When Margaret
Linda Kennedy got into her car that morning in Brocklington she was feeling
unusually positive, and it was the first time for several years she had felt
that way, in fact it was the first time really since her divorce.
The village of Brocklington was on
the River Brooke about six miles downstream from Sharping St Mary in the
Finchbottom Vale which was nestled comfortably between the Ancient Dancingdean
Forest to the south and the rolling Pepperstock Hills in the north, those who
are lucky enough to live there think of it as the rose between two thorns.
The Vale was once a great wetland
that centuries earlier stretched from Mornington in the East to Childean in the
west and from Shallowfield in the south to Purplemere in the north.
But over the many centuries the vast
majority had been drained for agriculture, a feat achieved largely by the
efforts of famous Mornington Mills, of which only three had survived to the
present day and even those were no longer functional and were in various states
of repair.
There were only three small bodies of
water left in the Vale now one in Mornington, one in Childean and third of
course was Purplemere and it was Purplemere where Maggie was headed with her
new-found positivity.
The reason for it was actually a
misunderstanding and stemmed from the moment when she viewed her Twitter feed
and saw that #MLKday was trending.
“MLK? That’s me” she said
triumphantly and went off to shower.
Had she clicked on the hashtag she
would have discovered that it was actually Martin Luthor King day and not
Margaret Linda Kennedy day, but she hadn’t so she took it as a sign.
In truth it didn’t really matter what
made her positive, what was important was that she liked the feeling and she
was determined not to relinquish the feeling, and she managed to get as far as
Purplemere when the incident that dented her positivity occurred.
She had just got off the Finchbottom
Expressway onto the slip road when a BMW undercut her and, in the process,
sideswiped her into the crash barrier.
The airbag deployed the moment she
made impact and she closed her eyes and stamped on the brakes as her momentum
carried her almost sixty yards before she came to a halt, and she was dazed and
bleeding from a head wound as she saw the BMW drive away and then she passed
out.
When the ambulance arrived at the
Royal Downshire Hospital in Purplemere they took her straight into the
emergency department and she was immediately attended to by Doctor Vera
Williams and Nurse Amanda Turner
PC King
sat down next to Maggie’s bed while Amanda Turner,
a skinny freckly nurse with her straw coloured hair
tied in a bun stitched the cut on her scalp.
“Do you
know who ran you off the road?” Marty King asked
“No” She
replied
“Can you
describe the car?” he asked
“Silver”
“Make?
Model?”
“No” she
said shaking her head
“Keep
still hon” Nurse Turner said
“Dash cam”
Maggie replied
“Excuse
me?” PC King responded
“I had a
dash cam, forward and rear facing” she said and winced
“Well that
will definitely help” he said “I’ll come back this evening and get a proper
statement.
“Ok” she
replied with closed eyes
As PC King
walked away Amanda leant in close and whispered
“He’s a
dish” And squeezed Maggie’s hand as she added “and he’s coming back to see you
later”
Maggie had
a mild concussion, a broken wrist, bruised ribs and a number of cuts and
contusions so they admitted her overnight for observation, and it was upstairs
on a ward where PC King went to take her statement and left his partner PC
Ricky Hall in the ED where nurse Amanda
Turner
flirted with him.
And as if being six feet four inches tall didn’t
make him stand out enough, nature had also endowed him with prematurely grey
hair.
But Maggie cheered up when she saw him approaching,
she been a bit miserable since they took her up to the ward, she’d overheard
the porters talking earlier and one of them mentioned Martin Luthor King Day.
“Duh” she said to herself “so much for being a
sign”
So, she’d spent the afternoon feeling sorry for
herself but when she saw him she realized Amanda was right, he was a dish, and
she had always had a weakness for grey hair.
It didn’t
take long to take Maggie’s statement as she was very together and very precise,
which was a blessing and a curse because he rather liked her and although the
way she gave her statement made it easier for him to transcribe later it meant
the interview would be over far too quickly.
He thought
it was a shame he was on duty as he would have asked her out under any other
circumstances.
When he
had finished he handed her the statement for her to sign, and after she had
scrawled her Monica she noticed his own signature and printed beneath it was PC
M.L.King.
“MLK” she
thought to herself “maybe it was a sign after all”
Maggie
handed the statement back to him and blurted out
“Can I
call you? …. in case I think of anything else”
“Yes” he
said “and perhaps I should have your number in case I have any more questions
for you”
“What a
good idea” she said and handed him her phone, and he smiled as he entered his
number.
No comments:
Post a Comment