‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Laura said in exasperated tones. ‘It’s only a bit of water. It hasn’t even splashed your trousers. Do you have to make such a fuss?’ She crouched down and picked up the empty pot. ‘If it’s such a big deal, I’ll fetch you some more.’ She marched past a waitress who had scurried up, and straight through the door into the kitchen.
The waitress brought Ian clean crockery, but before she could bring fresh supplies, Laura had returned with a rack of wholemeal toast and a fresh pot of hot water. She dumped them unceremoniously on the table, saying, ‘I didn’t do it deliberately, you know. There was absolutely no need to make such an exhibition of yourself. Why don’t you grow up, Ian? Most women prefer men to small boys, you know.’
Laura marched off, head held high. Grimly, Ian stared at the table as he poured himself a cup of water and dropped his herbal teabag in.
‘At least you know she didn’t do it deliberately,’ Siobhan said.
‘How d’you figure that out?’ Lindsay said, right on cue.
‘If she’d done it on purpose, his balls would be in the burns unit by now!’ Siobhan said raucously as Ian winced.
Lindsay cautiously worked her way through a slice of toast, discovering that if she sucked it before chewing, the noise was just about bearable. Ian sipped his tea in silence, absorbed once more in his newspaper. Siobhan shovelled a cooked English breakfast down her neck, eyes swivelling constantly round the room in search of potential prey.
At five to nine, Ian glanced at his watch, folded his paper and got to his feet. ‘I’ll see you two at the Winter Gardens in a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to pop to the shops. I promised my sister’s kids I’d bring them back a present from the seaside. Somebody told me there’s a really good toy shop up the back of the town, so I’m going to take a drive up there.’
‘I wish he’d said a bit sooner,’ Siobhan grumped as Ian strode off. ‘I was relying on him to give us a lift. Now we’re going to be late.’
Lindsay and Siobhan slipped into their chairs at twenty past nine. The hall was less than half-full, which was more than could be said for the platform. A man with a hoarse voice was proposing a motion which appeared to have something to do with child care. Lindsay shoved her voting card at Siobhan, made a pillow of her forearms on the table and carefully lowered her head. She was drifting in the comfortable half-world between sleep and wakefulness when Siobhan dug her in the ribs and announced in a voice loud enough to turn heads three tables away, ‘That’s him, Lindsay! That’s the man I was with last night!’
Siobhan’s urgent revelation caused enough stir to ripple forward to the platform. The young man at the podium was thrown off his stride mid-sentence as he struggled to see what was going on. He clearly couldn’t believe it was the power of his oratory that had caused the commotion. It took only moments for him to realise who was at the centre of it. Even at that distance, Lindsay could see him flush. A slow ripple of mirth began in the corner of the hall.
Overcome with confusion, he gabbled, ‘Support the amendment,’ turned tail and fled. By then, the ripple had become a wave of laughter. The noise around their table was so loud that Lindsay could scarcely make out the words of Paul Horne, who arrived at the delegation table pale and sweating.
‘Say again?’ she said.
Paul’s lips trembled as he struggled for his rapidly disintegrating self-control. ‘It’s Ian. He’s dead.’
‘In view of the increasing tendency of delegates to sneak off before conference ends at Friday lunchtime, SOS is considering methods of enforcing delegates’ attendance. We await with eagerness reports of experiments in the probation service with electronic tagging; not that we imagine for one minute that we would want to know exactly where people are at crucial moments. Meanwhile, as a trial deterrent, this year delegates will not be paid their conference lunch expense allowance until noon on Friday. So be there or be poor.’
from ‘Advice for New Delegates’, a Standing Orders Sub-Committee booklet.
It was hard to imagine the crumpled concertina of red metal had ever been a Ford Escort. It didn’t look as if it could ever have been longer than a Mini. The signpost it had hit first had sliced the car almost in two, before the brick wall of the shopping centre had compressed it to half its length. As she watched a salvage crew struggle to get the wreckage away from the shattered wall, the churning in Lindsay’s stomach had nothing to do with the amount of alcohol she’d consumed. She turned away and threw up unceremoniously in the gutter.
When she recovered herself, she saw Paul had turned away and was staring unseeingly at the traffic.
‘I was passing when it happened,’ he said emptily. ‘I’d popped out for five minutes to buy some rock for the kids. He came round the corner at the end of the street there like a bat out of hell. The car was fishtailing all over the road. I didn’t even realise it was Ian. If I thought anything at all, I thought it was some teenage joyrider.’
Lindsay tentatively put out a hand and touched Paul’s arm. He gripped her fingers tightly.
‘He just kept going faster and faster. Then he tried to take the bend, but he must have been doing seventy, and it’s a really tight turn. He was completely out of control. He just kept going faster and faster.’ Paul shook his head. ‘Then I saw his face, in a kind of blur, and I realised it was Ian. I knew he didn’t have a chance.’
‘Let’s go somewhere and have a cup of tea,’ Lindsay suggested gently, steering Paul towards a nearby café. Luckily, it was the lull between morning coffees and lunches, and they had no trouble finding a quiet table. Because Paul’s dramatic announcement hadn’t penetrated the general laughter, Lindsay had been able to get the shocked branch chairman out of the hall before he could cause general consternation. Outside the conference, he had simply said, ‘Come and see,’ and led her in silence to the scene of the accident.
As they waited for the waitress to bring them a pot of tea, Paul started to shiver, like a dog in a thunderstorm. ‘He looked … he looked really weird,’ he said in a puzzled voice. ‘His eyes were really staring, and it was like he was pushing himself up on the steering-wheel. And he’d gone a funny colour. Sort of purply.’
‘He had bad asthma,’ Lindsay said. It didn’t seem very helpful, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘I know,’ Paul said. ‘Ian’s been my friend for years. But I’ve never seen him in a real state with it. Not like that.’ The waitress deposited a tray on the table. Lindsay poured the tea and Paul instantly clutched a cup, warming his hands like a man dying of cold. ‘He looked completely out of control, and I’ve never seen him like that. He always had his drugs with him, always.’
Lindsay sighed and lit up a cigarette. ‘Maybe he didn’t take them soon enough. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about asthma.’
Paul shook his head. ‘I do. My eldest son is mildly asthmatic. But I’ve never seen him like that either, not even when he was a baby and he couldn’t use inhalers. But Ian was always really careful, really methodical. Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? Look what an organised branch secretary he was.’ Paul gave a hysterical laugh. ‘Listen to me. The poor bastard’s in the past tense already.’
‘You’re sure he was dead?’ Lindsay asked, clutching at straws.
Paul gulped his tea. ‘I’m sure. No one could get the door open. We tried. The fire brigade had to cut it open. When they finally got him out, they …’ His voice cracked. He cleared his throat noisily and said, ‘He didn’t come out in one piece, Lindsay. His face was covered when they took him away. They didn’t have their siren going or their light flashing.’ He stared