow.
But my boyfriend, Ben, misunderstood me – or maybe he understood me much too well – and bit back a sigh.
‘It’s my job, Abi,’ he muttered. ‘I couldn’t say no. You know I couldn’t.’
For the record, he could have said no. He could have said it as easily as he’d said no to the two of us finishing our weekend away together.
Only, I wasn’t going to tell him that. It would be crazy for me to tell him that. Because if I did then we’d finally have the argument we’d been avoiding since he’d taken the call from the partner at his law firm in the middle of the morning, before pretending he hadn’t taken the call, before owning up to me half an hour later when we were sitting with our feet dangling in the spa swimming pool in our hotel and—
‘You could have said no,’ I told him.
Ben groaned, thumping the back of his skull against his headrest.
I kept my gaze fixed ahead, my body clenched up behind the steering wheel, peering blindly through the windscreen at the dank murkiness outside. We were climbing a steep gradient, but I had no way of seeing when we’d reach the top. The engine of my crappy old Volkswagen Polo whined so fiercely I could feel the vibrations through my hands.
I’d inherited the car from my grandparents – Grandpa had died five years earlier, my granny was afflicted by dementia in a care home – and, while it had passed its most recent MOT (just barely) and I’d paid for new tyres the previous winter, I drove it in the constant nervous awareness that a) if something major went wrong, it would likely be terminal, and b) I could no longer afford to fix even the most minor fault, anyway.
‘Are we really going to do this?’ Ben asked me, faking indifference from the dimness of the front passenger seat.
I didn’t look at him because I knew what I’d see if I did. The wounded expression. The feigned surprise.
Ben was good at acting blameless. He was twenty-nine – the same age as me – but he looked younger, with his neat, side-parted hair, clean-shaved face and preppy clothes. Tonight, he was wearing a branded grey hoodie over tan chinos and smart trainers.
‘I’m just telling you what you already know,’ I told him.
‘Unbelievable.’
But it wasn’t unbelievable. Not any more.
And yes, we’d talked about it. Sometimes calmly, sometimes not. But nothing had changed. I was finally beginning to understand that it wasn’t going to change. There would always be last-minute calls from his office, aborted weekends, ruined plans. For a long time I’d tried to accept it, adapt to it, but I was no longer sure I could.
‘What do you want me to say, Abi? Do you want me to tell you my career isn’t important to me? Because it is. This is about our future.’
‘Going into the office tomorrow is about our future?’
‘Yes.’
‘Getting out your laptop and working all this afternoon. Interrupting our h oliday—’
‘It was a weekend away. Don’t exaggerate. You always exaggerate. It wasn’t a holiday. It was a quick trip to Cornwall, that’s all. And if I want to get ahead, I have to work when they need me to work. The partners pay attention to this stuff. You know they do. There’s time pressure on this deal. I have to turn this contract around by Monday.’
I counted to ten in my head, squeezing the steering wheel tighter. We must have crested the rise because the road dipped away into even denser fog, the dank vapour pressing in from all sides. It didn’t eddy. Didn’t drift. Peering into it reminded me of walking into our cramped bathroom back at home after Ben had spent too long in the shower.
I flipped the headlights to full beam, then dipped them again. With the lights on full the fog seemed somehow worse, radiating back at us, blaring in the dark.
Shouldn’t we have reached the turn by now?
The windscreen was pebbled with moisture and the wiper blades thumped from side to side. I rubbed my eyes and reached for the cloth in my door pocket, scrubbing at the condensation that was encroaching from the corners of the screen. I could feel the cold from outside penetrating the glass and bathing the backs of my fingers. The read-out on the dash told me the night-time temperature was 2°C.
My stomach tightened. I felt nauseous.
‘This is dangerous,’ I murmured. ‘We should have listened to that travel warning.’
We’d caught the tail end of the local radio news as we were packing up to leave our hotel in Fowey, the heavy sea mist pressing in against the windows of our room. The police were advising against travel unless your journey was essential. We hadn’t passed another car since we’d set off, so most people must have paid attention.
‘You heard that receptionist. It’ll clear up if we go via Par.’
I had heard the receptionist. Ben had made a big deal about asking her advice before we’d left. She was young and pretty. Maybe seventeen or eighteen. She’d flicked back her hair and told us she’d driven into work from Par only an hour before to begin her shift, and that the road ‘hadn’t been too bad’. To go that way, we just needed to take a left at the first fork in the road we came to instead of bearing right. Following the route she’d suggested would make our journey a bit longer, but hopefully it would be safer.
‘How far until this turning?’ I asked Ben.
‘Let me check.’ He leaned forwards and zoomed out on the satnav that was fitted in the central console. ‘Shit,’ he said, turning and looking behind us. Not that he could see any better out the back than the front.
‘What is it?’ I asked him, my heart sinking.
‘We missed our turn.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. A way back, I think.’
‘How?’
‘The volume was on low. I’ve upped it now, but I think maybe when we were arguing . . .’
‘Ben!’
My eyes strayed to the satnav. It wasn’t even showing the route to Par behind us any longer. All that lay ahead was a winding country road.
‘What do we do now?’ I asked him.
‘Up to you.’
I stared at the fog, feeling a rising panic about missing the turn we’d been told to watch out for. I could barely see more than a few metres ahead of us, and what I could see was hazy in the extreme. The road we’d accidentally taken was narrow with tall hedgerows on either side. We’d driven in this way the previous evening when visibility had been better, but even that had been hairy.
‘I don’t think I can turn around here.’
‘I don’t fancy your chances of reversing back as far as we’d need to go, either.’
‘Well, that’s just brilliant, Ben.’
‘Hey, at least this way is faster. It might be better to just carry on.’
‘Only if I don’t crash,’ I muttered.
‘Look, it’s no big deal.’ He reached over to take the cloth from me, wiping at his own side of the screen. ‘We’ll be on bigger roads soon and this fog won’t last for ever.’ A pause. ‘I could drive, if you like?’
‘Good one.’
Because Ben couldn’t drive. Or not legally, anyway. He’d taken a bunch of lessons, but after failing his test for the second time just over two months earlier, he hadn’t got around to booking a new test. He claimed he was too busy with work, though secretly I thought he was embarrassed about failing, especially as I’d passed first time. I’d taken him out for a driving lesson myself exactly once, and we’d argued so much we’d never tried it again.
Usually, it wasn’t a problem. On most days, Ben walked or jogged to and from work, and if we went anywhere outside Bristol, he had me to drive him, especially lately when I hadn’t been working. Most of the time I preferred it that way. I’d never enjoyed the feeling of being a passenger – not in my car, and least of all in my life.
Tonight, though, everything felt different, more precarious. And not only because of the awful fog and the late hour, or the change to our plans, but because all I really wanted was to be back in the bed in our hotel room, burrowed under the covers, listening to Ben’s sleep sounds as I battled to block out my racing thoughts.
‘Are you OK?’ Ben asked me.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Really fine? Or really pissed off with me about working tomorrow?’
‘Ben, please. I’m trying to concentrate.’
‘OK, I’ll stop. In a second. But can I just say a super-quick thank you, first?’
I hesitated. ‘For what?’
‘For waiting to bite my head off about it until we were driving home. I had a few podcasts lined up, a bit of music, but I wasn’t sure they were going to entertain us the whole way home.’
My turn to groan. ‘You’re such a dick.’
‘But you love me. And I love you. And it’s only one Sunday. We’re going to have so many more of them together.’
I should have let it go then. I should have let us both move on. But I could feel the tears building against the backs of my eyes, a pang of hurt deep inside.
‘No,’ I told him. ‘It’s another Sunday.’
‘Abi . . .’
‘I’m serious.’ I fixed on him quickly, feeling a tiny piece of my heart break loose and float away when I saw that he really wasn’t getting it. ‘This is about you being there for me when I need you to be there for me. It’s about me knowing you’ll be there.’
‘I am there for you.’
‘You’re not, though. Not really. Today, I needed . . .’
I trailed off, unsure if I could say what needed to be said, aware that now probably wasn’t the time.
‘You needed what, Abi? What is it you—’
But as Ben glanced out of the windscreen, his eyes went huge and he reared backwards, raising his crossed arms in front of his face.
‘Look out!’
2
There was a man standing in the foggy road, waving a torch in an overhand grip.
I yelped and stamped on the brake pedal, wrenching the steering wheel to my right, watching the man slide closer as the suspension compressed and we skated across the greased tarmac towards him.
He was tall and striking-looking, neatly groomed and smartly dressed in a soaked tan mackintosh over dark trousers and leather shoes. His fair hair was slicked against his scalp and his pale skin gleamed wetly in the sudden headlamp glare.
He looked a lot like a city-dweller who should have been standing on a train platform on the outskirts of London but had somehow, inexplicably, found himself in the middle of the road in front of my car.
For a split second he froze without lowering his torch, his spectacle lenses flashing brightly. Then his mouth hinged open and he lunged sideways, leaping for the steep hedge lining the road.
I didn’t think he was going to make it. I was terrified we were about to flatten him.
But then the tyres bit and gripped and we lurched to the right, fishtailing wildly as I sawed the wheel in the opposite direction, veering for the fog-blurred hedge on the other side of the road before the car shimmied and straightened out.
‘Did we hit him?’ Ben yelled.
‘No, I think we missed him.’
‘Can you see him?’
I looked up into the rear mirror with my heart in my mouth.
The man was no longer in the hedge. He’d stepped back into the road and was standing sideways in the swirling fog, looking after us with the light of his torch angled down at his feet.
‘I can just about see him but I’m not stopping,’ I told Ben.
‘It looked like he wanted our help.’
‘No way. We’re in the middle of nowhere here.’
Ben’s silence was testy. When I looked at him, his face was bloodless. He seemed shocked.
