Release of the Captured River by Keith Price

Author:Keith Price [Price, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781484159
Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing
Published: 2015-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

13

The large white van collided with the solitary cyclist just where it entered the pool of blank darkness beneath the limestone railway-bridge. The spilled citrus fruit, apples and potatoes from Brenda’s shopping-basket rolling all around her, the displaced woman slowly got to her feet, then turned in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the registration-plate on the vehicle that had briefly halted, but which she now saw was speeding away up the hill towards Pant. After doing so, the teacher leaned her stooped shoulder against the curved, wet wall of the tunnel and ran her hand up and down her back, seeking to alleviate the sharp pain that she was feeling.

Mobile-phone clutched in her hand, the tall, busty woman in the light-blue macintosh edged wearily across the tarmac and sat her herself down on a large tree-stump at the side of the road; and there waited patiently for the ambulance she had summoned to assist her, not once thinking that it might actually be the police who arrived on the scene first. ‘Bloody Hell! I’ll be sure to stick to my car next time,’ Brenda muttered quietly to herself.

And when the tall, uniformed figure of Sergeant Lloyd Webber climbed from his un-marked saloon-car to join the shaken woman on the roadside, and, and once the briefest of commiserations had been delivered, it was the white stem of a breath-test machine that he elected to pop into Brenda’s pale, quivering mouth, and the low stentorian commands of ‘Blow! Blow! Blow!’ which he repeatedly bawled into her deafened ears by way of consolation.

‘And can’t you recall even one of the digits on the van’s plate?’ Lloyd soon asked the hapless woman, as she inhaled violently and repeatedly in an attempt to stop herself from passing out, her curly bleach-blond head tipped back, her huge legs flailing widely beneath her wobbly trunk like the base of a rubber tetrahedron.

‘English, I’m thinking,’ Brenda eventually coughed up, after rebalancing her head.

‘Oh! And how would you know that, then?’ Lloyd enquired, tilting his head quizzically. ‘Seeing as all you could tell me was the van’s colour.’

‘By what fell out of it when the back-door flipped open,’ she told him, pointing a finger into the tunnel’s gloom before her, in which her stricken bicycle still lay, basket-less, and on its side.

Lloyd quickly leapt up and hurried away from the woman so as to examine the road-surface inside the tunnel’s dark recesses, as well as its damp, streaming gutters. And, within seconds the sergeant had marched back out again, something large and black swinging by its tail from his elevated arms. ‘Christ! It’s a dead badger!’ he yelled, as he rejoined the stricken woman.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Brenda told him. ‘Like I told you, it fell out the back of the van. Oh, and, officer, I think you’ll find there might be another one just further up the road too.’

Before turning round again so as to retrieve it, Lloyd gazed at Brenda and asked, ‘But why would somebody

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