THE CAGE (DI Tom McAllister series Book 1) by Scott Mariani

Author:Scott Mariani [Mariani, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sifu's Hut Publishing
Published: 2021-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

The major road smash that took place at 10.06 p.m. on the A34 dual carriageway sixteen miles from Oxford that Saturday night involved several vehicles. Five people were injured, three of them seriously, in addition to the single fatality who had been the lone occupant of a 2002 Honda Stream that caused the accident.

Several alarmed motorists had called in to report the Honda driving erratically at high speed the wrong way down the dual carriageway just moments before the crash. The car had already been involved in a separate incident a few miles away, in which another vehicle had been forced off the road. Its driver had luckily escaped unhurt, but the trucker at the wheel of the articulated lorry into which the Honda subsequently ploughed headlong at a combined speed of over 120 miles an hour had been much less fortunate, needing to be cut from the wreckage of his cab and airlifted to the John Radcliffe Emergency Department with a ruptured spleen, broken back and compound fractures of both legs.

Meanwhile, first responders were setting about the grim task of recovering the corpse of the Honda’s driver, which was removed from the scene in three separate body bags. He hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt and the car’s airbag system appeared to have malfunctioned. The least mangled body part they found was an intact left arm, severed above the elbow, which had been thrown over forty feet from the crash site.

Beyond the fact that he was a white male possibly in his mid-thirties, identifying the body proved unusually difficult, as the driver had been carrying no ID and the car had not been registered to him or anyone else. A DVLA search quickly revealed that its number plates were taken from a scrapyard; an examination of the twisted wreckage would later show that identifying numbers had been removed from the engine and chassis. Nor had anyone called in to report the mystery man missing, even after breaking news of the smash appeared on local TV. Running out of options, pathologists had resorted to taking fingerprint samples from the recovered left arm and running them through the police database in hope of a match.

They’d got one.

Tom McAllister’s phone rang at twenty past midnight, just as he was winding down after his solitary evening meal. He’d been feeling too restless and agitated to cook anything fancy that night, and had settled for a frozen pizza instead, washed down with a single bottle of Langtree Hundred.

He snatched up the phone on the second ring. ‘McAllister.’

It was Thins Waller, calling from the forensic lab. ‘Sorry to bother you so late, Inspector. But I thought you might be interested to know that I’m sitting looking at the remains of one Vincent F. Sweeney on my slab. Or should I say, the bits of him that were scraped off the fast lane of the A34 just over two hours ago.’

And with that, the hunt for Sweeney had come to a grinding halt. Tom was suddenly sitting bolt upright on the sofa.

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