At that exact moment, Jason saw to his utter horror Emily’s pink van coming along Lakeview Drive in the opposite direction.

‘No!’ he screamed.

Impotently.

He saw there were two people in Emily’s van. He stared, frozen in horror and disbelief, as the Penze-Weedells’ car headed straight for the van at high speed.

Emily was at the wheel. He, himself, was sitting beside her in the passenger seat.

Not possible. No. Not possible.

Oh God.

The purple car struck the van head-on in an explosion of metal splinters, steam, flying shards of glass as thick as a cloud. The van catapulted backwards and sideways, rolling over and over. He heard the sickening metallic boom. The Penze-Weedells’ car carried on, the bonnet crumpled, careering across the road and head-on into a tractor with a bulldozer bucket that was thundering down the street from the same direction as Emily.

The shovel sheared the roof of the car almost clean off. A few yards on, pushing the crumpled wreck of car in its path, the huge vehicle stopped. Jason saw the driver in the cab, smiling with grim satisfaction. He looked like Albert Fears.

It was Albert Fears.

Jesus, no. No.

Maurice Penze-Weedell’s torso sat behind the wheel of the roofless little car. The headless stump of his spine stuck up through his blood-soaked anorak and woolly scarf.

The car’s horn blared, steadily and unremittingly.

Jason, as if in a trance, stabbed out 999 on his phone, blurted out what had happened, then hurtled downstairs and out into the street, his eyes streaming tears.

74

Thursday 27 December

As he stood, momentarily looking around, trying to take it all in, Jason could see no sign of Emily’s van. It simply wasn’t there.

He ran up to the mangled wreckage of the purple car and stared, beyond, along Lakeview Drive. No van.

Had he imagined it?

He must have. There was no van. Very definitely no van.

He turned and sprinted back towards Claudette Penze-Weedell, who lay, misshapen and motionless, in front of her house. There was a ghastly, bloody imprint of her body, like a shadow, on the brick wall above her. Her midriff was split open, her intestines spilled out onto the paved driveway either side of her, and blood was pooling all around her. A fancy crocodile handbag lay on the ground close by.

The car horn continued blaring.

He stared down at her, numb with shock. Her eyes were open, glazed, her mouth agape, as if she had stopped saying something mid-sentence. Was there anything he could do for her, he wondered, racking his brains, trying to think back to a first-aid course he’d once attended with Emily as part of her qualifications in catering. From the state of her he didn’t think Claudette was still alive. Even so, he knelt and clumsily felt for a pulse, curling his finger and thumb around her wrist, pushing the band of her Rolex watch up her arm a little.

He could feel nothing. A mobile phone began ringing. It was coming from inside her handbag, he realized.