Kipper hadn’t a hope of stopping in time. For a start, he had been going faster than I, and he’d still been accelerating in his attempt to catch me.

I looked in the rearview mirror. The Volvo had almost stopped completely before Kipper realized what I’d done. White smoke poured from his tires, as all four wheels of the hatchback locked up, but, by then, it was far too late.

I had hoped that he might have hit a tree, or the oncoming truck, but his locked front wheels meant he couldn’t steer, and he came thundering straight towards the back of the Volvo. I watched him coming ever closer, almost as if it was happening in slow motion, and in the last moments before impact I flicked off my car’s ignition, pulled the seat belt tight, clasped my hands firmly together in my lap and put my head back against the headrest, all the while shouting at Sophie, “Brace! Brace!”

There was a tremendous bang as the vehicles collided. I don’t know how quickly he was traveling, but it was fast enough to throw the Volvo violently forwards and sideways onto the grass verge in spite of me still having my foot pressed down hard on the brake pedal. At the same time, the air bag in front of me inflated with another bang and a cloud of white gas.

Then there was another huge thump from somewhere behind me. Something else had collided but not with us, the Volvo hadn’t moved again.

“Sophie, Sophie,” I shouted urgently, fighting to undo my seat belt and turning around in my seat. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, Ned, I’m fine,” she said almost calmly from the back. “Is it over?”

“Yes, my darling, it’s over.”

But I didn’t know that for certain. I couldn’t even see the silver hatchback from where I was, let alone know the state of its occupant.

“Can you please untie me, then?” she asked.“I’m bloody hurting.” She still sounded remarkably unfazed by the whole affair.

The driver’s door wouldn’t open, and I began to be a bit panicky as I could smell petrol. The last thing I wanted was to be trapped inside a burning car.

I pushed and shoved, but the door wouldn’t budge, jammed shut by the collision. The windows were electrically operated, but I didn’t fancy turning on the car ignition with flammable fuel all over the place. I struggled over the center armrest into the passenger seat, and, thankfully, the passenger door opened easily. I scrambled out of the car onto the verge.

“You all right, mate?” shouted someone from behind me.

“Yes, fine,” I said, turning around. “How about him?” I pointed at the crumpled mess that had been the silver hatchback, which was now some ten yards or so behind the Volvo.

“Doesn’t look too good, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’ve called the ambulance and the police.”

I looked around. The road was completely blocked, and the traffic queues were beginning to build up in both directions. People were spilling out of their vehicles to come have a closer look at the crash. I didn’t really care.

I tugged frantically at the nearside back door of the car, but it wouldn’t open, so I went back in through the front and knelt on the passenger seat, looking over.

Sophie still was curled up on the floor with her hands tied together with the plastic garden tie. I needed some scissors or a knife to free her. I thought fleetingly about the knife Kipper had with him, but I decided it wouldn’t be such a good idea to go fetch it, not just now. I needed to get Sophie loose as soon as possible, and before anyone came snooping around asking why I had a tied-up woman in the back of my car.

I knew that there was a pair of scissors somewhere amongst our bookmaking equipment. We often used gaffer tape to affix the odds board to the umbrella pole when it was windy and we always needed scissors to cut it.

I looked towards the back of the Volvo. Our equipment boxes, which had been neatly stowed at Bangor, were now all in a jumble. The collision had completely buckled the big top-hinged back door of the Volvo, but, amazingly, the back window was still intact. I slithered on my stomach over the top of the passenger seat and then over the backseat into the luggage space. I found the scissors in the second box I tried.

I soon had Sophie cut loose and safely out of the car. I sat her down on the grass verge and told her to wait.

“Please don’t leave me, Ned,” she wailed.

I looked lovingly at my battered, sore and frightened wife. “There’s absolutely no chance of that,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

The road was rapidly filling with people from their cars as I walked around behind my Volvo to inspect the damage. It was pretty bad, with the rear far corner of the car completely caved in. The back wheel on that side was at the wrong angle and the tire was burst, and I could see petrol still dripping out onto the road from the ruptured fuel tank. But it was not half as bad as the near-total destruction of the silver hatchback.

It seemed that Kipper’s car had collided not only with my Volvo Tank but also with oncoming traffic, the first impact having bounced the hatchback onto the wrong side of the road and straight into the path of the semi tractor trailer. The driver of the truck was walking amongst the crowd in a bit of a daze. “I had no chance,” he kept saying to everyone. “That car came straight across the road. I had no chance.”

Nor had shifty-eyed Kipper. The eighteen-wheeler had plowed straight into the driver’s door of the hatchback, mangling the whole of the vehicle almost beyond recognition. A couple of men were leaning in through the broken windows trying to help him. And, in the distance, I could hear the sirens coming closer.

Another James Bond-style car chase was over, and, this time, I thought M might have been fairly proud of me. I was only shaken, not stirred.

But I suddenly felt quite ill. This was reality, not a spy movie.

Sophie and I sat side by side on the grass verge for quite some time while a team of firemen, police and ambulance staff did their best to remove Kipper from the twisted wreckage of his car.

It seemed remarkable that he was still alive, but apparently he was only just. The efforts of the emergency crews were trying to keep him that way.

I rather wished that they wouldn’t bother.

Sophie and I had been assessed by a paramedic as being physically unharmed before being wrapped in red ambulance blankets and asked to wait.

We waited.

After a while, a bright-yellow-and-black helicopter landed in the cornfield alongside the road, and soon a doctor in a bright orange flight suit came over and asked us if we were both OK. “Yes,” we said in unison. He went over to join the team working on the hatchback.

Sophie took my hand. “We are OK, aren’t we, Ned?” she said.

“Yes,” I said with certainty. “We are definitely OK.”