Chapter Two: The Aftermath
A largish black car, a TX1 by the look of it, was blocking the road to the suburbs, its front end buried in the smash of one of those aluminum and fiberglass sporty vehicles the car rental place leased out to tourists. Chaz the Honoré cabbie was looming over the wreckage, his mobile in one hand and the other waving at a handful of blank-faced teenagers who were, Poole suspected, already half drunk. He threw on the handbrake and practically fell out of the Defender. "Call the ambulance!" he shouted above the car horn at whoever might hear.
"Hey, suit mon!" Chaz shouted back, seeing him. "How you get here so soon?"
"Police!" Poole bellowed at the vacant teens. "Call the bloody ambulance!"
He made for the passenger's side of the sporty number where the door had been nearly torn off. Even in the dimming light of the overhead he could see someone was trapped there, and blood spattered the ruin of the window. It was a girl, not yet seventeen he judged, blonde and pretty and still alive, but with both legs wedged under the dashboard while her compatriots stood aimlessly around, one of them tweeting their predicament, another one being sick.
In a moment Chaz was at the sporty and together he and Poole tried to pry the girl loose. Neither of them heard the off-key drone of the Enfield over the blaring horn, so when Dwayne Myers suddenly appeared in his Hawaiian shirt and began bullying the teens into giving statements, it seemed like a small miracle. It became a miracle writ large when Camille Bordey practically pushed Chaz out of the way to get at her boss by the girl's side.
"Richard!" she was screaming.
"Hold that!" Poole shouted back, and caught her outstretched hands to clamp over the worst of the victim's open wounds before ripping off his tie, praying he still remembered how to apply a proper tourniquet as he did so. Even with that in place, the girl might have died right there if Fidel Best had not appeared out of nowhere with the ambulance crew in tow. They had seen his little Ford Anglia go by with the flashing blue light on top and simply followed him.
Mercifully, Chaz had turned his attention to the sporty's motor and soon got the horn cut off. In the end, DI Poole had the bloodied tie tossed back to him as he watched the girl being loaded into the ambulance. According to Dwayne, none of the kids were tourists; they were all locals intent on carrying their drinking binge/party on to one of the private beaches along the coast road. Chaz had been returning from dropping off his last passenger of the day in the suburbs above and had just slid into the intersection when the sports car had come roaring up through the foliage from town. He had been unable to stop his heavy TX1 cab in time.
Camille and Fidel were bundling the 'just cuts and bruises' teens into the Defender for a hospital run. Dwayne was revving up the Enfield to escort Chaz, who was pushing the loudest and most blotto of the sports car crew into his cab for the ride home, as the boy tearfully protested that none of this was his fault. He'd had to rent the car because his dad had refused him the use of the Mercedes on a school night . . . it seemed he was the son of the chairperson of Honoré City Council. Wonderful.
DI Poole wiped his hands on his useless handkerchief, stuffed it into the pocket of his stained jacket and climbed back into the Defender to await the rental's towing crew. After he had seen them off there would be the great pleasure of the mound of paperwork accidents generated, awaiting his attention at the station.
...
Once home, and washed up, Poole sat on his veranda, supposedly watching the night begin to lift away from the horizon. It had seemed useless to try and sleep with the workday only a few hours away, and food was simply not interesting.
What he was actually seeing, or what he imagined he saw in the rift under the rosy cloud and above the line of the ocean, was two red eyes, not blinking at him. Gradually he came to the realization that, under their influence, he was waiting on word that that girl, that pretty, silly little child, had died of her injuries.
Poole dragged two hands over his face. He was a rational, mature twentieth century man – sorry, twenty-first century now. He was an experienced police officer. He was a Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police of London. And in spite of all that, he had seen the Black Dog.
Only the drunk and incapacitated, or those prone to hysterics, or those a mustard pot shy of a picnic, saw the Black Dog. Which was he?
He was analyzing his way toward revising how many categories of Dog see-ers there were when the noise of the Defender cut through his meditations. Camille had dropped him off when they had finished at the station, and now she was picking him up.
Amazingly, she did not sound the horn, but Poole heard the clunk of the driver's door and a moment later saw her appear, fresh and smiling, at the corner of his veranda. She wished him good morning, which he returned, and together they sat and watched the sea gradually push off its sleeping gray in favor of its waking-up blue.
"Have the Munros . . .?" Poole asked once, remembering his responsibility.
"They called, but only to get news about the crash," Camille assured him. "They love each other, really. They will never file complaints." She glanced sideways at her boss, only to see him still staring out over the ocean, nodding absently. As a response, it wasn't enough.
Camille counted to ten and spoke. "Did you know her?"
It took Poole a moment or five before it registered what his sergeant was talking about. "Who? . . . Oh – you mean the, um, the girl. Then she's, she . . ."
Camille looked back at him solemnly. "They have flown her to a hospital on Guadeloupe. She has a good chance of making a full recovery, but it will take time. A lot of time, they are saying."
"Ah."
Camille noted the loss of tension in her senior officer, the letting-out of a tremulous breath. If she didn't know better she would think he had been silently thanking someone, or perhaps thanking something, because he looked just as long-faced and troubled as he had a moment ago, doing that little semi-pout with his mouth that made her want to smooth all his unhappies away.
She counted another ten and went on. "The Commissioner has cancelled his regular weekly meeting with us. He says he needs that time to appear before the City Council and urge them to approve the plans Transport had drawn up for that intersection years ago."
"Hm."
That might have been a grunt of approval. Camille sailed on. "The manbos have held the plans back. One cannot disturb the loa, they say. But the Council may listen to us now, the Commissioner says, if you were to go with him and speak . . .?"
No reply.
This was not Richard. Camille shifted in her chair to get a fraction nearer to him. "What is the matter, then?" she challenged.
Poole blinked the red spots away and turned his attention to his sergeant. It was hopeless, of course. He couldn't tell her. It would be professional suicide. "You'll think I'm bonkers," he muttered.
And then he told her.
He was impressed at how patiently Camille sat through the whole recital without even a snigger, while she on her part wondered at how even a wild story like this could sound so plausible, if it was Richard Poole telling it to her.
Last night at her maman's, just as she had been complaining about her work situation to someone, she was forgetting who, Dwayne had come roaring up the street with news of a serious accident at the crossroads and the Defender at the crash site. The fear that had exploded in Camille's mind at that announcement had surprised her. And then, riding shotgun on the Enfield to the scene had shown her two things, first: why Richard disliked the sidecar so, and second: what that fear meant, it and the feeling of waiting and waiting as she spent all those long afternoons watching Richard at the desk across from hers in the station.
Now her intuition was hinting at one more thing. "So, this Dog," she began, "this fantôme –"
Poole shook his head. "Not a ghost. A phenomenon, a, a portent, a . . . sorry." She didn't need his encyclopedic pomposity now.
Camille put the interruption aside. "It seems like, if you had not been delayed by this 'Dog', it might have been you at that crossroads, in a head-on collision with those young ones. Don't you think?"
In which case, Poole's brain chattered on, more of those kids might have been hurt, if the low bonnet of that sporty had been crushed under the Defender's front end. And if I had been knocked out, or pinned and unable to get out the mobile, who knows how long . . . or no, Chaz would have found us . . . once he'd ploughed straight into us.
Ask not to know for whom the Dog appears, Poole. It may be it appears for thee. Or rather, it may be it comes to thine aid . . .?
I need tea.
Camille was going on, softly. "Chaz is saying all over town that you are magic."
"Um-hum. Uh, er, what? What was that?"
Camille hid a smile. "Chaz is saying that you are the phenomenon, that you know when anything unlawful happens in all Honoré, and that you will appear on the spot," and she clicked her fingers, "like that."
A blessed jolt of indignation got Poole straight up in his chair, huffing at last, worries forgotten. "What? Me? Rubbish! I mean – well, of all the nerve!"
He was still going on about it as they set out to the station, pulling up the path towards the crossroads. "Me, a phenomenon! Well, you can be sure of one thing. This is absolutely the last time I will ever go in for ghosts, goblins or any other such foolishness. Never again! Magic, indeed!"
This as he was forgetting that other thing that Granfer used to tell him; that one must never, ever, say "never".
The End, sort of
...
Notes:
First, apologies to John Donne for the misuse of his famous "For whom the bell tolls" quote.
Secondly, the Black Dog is a real (?) thing, its first recorded appearance being in France in AD 856, although it is best known for its numerous sightings in the British Isles. Variations appear wherever Europeans have settled, including North and South America, so one on Saint-Marie is not too far-fetched.
And third, DI Poole's further adventures amongst the substantially-challenged are forthcoming on October 26, both on FanFiction and on AO3, as a joint effort brought to you by sweepeaspatch and faarfromhome.