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And then I saw it. Hanging on a bramble branch a short distance ahead of me, looking for all the world like a Christmas tree ornament. The breath caught in my throat as my fingers tightened around the familiar key ring, with its fob bearing the insignia of a hotel where we’d stayed, and the keys for the Gran Torino.
‘Finn!’ I cried, raindrops filling my mouth as I screamed his name into the storm. I pushed through the brambles with renewed purpose, no longer feeling the cuts, scrapes and grazes. Fear and hope had tangled together in an impossible knot that was lodged somewhere in the middle of my chest, making it hard to breathe.
My first glimpse of red paintwork through the brambles below me felt like a gift. One I was almost too afraid to open. With one hand curled around a tree root, I leant over the abyss of thorns and saw the distinctive chevron stripe of the Gran Torino about six feet beneath me. The car was on its side and tilted upwards, with most of it buried beneath the foliage.
Against all the odds, I had found him.
I called out his name, but there was no responding cry from within the car.
Frantically, I looked around for a way to climb down to him, but there was nothing to hold on to. There was only one way to reach Finn’s car. I was going to have to jump. Good sense did its best to remind me that I was neither athletic nor particularly agile, but I wasn’t listening. Finn’s car was lodged at a strange angle, and I would need to leap forward towards the middle of the gully if I had any hope of landing on it. If I missed, I would go plummeting through the thorns straight to the bottom of the gully.
I took just a moment to steady myself. From this angle the jump looked unachievable, but I refused to allow doubt to sway me. It would be, in the truest sense of the phrase, a leap of faith. But faith had led me this far and I had to trust that it wouldn’t abandon me now.
I landed in a crouch on the wing of the Gran Torino like a practised stuntwoman. It was an illusion that quickly disappeared as I slipped and slithered down the side of the tilted vehicle, calling Finn’s name between desperate sobs. My eyes were fixed on the windscreen, which was a milky mosaic of shattered glass. I couldn’t see through it. I couldn’t see him.
And then suddenly I was beside the driver’s door and finally, after the worst six days of my life, I saw him.
‘Finn. Finn. Can you hear me?’ I cried, reaching in through the broken window. My hands touched his face; his beautiful, precious, motionless face. But he didn’t respond. His long dark eyelashes didn’t flicker open, his dry, cracked lips didn’t part.
‘Finn, it’s me. I’m here. It’s Gemma. Open your eyes, baby. Please open your eyes.’
I reached into my jacket pocket where I’d stuffed the torch and shakily shone it over him. What it revealed was the stuff of nightmares. Finn’s lower body was covered in blood. So much blood. And I couldn’t see where it was coming from. There was twisted metal pinioning him in the wreckage, which I already knew I would never be able to move.
My fingers flew to his neck, but in my panic I couldn’t find his pulse. Was it on the left or the right-hand side? I couldn’t think straight. Was I too late? Had I found him, only to discover he was already lost?
‘Finn, wake up, please wake up,’ I begged, pressing my lips against his frozen cheek.
38
FINN
The darkness was complete now. His eyes felt heavily weighed down and he couldn’t imagine that he would open them again. And why would he want to? Because in the dark shadows of his mind he had finally found her. He could hear Gemma’s voice, more clearly than the hallucination when she’d sat beside him in the wreckage in her wedding dress. He could feel her fingers caressing his cheek, and if he had just a shred of strength left in him, he would turn his face and kiss her hand. But strength, like time, had run out for him now. He could hear the water so close to his ear that it muffled her voice.
She was talking now. Not to him, because the softness was gone from her tone. She was crying as she spoke, urging someone to hurry. ‘Tell them to look for my car on the road. That’s how they’ll find us.’
Finn grappled with the words, but they made no sense to him. But then why should they? They existed only in his mind.
He knew he should be afraid; he knew that death was very, very close. He could feel its hot breath on him. But his mind had found him a safe passageway from this world to whatever came next. It had brought Gemma to him, so real that he could even smell her perfume, feel the brush of her hair on his face as she leant over him, and pressed her mouth on to his.
Just one last look at her beautiful face. That’s all I need. Let me see her just one more time and then I will be ready to go.Everyone deserved one last wish, and that was his.
He opened his eyes.
39
Someone had draped a fresh, dry blanket around my shoulders. Like the two that had come before it, it would be saturated in minutes. They kept trying to persuade me to sit in one of the many emergency vehicles lining the lane – and there were certainly plenty to choose from. I could see at least three police cars, two fire engines and a bright yellow recovery truck. But I refused to move from my position at the edge of the road. If I’d had my way, I would still be down in the gully with Finn, although obviously that was out of the question.
The moment of pure joy when Finn’s eyes had flickered open had been snatched away when I’d seen his glazed, unfocused expression. I kept saying his name and touching his face, and for a second or two I’d thought he was there with me, but then he’d given a small sigh, that sounded almost happy, before his eyes had closed again. I tried calling him back, but he was somewhere else now. Somewhere I couldn’t reach.
Strangely, I didn’t hear the first siren, even though it must have been deafening. I jumped in genuine shock when a pair of heavy boots landed on the Ford beside me and would have lost my footing on the slippery surface if the firefighter hadn’t reached out and grabbed me. I was less grateful a few moments later when those same arms insisted on lifting me and passing me like a parcel to the outstretched hands waiting to haul me out of the gully.
Since then, a great many people, all of them wearing troubled expressions, had descended into the gully before eventually re-emerging. None of them had been Finn.
Finally, one of the blanket bearers had explained that the situation was too precarious for Finn to be cut free while the car was still in the gully. Frustratingly, they insisted that I wait evenfurtherdown the road while a recovery truck manoeuvred into position and began the tricky operation of lifting the Gran Torino back on to solid ground.
I was desperate for an update on Finn’s condition but was continually turned back whenever I tried to creep a little closer.
‘Can you at least tell me if he’s conscious? How is he doing? Is he in much pain?’ I fired the questions like a round of bullets at a young police officer, who had neither the answers nor the experience to hide his shock when I told him brokenly: ‘He’s been trapped in that car for nearly a week.’
