Page 83 of 59 Minutes

FRANKIE

ONE YEAR AFTER THE ALERT ST JAMES’S PARK

Around midnight, eyes raw from concentrating on driving, she pulled into London Gateway Services, tucked the car into a dark corner away from the lorries and climbed into the back seat, sleeping – sort of – until four. When she woke, she headed straight here.

Maybe it would have been easier in the city.

A simple, bloody fight for survival. Unlike Dartmoor, so shrouded in mist, literally and figuratively.

Even now her memories are grey, faces and moments blanked out, dreams filling in the details sometimes, but wrong, distorted.

More gruesome, less. More unlucky, more deliberate.

Frankie is swaying. She keeps doing this when she’s not holding Thorne, rocking handbags, coats, Seb and Nicole’s cat, who loves it.

Her hands feel stupid and empty without her baby, and she fills them without thinking whenever he is asleep or with Otis in the bed, or having a cuddle with a cousin or a grandparent.

Now, the light bristly weight of the dried flower bouquet has taken the place of her warm baby. And worse, she’s got that zoned-out staring thing going on which apparently, according to both Seb and Otis, she’s been doing a lot.

Ahead of her, the monolithic memorial wall is one great mass. The individual names so plentiful that they are invisible to her, blending into the surface.

Behind her, a group of protestors have picked up their signs and pulled on big white matching T-shirts over their coats. The fronts of the T-shirts say, THEY’VE GOT AWAY WITH MURDER. A woman turns around and on her back it says, CANCEL HAIL MARY SENTENCES.

If Ashley Curtiss had pleaded guilty, taken one of those sentences, he’d be getting out soon. Would he have come to find her and Otis? To find everyone she loves and punish them too? He blames her and Otis for everything, the police have made that clear.

Instead, by refusing to plead guilty and forcing a court hearing, he joins the queue.

Now all of them must wait in limbo to be called up to give evidence.

She worries most about Juno, who she talks to constantly on WhatsApp, the only other person who knows what it was like to be in that truck.

The brave girl who came back for her, brought help and saved Otis’s life and maybe Frankie’s too.

Mark and Nathan, the witnesses to the aftermath, the men who stopped Ashley getting away, they will have to come to the stand, eventually.

Otis won’t. His memory problems are considered too severe for him to be of any value.

He knows she’s nervous about reliving the ‘ordeal’ and has fussed around her and tried to help. It has only made her feel more guilty.

Ahead of her, a woman stands gripping the handrail as if it’s the only thing holding her up.