Dangerous Driving

Gladys Cramer spent the night shut in the storage cupboard under the stairs of Luke Smith's house in Berriedale, in the dark beside the body of Cody Jennings. In the early morning she forced the door open and Cody's body tumbled out onto the carpet after her. She tried and failed to push him back inside, found his blood on her hands, and ran upstairs to be sick. She was at the bathroom basin, scrubbing at her hands, when Sarah Lahey knocked at the front door.

Sarah had driven out alone in a patrol car. She had told Detective Sergeant Charlie Claiborne that she would take Glen Crosswell, and had never meant to. She parked in the driveway, knocked several times and called out that police were responding to a reported break-in, pitching the announcement as much for the neighbours as for anyone inside. Hearing no answer, she went round the side of the house to the broken window, announced that she was entering, drew her service weapon and climbed through. It was her third time through that window.

Gladys knew the voice at once. She knew exactly what Sarah and Karl Jenkins had done in that house the night before, and neither of them knew she had been there to see it. Her first impulse was fury and her second was to run, and she had the strength for neither. She shut off the tap, dried her hands, walked to the living room and sat down on the couch. There she stayed, shut down by shock, listening to Sarah's boots cross the floor towards her.

Sarah worked through the upstairs rooms with her gun raised and came into the living room to find Gladys sitting bolt upright, staring at nothing. Sarah swore and demanded to know what she was doing there. Gladys gave no answer. What reached her was not Sarah's question but Cody's voice in her own head, telling her Sarah did not deserve one.

Sarah saw that the door at the top of the stairs had been shut and drew the obvious conclusion: Gladys had found the body in the cupboard and called in the break-in. The body was no longer in the cupboard. It lay on the carpet outside it, where Gladys had left it, and Sarah did not go down to look.

With no better idea of what to do, Sarah fell back on procedure. She ordered Gladys to stand with her back to her and put her hands on her head. Gladys rose slowly and held Sarah's eyes as she turned, putting into that stare all the grief and rage she could not put into words, then faced away and laced her fingers on her head. Sarah holstered her weapon without fully securing it and arrested Gladys for dangerous driving and resisting arrest, the offences outstanding from her flight from police through Collinsvale to Myrtle Forest. She read the caution and cuffed her.

Neither charge came anywhere near the body below them. To Gladys they were absurd; to Sarah they were the only charges she could use. Gladys offered no resistance. Sarah walked her out through the front door into the cold winter morning and put her in the back of the patrol car.