It was February. As is not unusual during that month, it was raining. The rain was a heavy, persistent drizzle rather than anything more, but it was enough to lend a grey, monochromatic palette to the landscape, a landscape which swept down and away from the cemetery beside the old church at the top of the hill. Despite being hatless, the man standing before the gravestone seemed impervious to the rain as he studied, as though for the first time, though in fact he had read the words many times before, the inscription, the gold lettering standing out fresh and clear from the dark grey granite.
Sacred to the Memory
of
Helen Mary Smith
Died 9th February, 2009
Aged 34
‘Ten years today,’ the man mused to himself, as he once again remembered that awful day. What, he wondered, might Mary have done in the last ten years, years denied her by the van jumping the red light and crashing into the side of the car in which she had been travelling? The inquest, and the subsequent trial, had been informed that her death had been a combination of factors. The car, an old classic vehicle made long before the advent of airbags and safety belts, had allowed her to be hurled into the windscreen, resulting in fatal head injuries. In a more modern vehicle, the expert witness had declared, she would have been virtually certain to have survived the crash with only, at worst, minor injuries. The trial had been a formality; the van driver had pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving and had been sentenced to ten years in prison. Ten years, as is often the case, actually resulted in him being released after just over five, but there been no such remission for Mary, nor for her family.
The man stepped up to the stone; at its base it had a small holder for flowers and the blooms that he had been holding by his side, he now placed carefully in it – six white carnations, six red roses making a splash of brave colour against the greyness of the day.
His task completed, the man turned slowly away from the grave and walked past the church, through the lytchgate to the car parked a few yards away. He opened the passenger door and climbed in. As he fastened his seat belt, the driver, his wife, turned to him.
“John, it’s been ten years now. Isn’t it time for you to move on?”
He looked at her, his face a mirror of his thoughts
“How can I, love,” he sadly replied. “I killed her – and just to get to the next job on time – and in the event, the crash meant that I never got to it at all!”
Having no answer, his wife engaged gear and drove away whilst the drizzle still came relentlessly down.
