Rowlands spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘This is Laura. She was on her way to work, weren’t you, Laura?’ The woman nodded, eyes wide with disbelief as tears continued to flow down her face. Jessica knew her colleague was doing his best to keep the woman calm, using her name frequently to keep her attention until help arrived. Outwardly, aside from long dark hair which was tousled across her face from the impact, the driver looked fine, but she was obviously suffering from shock.

‘Are you okay, Laura?’ Jessica asked. The woman nodded again but said nothing.

Jessica left Dave talking as cars swerved around the accident, sirens blaring in the distance.

She stopped to take a deep breath, swallowing a feeling of claustrophobia despite being in the open. The car horns and engines, the chatter of nearby pedestrians, the patter of the rain: it was becoming overpowering. Jessica felt a few drops of rain slide down her neck, struggling not to shiver as she made her way back towards the black car while tying her long hair into a ponytail.

The vehicle looked much more of a mess from the other side. It was a mid-size four-door model that Jessica thought of as always being advertised with a family sitting inside, as if the machine itself was the key to parenting bliss. A scrape ran the full length of the passenger side, the front headlight a concertina of mangled metal.

Jessica blinked the water away from her eyes as she saw the flashing lights of an ambulance a few hundred metres away, the noise from the siren blaring ever louder. Her eyes were attracted to the rear of the vehicle where the car’s boot had popped open ever so slightly. She put a hand on the metal, at first thinking about pushing it shut, but curiosity got the better of her and she opened it instead.

If she’d had to, Jessica would have struggled to guess the contents of her own boot. There might well have been jump leads and possibly a petrol can but she wouldn’t have put money on it. She definitely wasn’t prepared for the sight that met her in the rear of the smashed-up black car. Thick plastic sheeting was wrapped tightly around an object with heavy-looking tape sealing it into a tight cocoon. Next to the object was a rusting spade with a muddied plastic handle. Jessica felt something in her stomach urging her forward as if she already knew what it was.

She pushed the boot down but didn’t lock it in place. As the ambulance drew up, she ran to her own car, opening the driver’s door and digging into the well before pulling out a pair of scissors.

Her father had always been good about keeping things in their old family car just in case but Jessica hadn’t inherited his forward thinking. She had found the scissors not long after her dad bought her the car second-hand a decade or so ago, left by the previous owner. She dashed across the junction again, silently thanking whoever that previous owner was and feeling justified for never cleaning out her car.

As she arrived back at the black vehicle, paramedics stepped out of the ambulance. Jessica flashed her identification and told them the fate of the driver. One of them went to check on him anyway as another walked to where Rowlands was still comforting the woman from the blue car.

More sirens blared in the distance as Jessica returned to the black car’s boot, opening it and moving the spade to the rear of the compartment out of her way. Layer upon layer of plastic sheeting was wrapped tightly around the object and Jessica struggled to force through the blunt blades of her scissors. As she pushed harder, it started to rain more heavily, huge drops bouncing off the tarmac road. Jessica could feel the force of the water smashing into the top of her head. She continued to cut and finally felt the scissors push through the top few layers of the plastic. Reaching in with her hands, she pulled hard to try to tear the material apart. Slowly, it began to give and, with a combination of her hands and the scissors, she opened up part of the wrapping.

With the plastic pulled back, all she could see was a piece of cloth that had a flowery pattern. It reminded Jessica of the curtains her parents used to have at their house when she was a child, a hideous mixture of yellow and brown. Still reaching into the boot, Jessica tugged at the fabric, finally freeing it with a gasp.

Jessica tried to force herself to look away but the pale skin and clamped eyelids held her hypnotically: the haunting lifeless face of a dead child.

Afterword

The final version of what you have just read has perhaps as much of a tale behind it as the story itself.

In 2010, I had the incredible misfortune of turning thirty. Wrinkles appeared overnight, all-new silvery strands of hair providing a taunting reminder that my youth was all but gone. Joints that once allowed me to run around being terrible at football now ached, still allowing me to be equally terrible at football. All of a sudden, teenagers started listening to music I’d never heard of and I had an overwhelming urge to talk about how things were better ‘in my day’.

Anyway, despite thirty ‘being just a number’, inside I had a sense that I hadn’t really done much with my life – not unless you count being pretty good on the PlayStation and carefully cultivating a palate for ice cream, which most people wouldn’t. I figured I could either meander through the rest of my life and wonder what I might have managed to do had I bothered, or I could actually try to do something.

So I made a list of everything I reckoned I was half-decent at, thinking that if I failed at the first then I’d move onto the next until I found something that made me happy.

It seems a bit crazy now but I never got beyond the first thing on that list – writing a book. I always thought I could, not because of the saying that ‘everyone has a book in them’ – which I don’t believe is true – but simply because I had a lot of ideas.

Over the next few months, each time I heard, saw or thought of something I found vaguely interesting, I wrote it down. Sometimes it was something as small as a name I liked, other times a news story, or perhaps a small flash of an incident. After a while, I had many Post-it notes littering my side of the bed and my car.

Back at school, my most impressive works of fiction had been the excuses I had for not doing my homework, why I was late, why I had missed a lesson, or why I was generally being disruptive. I hadn’t written anything even approaching a story since then but soon thought I had enough to start stringing something together.

I’ll leave out all the boring sitting-around-on-the-sofa-while-typing bits – because they basically involve me being boring and sitting on a sofa. It may well be what you’re doing now. It’s pretty boring, isn’t it? But it was a good feeling when I finished something so completely different to anything I had done before.

If I had written it a year earlier, there is every chance the document would still be sitting on my laptop now, gathering digital dust. As it was, I was messing around on Amazon.co.uk one day when I saw a ‘self-publish with us’ link at the bottom. I had a quick read and figured I may as well give it a go.

There are a lot of books on Amazon, over a million in fact, but with mine something strange began to happen: people bought it. I’m still not entirely sure what started things rolling but I began receiving emails from strangers within weeks, saying they had read it and wanting to know if there was another one coming.

My Giant Pad of Ideas, which by this time was actually a pad, had plenty left on it and was continually being added to. I have written more or less every day since – sometimes for half an hour, one time for eighteen – but I always have something on the go.