f r o m ___ M e m o r y ' s _
D a u g h t e r__________
by Jennifer Howard__________
The car and its unlucky driver had been mangled almost beyond recognition. Pity, thought Inspector Adamson. Car like that. Don't see those every day. He shielded his eyes from the pulse of the emergency lights and took a closer look. It was a vintage Porsche convertible, black--he guessed it was a 1961, though it was hard to be sure, given the state of the vehicle. Could be a year or two off. Nice car, or had been. Poor bastard had had good taste, and the money to indulge it.A strong light, suddenly switched on, illuminated the wreck, sending a million tiny refractions dancing off the shattered glass spread across the roadway. It threw into relief the trunk of the old tree and the heap of metal that huddled against it like some weird metallic outgrowth. Up above, in the branches of the oak, the shadows grew black and inscrutable.
Now that he could see the extent of the damage, Adamson whistled. The car couldn't have been going less than 50--call it 60--when it hit the tree. It didn't even look like the driver had tried to brake. In the sharp light, the crimson stain spread across what had been the passenger compartment turned a viscous black.
The rescue crew--salvage crew was more like it--began to cut through the jangled metal. The sound of a saw cutting through metal sent an angry shudder through Adamson's nerves; it was a sound he hated. Outside the circle of glare the Devonshire night suddenly seemed blacker, and he noticed there were no stars visible, no moon. He checked his watch, the numbers glowing faintly--just past 2 a.m. It was a cold November night in the country, and he turned up the collar of his coat to keep the chill out, wishing himself back in his warm bed, wishing he had at least thought to bring his gloves.
The crew worked methodically, without hurry. There wasn't a need to hurry. They'll have to scoop him out with a spoon, Adamson said to himself, and then winced. Of all the ways people found to die, car wrecks were, in his mind, one of the lousiest.
His sergeant, McConaughey, came up and stood next to him. "Quite a pretty mess he made," the sergeant said. Adamson said nothing. "I ran a check on the license plate, sir. Car's registered to a Jared Kilmartin, of London. Owns a weekend place down here."
Adamson registered the name with a mild shock of recognition. "Kilmartin. I know him. He's an art dealer. Was, I should say."
Adamson had only met the man once, but that had been once too often. Kilmartin. It had been only a mile or so down the road, at one of the occasional dinner parties given by Jane Moorhead, the self-proclaimed hostess of the neighborhood. Jane--a woman of independent means, thanks to her late husband, who'd killed himself making her the fortune she now enjoyed--had precious little else to do besides throw dinner parties. And while she was something of a running joke in the neighborhood, Adamson had to admit that he managed to find her parties entertaining--though perhaps not in the way she intended. "A study in humanity" was the phrase his father had always used when the conversation turned to the foibles of a neighbor or acquaintance, and it was a phrase that could aptly be applied to one of Jane's gala evenings.
Kilmartin had been one of her "finds"--a new, vaguely artsy addition to a tired guest list. The dealer did not seem to relish the role of Jane's latest protege. He was ill at ease, out of place among his country neighbors, and had kept aloof from the most of the company, as if afraid they presented some threat of contamination.
Before she introduced them, Jane told Adamson that Kilmartin owned a gallery in town specializing in Greek objects--classical and Hellenistic periods, mostly. This piece of information piqued Adamson's interest. Though few in his immediate circle knew it, the inspector was something of an art fancier. He nurtured a particular and long-standing passion for things classical, dating back to a picture book on the Acropolis he'd had as a child. Whenever he could, he got up to London and took a turn through the museums. Under the influence of a double Scotch, he had made the mistake of confessing his passion to Jane, who had not done him the courtesy of forgetting about it.
What Jane didn't know was that every month Adamson had been putting aside a few pounds with the idea, someday, of buying something lovely he could call his own, some fragment, no matter how tiny and insignificant, of the ancient world. He had no children to look after; he'd lost his wife too early for that, and never found the time or inclination to remarry. The money was his own to spend. On what, exactly, he didn't know.
When Jane, taking his coat and leading him through the hall to where her other guests hovered over the hors d'oeuvres, told him about Jared Kilmartin's gallery, Adamson felt a hopeful covetousness in his heart. Perhaps Kilmartin would have some advice for a collector whose means did not match his enthusiasm. Maybe, though this was probably too much to hope for, Kilmartin had an object in Adamson's price range. He imagined it, whatever it was--a marble limb, amputated from the cold body of a statue; the fragment of a vase on which warriors and athletes competed in ancient contest--cupped in his hands. He could almost feel the smooth marble against his palms, touch the rough ancient glaze with greedy and loving fingertips.
He approached Kilmartin, who was picking unenthusiastically at a tray of canapes, and tried to engage him on the subject. It was clear, before they'd exchanged two sentences, that the London dealer didn't feel like wasting his time on a country police inspector with a few quid in the bank and some romantic attachment to the classical world. "Why not take a holiday instead?" Kilmartin said, lips curved in a rather unpleasant smile, when Adamson broached the subject. "A long weekend in Brighton, perhaps."
Adamson knew an insult when he saw one. He tried to think of a snappy retort, but all he could come up with was an uninspired "I don't care much for the seaside." And beat a hasty retreat, washing his hands of Jared Kilmartin. Until tonight. Much as he instinctively disliked the man, he wouldn't have wished this end even on him.
The harsh searing sound of metal cutting interrupted this thought, and he returned his attention to McConaughey, who was in the middle of reconstructing the accident. This was a part of the job that McConaughey relished, though Adamson found that the facts of a case, once unearthed, tended not to support the sergeant's expectations of them.
"....took the curve too fast"--the sergeant gestured behind them, where the road took a blind turn--"lost control and went straight into the tree. Out of towner, didn't know the roads. Drinking, probably. Died instantly, I suppose."
"Looks that way," said the inspector, nodding in an agreement that he did not feel. Kilmartin was no stranger to these roads; he'd been a weekender in the vicinity for over a year. And however unimpressed Adamson had been with the man's social skills, he would not have pegged him as a bad driver.
Kilmartin had struck Adamson as a man who liked fine things and knew how to take care of them. He wasn't likely to own a vintage convertible if he weren't supremely confident in his ability to handle her. A car like that ought to be able to take the curves, if the driver knew what he was doing. Then again, from Adamson's brief encounter with him, Kilmartin seemed to be endlessly confident about his own abilities. A little too confident, perhaps.
He turned to McConaughey. "I want to have a look at the roadway," he said. "As far back as the curve. See how they're coming." He nodded in the direction of the mangled car, from which the crew was now attempting to remove the bloody remnants of Jared Kilmartin. McConaughey blanched, but knew better than to protest.
Adamson switched on his flashlight and set off down the blacktop, swinging the beam of light in a careful arc from side to side. It was a dry night, the road was seldom used, especially at this hour, and any marks on the pavement ought to be fresh. He expected to see the snaking parallel tire tracks of a car travelling too fast and braking too late, wheels locked in a futile effort to arrest disaster. In his mind he could hear the squealing of tires, smell burning rubber, acrid and ominous on the cold air.
But on the roadway itself there was nothing to indicate the Porsche's fatal trajectory. His light revealed only the dull unblemished grey of asphalt. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for the crushed grass the car had left in its wake as it left the roadway and headed towards its fatal rendezvous with the oak.
"Arrogant son of a bitch," said Adamson, to nobody in particular. The stars hung cold and distant above him. The flashlight, which had been steady and clear, began to wink and fade. He stopped and unscrewed the top, shaking the batteries out onto his hand. "Damn the department," he said, under his breath though there was no one within earshot. "Too cheap to buy a decent torch."
He dropped the batteries back into the metal cylinder, working by feel in the dark, screwed the top back on, and when he hit the power switch was rewarded by a strong unwavering column of light. Must have been a loose connection.
He stood for a moment and swung the beam from side to side, testing it. did a sweep of the surrounding grass to make sure it was clean. It was, as far as he could see. He'd send somebody out in the morning to do another sweep, just to make sure. "Goddamned arrogant son of a bitch."
Adamson stopped himself from pursuing that line of thought and took up another. Throw a little alcohol into the mixture, and everything could change. Good drivers became bad ones under the influence. Would it be like Kilmartin to be driving drunk? The man had barely touched a glass of wine the night Adamson met him, but that was hardly enough to go on. He'd have to wait for the lab results to draw any conclusions on that point.
Adamson walked as far as the curve, some 200 yards up the road, that McConaughey had mentioned. It was a bad one all right; every year someone took it too fast and wound up in the fields off to either side. Two years ago, just after Kilmartin had moved into the neighborhood, there had been a fatality--a party of university students had had a bit too much to drink, and the driver had lost control of the car on that curve and ploughed head on into an oncoming vehicle.
The usual sad story. It pained Adamson to recall the details. The man killed had left behind a wife and small child. One of the students had been paralyzed for life. The villagers had been up in arms about it. For a couple of months the authorities had made a show of setting up checkpoints to snag those unwise enough to indulge in that extra pint at the pub before heading unwillingly home to a nagging wife or a lonely room somewhere. Eventually they gave up the checkpoints too, and the only reminder of the anti-alcohol campaign was a forlorn poster at the pub: "DRINK RESPONSIBLY," it said. "THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN."
Adamson, being something of a fatalist, shrugged to himself. As long as people insisted on driving, as long as they enjoyed a pint or two beforehand--he was not a stranger to the pubs himself--he figured he'd be picking them up off the roadway from time to time no matter how many checkpoints there were.
He turned and looked back down the road at the bubble of light around the scene of the accident. From this perspective all the activity looked almost cheerful, people bustling about. He began to retrace his steps, swinging the flashlight--more out of habit than hope--in the same methodical side-to-side motion.
By the time he made it back to the tree, they were scraping the remnants of Jared Kilmartin into a body bag, which was bundled quickly onto a stretcher and loaded into a waiting ambulance, bound for the morgue. Adamson turned to McConaughey, who looked a shade or two greyer than he had a few minutes ago. "I think we could both use a cup of coffee," Adamson said.
Jennifer Howard's fiction has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and the Blue Moon Review. A part-time assistant editor at the Washington Post Book World, she also contributes reviews and literary features to the Post, the New York Times, Salon, Civilization and other publications.
All contents copyright © 1997, The Blue Moon Review, All Rights Reserved.
