At first I thought there had been a murder, but then as I passed the police tape, I could see a smashed up car in the middle of the road. I couldn't go through the front doors of the building as they were taped off so I went round to the back entrance.
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E. arrived for rehearsals and I told her about what I'd seen and she told me what she had seen and we spoke about it for a bit and then stopped speaking about it. We were rehearsing and writing for this thing we're doing in Wales in November.
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At about 3pm we weren't getting anywhere with writing the thing and E. suggested we go for a walk. We came out of the back doors and saw G. and M. the two guys who manage our building in the day. G. told us that the crash had happened late the previous night. The car had been travelling at 50mph in a 30mph zone, hit ten different cars, thrown the passenger through the front window and spun around into the middle of the road. The driver, realising that he had killed his friend, fled from the scene, and threw his jacket down the stairs to our building's basement, which was why the front of the building had been taped off. G. said that the forensics team had taken hours to do their work, much longer than they'd said they would.
We walked around to the front of the building. The policemen were gone, and the police tape had been taken down, with just a few remaining strands fluttering from a lamppost. We walked along De Beauvoir road. Down each side of the road, all the cars that had been hit were lined up nose to tail, very close to each other - wing mirrors hanging off, dents in the side, wheel arches crumpled. A big Turkish guy was talking to a small audience on the pavement, claiming to have seen the whole thing. He said that there had only been the driver, and that the driver had died, but that he hadn't come through the windscreen. A woman said that she'd heard different, but the guy was sure he'd seen it. A thin man complained and pointed at one of the cars that had been hit. It was his car. It didn't look too badly damaged, but I nodded and made appropriate noises. As we made to leave a young white guy with a nice camera turned up on a bike, he looked sheepishly at us and the group we were with. I kept expecting him to ask something, but he didn't and we walked on.
We stopped for a minute to look at the patterns made on the road by the forensics team: yellow chalk ovals surrounding vague skid marks. The ovals all sort of pointed up the road, towards where I'd seen the smashed car that morning. The car was gone now. Everyone and everything was gesturing to something that was no longer there.
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Yesterday, while waiting to meet a friend outside school, I saw a roadside memorial to the guy who died in the crash: Anthony "Tony" Clarke. There were flowers and messages on bits of A4 paper in plastic wallets. The messages had that slightly impersonal feel of a public declaration and it was sad to think of his family and friends not knowing what else to do. A violent death.
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Today I looked at the news stories written about the crash. It seems like the Turkish guy was right, the police believe Anthony had been driving the car alone. All the news stories were based on the same information from the police. No one had printed any interviews. Only the Hackney Gazette had bothered to get any photos, and the photographer must have arrived after the car had been taken away because the pictures were of nothing.
