Lost Summer

‘Actually, yes.’

‘Can you tell me if you found anything unusual at all? Anything to indicate this could have been something other than an accident.’

She furrowed her brow. ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow you.’

He explained briefly that Helen Pierce maintained that her brother, who was supposedly the driver of the car, not only didn’t know how to drive, but didn’t drink either. ‘I understand the autopsy results showed that his blood alcohol level was several times above the legal limit.’

She listened without comment, and then began to scan the contents of the files in front of her. ‘That’s correct.’ As she leafed through the pages she laid out some photographs on the desk. They were black and white prints, each of the naked body of a young male, Ben Pierce among them. He lay face up on the autopsy slab, the channels designed to carry away body fluids clearly visible.

‘Judging from the contents of his stomach and by measuring the rate of alcohol absorption in his blood and brain I’d say this young man had consumed the equivalent of a large glass, or about a quarter of a bottle of spirits prior to the accident.’

‘Enough to make him drunk?’

‘People react differently when they drink, but I’d say so, yes. In his case the reaction might well have been worse.’

‘Oh? Why is that?’

‘He also had traces of a drug called Lamictal in his blood. Do you know what that is?’

‘The medication he took to control his epilepsy?’

‘That’s right.’

‘His sister claims that he didn’t drink much because of his medication. Apparently more than a beer made him sick.’

Dr Keller met his eye and though she didn’t look entirely unsympathetic she shrugged slightly. ‘That’s quite possible. The side-effects people experience from drugs like Lamictal can vary, but certainly for some mixing it with alcohol could make them quite ill. However, there is no doubt that this young man had been drinking.’

‘There’s no chance of some kind of error I suppose? Perhaps his results were mixed up with somebody else’s.’

She shook her head, and smiled a little wryly. ‘I’ll disregard the implied slur on my professional conduct, Mr Turner. There is absolutely no chance of a mistake having occurred.’

‘No offence intended, Doctor.’

‘Then none is taken.’

Somehow it was this one thing, this anomaly that Helen Pierce had been so adamant about that had struck Adam most of all. If she was wrong about that, then perhaps she was wrong about everything else too. Maybe she simply hadn’t known her brother as well as she thought.

‘You said that this young man’s sister claims that he couldn’t drive,’ Dr Keller said.

‘He never learned because of his epilepsy. Apparently their parents were killed in a car accident. By a drunk driver.’

‘Have you considered the possibility that that fact in itself may very well explain what happened here? A young man whose judgement is impaired by alcohol gets behind the wheel of a car. His inexperience leads to the accident.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s tragic, but I’m afraid not unusual.’

On the face of it, her logic made sense, Adam had to admit. Except that Dr Keller hadn’t known Ben Pierce the way Helen had.

‘Anyway, I don’t see anything unusual here,’ Dr Keller said at length. ‘The injuries are consistent with those I would expect to see with victims of a road accident.’

Adam examined the picture of Ben, looking in particular at a black mark between his neck and shoulder. Other than this blemish he appeared uninjured. ‘What is that, a cut?’ Streaks of what he assumed was blood ran away from the wound and down across his shoulder and ribcage.

‘Yes.’ Dr Keller referred to her notes. ‘There were traces of paint in the wound that matched samples from the vehicle. The wound itself is around six inches long, and penetrates to a depth of almost an inch. About half of it appears to be a clean cut, the edges are more or less neatly severed. The rest is messier, more jagged.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘My guess would be that it was caused by a section of metal from the wreck. It was forced in like so.’ She demonstrated what she meant by pointing her hand and thrusting downwards towards the space between her own neck and shoulder. ‘The angle of entry suggests it might have come from the roof. Then, forced by the momentum of the crash it cut through the flesh towards the base of the neck.’ She slashed towards her own neck with the tips of her fingers. ‘That would have produced this jagged section of the wound. It was this that killed him by the way. The artery was partially severed. Other than that this young man suffered only a few minor abrasions, apart from a blow to the head, which very likely rendered him unconscious. Though it wouldn’t have killed him.’

‘So, you’re saying cause of death was what exactly?’

‘He bled to death. Probably over several hours.’

Adam thought about that. ‘He was found in the driver’s seat, I believe, still wearing his seatbelt. If it took so long for him to die, why didn’t he get out of the car? Wouldn’t you expect him to go for help?’

‘As I said, he was probably already unconscious. With the amount of blood that he lost, I doubt that he ever came around.’

‘But it took several hours before he died?’

‘I would say so.’

Adam looked at the photographs of the other two bodies, and something about them struck him. Both Keith Frost and Simon Davies appeared to have suffered more visible injuries than Ben. They were each marked with a mass of what looked like bruises and abrasions. He pointed it out. ‘Isn’t that odd?’

‘Actually there is a logical explanation. They were both found some distance from the car. My guess is that neither of them was wearing a seatbelt. The first time the car rolled the doors probably popped open like the ends of a can and they were thrown out. It happens all the time. That partly accounts for their more obvious injuries. Both were killed almost instantly by the way, and both from a massive trauma to the head.’

‘You said partly,’ Adam said. ‘Partly accounts for their injuries.’

‘Yes. Some of these injuries occurred prior to the accident. About two or three days earlier I’d say. Mostly bruising and abrasions, some minor facial cuts, though one of them had a cracked rib.’

‘Any idea how they might have happened?’

She pursed her lips. ‘If I had to guess? I’d say they were probably in a fight. Quite a violent one.’ She paused for a moment, her brow furrowed in a puzzled frown.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s probably nothing. But I did wonder at the time why one of these two young men hadn’t been driving. Perhaps then we wouldn’t be sitting here now.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, neither of them showed any trace of alcohol in his blood,’ she said, and then saw his expression. ‘I thought you knew that. I suppose these injuries could be the explanation. Perhaps neither of them was up to it.’

He pondered her theory, but it didn’t make a lot of sense. It looked as if Frost and Davies had taken some punishment, but hardly enough that they’d allow someone high on a cocktail of drugs and booze to get behind the wheel. Especially if that person didn’t know how to drive.

‘You look sceptical,’ Dr Keller observed.

‘It’s my nature. But you said yourself that these older injuries on the other two were mostly cuts and abrasions.’

‘Yes.’ She looked again at the pictures. ‘As I said, it did strike me as unusual at the time. An anomaly shall we say.’

‘But not enough to raise in your report?’

‘No. The facts are inescapable. Ben Pierce was found in the driver’s seat. Both of the others were thrown clear before the car came to rest. The evidence at the site, and the injuries I recorded during my examination of the bodies both there and here confirm that.’

‘There’s no chance any of them were moved?’

Dr Keller frowned. ‘Moved?’

‘Perhaps they were switched. Perhaps one of the others was driving.’

‘Why would anyone do that? Besides, it isn’t possible. As I said, the evidence is clear. Both of these young men were in the back seat before they were thrown clear. I found fragments of tissue and clothing away from the wreck that clearly showed where each of them had fallen. I’m afraid there’s no mistake.’

Nevertheless, Adam thought, he had come looking for answers and instead had found one more thing that didn’t make sense. He thanked Dr Keller for her help, but as he left the hospital he was beginning to think that perhaps Helen’s misgivings were justified. Something about this didn’t feel right.

The police station in Castleton occupied a plain, purpose-built building behind the town’s only supermarket. On one side a metal gate opened to a small area where a police Range Rover with the Cumbrian police insignia on the door was parked. Adam went inside and pressed a buzzer on the counter and a few moments later a young police constable appeared.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘My name’s Adam Turner, I’m a journalist and I’m looking into an accident that happened near here in September. Three university students were killed.’

‘Yes. I remember that.’

‘I was hoping I could speak to the officer who attended the scene.’

‘Just a moment.’

The constable disappeared and a few minutes later a man wearing the uniform of a sergeant appeared. He wore a curious, uncertain expression and there was something familiar about him, which it took Adam a moment to place. He was heavier than when Adam had last seen him, more solid, and his once rosy cheeks were more ruddy and weathered now, but it was unmistakeably Graham. For a moment he gaped in surprise. It was Graham who spoke first, extending his hand across the counter.

‘Hello, Adam.’

They shook hands. Of course Adam had expected to run into them all sooner or later. Graham and Nick, and of course David. Somehow he’d known they wouldn’t have moved away. But he hadn’t been prepared for this. ‘Sorry,’ he said, realizing how he must look. ‘It’s the uniform that threw me there for a minute.’

‘I joined when I was eighteen,’ Graham said. ‘I didn’t know what else I wanted to do really. It was either this or an apprenticeship.’

‘Looks like you did the right thing,’ Adam said, gesturing to the stripes on Graham’s sleeve.

‘I got these a year or two ago when they moved me back here from Brampton. It’s not exactly Scotland Yard, but it’s not a bad life. We don’t get the sort of problems they have in the city, thank God. Not yet anyway.’ He looked around, perhaps pondering the surroundings where he could probably expect the rest of his career to be played out. ‘What about you, Adam, where are you living now?’

‘London.’

‘And you’re a journalist. When I heard the name I wondered if it was you. You always knew what you wanted to do. How long have you been back?’

‘I arrived last night.’

‘I don’t suppose it’s changed much.’

‘No, not really.’

‘So, what brings you back here anyway? Gordon said something about you wanting to know about the lads that were killed in that accident last month?’

‘I’m looking into it for the sister of one of them. She has some questions about what happened.’

‘Helen Pierce,’ Graham said, frowning.

‘You spoke to her?’

‘A few times. Ben, wasn’t it, her brother’s name? He was driving but she said he couldn’t have been. Something to do with his illness. He was epileptic.’

‘According to Helen her brother never learned to drive because of it. She said he didn’t drink either.’

‘Because of the medicine he was taking. Yes, she told me that too.’ Graham opened a flap in the counter. ‘Look, why don’t you come inside where we can talk properly?’

They went through to a small inner office and Graham gestured to a chair at his desk. ‘Have a seat, Adam.’ He went around the desk and settled himself in his own chair. ‘Is Helen Pierce a friend of yours, or is your interest in this professional?’

‘A bit of both, I suppose you could say.’

‘You know there’s been an inquest already? There’s really no doubt that Ben Pierce was driving the car when it crashed, and the autopsy results proved he’d been drinking.’

‘I know. I talked to the pathologist this morning.’

‘So, how can I help?’

‘I don’t know exactly. I’d like to find out more about how the accident happened,’ Adam said.

‘Hang on.’ Graham got up and went to a row of filing cabinets where he dug out a copy of the accident report. ‘It was the fifth of September. A woman reported seeing the wreck from the Geltsdale road when she was taking her kids to school. I went up there straight away.’

The Geltsdale road crossed the fells and wound down to the valley in a series of curves, passing through the forest for a good part of the way. From what Adam could remember it was pretty steep in places. Graham pushed the report across the desk.

‘It’s all there if you want to see it. Ben Pierce was in the driver’s seat just as you see him in the photograph; the others had been thrown clear. They were all dead when I arrived. The accident happened some time the night before.’

Adam scanned the report. Everything had been measured and recorded, including the skid marks on the road, and the contents of the car, which had been recovered. Mostly clothing and other belongings, including three backpacks. ‘It looks from this as if they were going somewhere,’ Adam said, reading through the list.

‘Probably back home to London. They were part of a load of protesters we had here over the summer. A lot of them were leaving about then.’

‘What time did the accident happen?’

‘Between about nine and ten as far as we can tell.’

‘Funny time to be leaving,’ Adam said, to which Graham made no comment.

An empty half-bottle of supermarket brand whisky had been found, which might seem a little convenient to a suspicious mind, but Adam couldn’t see anything in the report that looked obviously wrong. The car itself was found to have worn tread on one of the tyres but was otherwise mechanically sound. The logical conclusion anyone could draw was that the driver had been drunk while travelling too fast along a dangerously steep road at night. He’d lost control and skidded over the edge. End of story.

‘What were they doing there?’

Graham got up to file the report away again. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked over his shoulder.

‘They were packed up as if they were planning to leave, and they were travelling towards Castleton. But it’s a long way from anywhere up there.’

‘Perhaps they’d been to a pub somewhere.’

‘But there are no pubs up there, unless you go right over the fells,’ Adam reasoned. ‘You didn’t check?’

‘There was no reason to.’

That was true, Adam acknowledged silently. ‘What about this protest they were involved with? Where was that?’

‘On the estate at Castleton Wood, at the northern end.’

‘Castleton Wood?’

‘Didn’t you know? The estate is for sale. A company called Forest Havens wants to buy it. The woods have been full of bloody protesters since the spring. They’ve got a camp up there.’

A definite trace of rancour had appeared in Graham’s tone, which Adam wondered about. But something else struck him. ‘The wood is nowhere near where the accident happened. In fact it’s the other way, so they couldn’t have been coming from there.’

‘Perhaps they’d been to Alston.’

Maybe they had, Adam thought, though that was a twenty-mile drive over the fells. ‘You didn’t try to find out then?’

‘Like I said, I had no reason to.’

‘Not even after Helen Pierce expressed misgivings?’

‘I listened to what she had to say, but facts are facts, Adam.’

Adam glanced through the report again, looking for something out of place, but if there was anything there he couldn’t see it. He thought about the injuries on the bodies of Ben’s friends. ‘I gather from what you said a minute ago that you don’t have a lot of sympathy for the protesters?’

‘They’re bloody troublemakers, a lot of them. All kinds of hippy types sitting on their arses collecting the dole all summer. Half of them on drugs.’

‘Is that the prevailing opinion?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Has there been trouble between them and local people?’

‘Not to speak of.’

‘Helen Pierce thought her brother might have been threatened.’

‘There might have been a few scuffles, but nothing serious.’

‘When I spoke to the pathologist she said that she thought two of the boys, Frost and Davies, might have been in a fight a few days before the accident. One of them had a broken rib among other things. What do you make of that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, did you know about it? It must have been in the autopsy report.’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at,’ Graham said, sounding suddenly defensive.

Adam pressed the point. ‘Maybe the accident and the protest might be linked somehow.’

‘Linked, how?’

‘I don’t know. Why would anybody beat them up? People get worked up about these things. It seems to me it would have been worth looking into anyway.’

Adam knew that he was implying criticism of the way Graham had handled Helen Pierce’s concerns and it was clear from his expression that Graham didn’t appreciate it.

‘There’s nothing to suggest that those three lads being part of the protest had anything to do with this,’ Graham said. ‘What happened was an accident, plain and simple. Young lads out drinking, happens all the time. Take my advice, Adam, don’t start trying to make something out of this that isn’t there.’

‘But you said yourself you didn’t really investigate any other possibility.’

‘There was nothing to investigate.’

‘Maybe on the face of it,’ Adam insisted doggedly. He knew that based on the evidence he was being unreasonable, but he pushed the point anyway. ‘After Helen Pierce talked to you didn’t you at least wonder why her brother was driving? You know neither of the other two had been drinking. Even the pathologist wondered about that.’

‘But she also said both of them were in the back of the car when it left the road,’ Graham said flatly. ‘So what was I supposed to do?’

‘You might have tried to find out where they had been. Perhaps to see if anybody had seen Ben drinking, maybe in a pub in Alston. It could be that somebody even saw him get behind the wheel when they left. At least that would have proved the point to Helen Pierce.’

‘I could have done those things, yes. But I didn’t, because there was no need,’ Graham said angrily. ‘It might not be like London here, but that doesn’t mean I have time to run around all over the country asking questions I already know the answer to. Nobody doubts that lad was driving except his sister. I feel sorry for her loss, but it doesn’t alter the facts. I can’t tell you any more than that.’

There was nothing else Adam could think of to ask for the moment, and it was clear that Graham was losing patience so Adam thanked him for his time and rose to leave. Graham showed him to the door.

‘That accident had nothing to do with the protest, Adam,’ he said. ‘There’s already been a lot written in the papers about that, and most of it bloody rubbish. Some people around here have had enough of journalists. You might want to remember that before you go around stirring things up.’

‘I’ ll bear it in mind,’ Adam said, thinking that if he didn’t know better, he’d have thought Graham’s warning had sounded almost like a threat.

CHAPTER NINE

Angela parked her car in the driveway outside the large red sandstone house that had once belonged to David’s parents. It had a walled garden, and was on the edge of the town. Behind it there was a paddock where Kate, their ten-year-old daughter, kept her pony. Across the fields the River Gelt cut a path through the valley from the fells, which rose up behind the house. In the summer the hills were a patchwork of pale greens and browns and the purple of the heather. In the winter they were grey and barren, shrouded with cloud and often covered with deep snow. In bad years the blizzards could rage for weeks.

She went inside the house and put away the groceries. When she was done she went upstairs to the attic room that had been converted for use as her studio and checked her email. She loved this room, with its big roof window that looked out towards the river and the fells. There was a message from Julian Crown, who was her publisher. He wanted her to call him.

As she stood in front of her drawing board looking at the illustrations for the story that she was working on, she wondered what he wanted. The books that she wrote were very simple, aimed at two- to four-year-olds. It was the accompanying pictures that breathed life into her words. It was a career she’d stumbled into almost by accident, when she’d answered an ad in one of the Sunday papers. After Kate was born the doctors had told Angela she wouldn’t have any more children, so when Kate started going to kindergarten she suddenly had the house to herself again and she was bored. David had said she could help out with the office work at the sawmill if she wanted to, but the business was doing well enough without her, and he already had Mollie as his personal assistant-cum-secretary-cum-administrator. Besides which, the sawmill was David’s passion. She wanted something for herself.

She had phoned her old boss at the mail order company in Carlisle where she’d worked after she’d finished art college, and he’d offered to give her back her old job, but seeing the old office again, and many of the same faces, had made her hesitant. While she was thinking it over she saw an ad inviting people interested in a career as an illustrator for children’s stories to submit samples of their work.

Believing she had nothing to lose she’d gone to the library and pored over a stack of books like the ones she’d read to Kate when she was younger. Then she had gone home and written one herself, basing it around Castleton and the fells and surrounding countryside, and including a few whimsical watercolours. She’d posted it off quickly, before she changed her mind, not really expecting anything to come of it.

The publisher, it turned out, liked her work. His name was Julian Crown. Over the phone he told her that her pictures evoked a strong sense of childlike innocence that was, in his words, ‘really quite charming’. She went down to London on the train to meet him, suspicious that there would be a catch, half expecting him to ask her to pay for the production of her book herself. In fact he turned out to be a likable and genuine man who wore a suit with a buttonhole flower. He took her to lunch at a restaurant in Poland Street and told her that if she listened to his advice he thought he could sell her work. She had, and he did. Since then on average she’d produced a book a year. She wasn’t about to retire to the South of France on the proceeds, but she enjoyed the feeling of independence and the sense of purpose it gave her. She only worked a couple of hours a day, usually in the mornings after Kate had left for school. She could have done more if she wanted. Julian was always trying to persuade her that she should.

She picked up the phone and called the number for Kimberley Books and was put through to Julian.

‘Angela, you got my message.’ He sounded pleased to hear from her.

‘Hello, Julian, how are you?’

‘Marvellous. Couldn’t be better. How’s life in the wild open spaces?’

‘It’s Cumbria, Julian. It isn’t exactly the Russian Steppes.’

He laughed, but to him it might as well have been. On one of her occasional visits to London he’d taken her to meet his wife. They lived in a three-storey Georgian terrace house in a leafy street near Belsize Park. The world of publishing apparently involved an endless round of social events. In between cocktail parties and book launches Julian and his wife, who Angela had thought was beautiful and sophisticated, went to the opera and the theatre and ate at fine restaurants. Their house was tastefully and expensively furnished. Angela had showed Julian on a map exactly where she lived and she recalled his expression of surprise.