Snow Falcon

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At the border between the Federal Republic and the DDR west of Eisenach, the E63 ceases to be an autobahn, and becomes merely a main road for the sixty or more kilometres through the Kaufunger-Meissner Wald to Kassel. At one specific point along that more twisting metalled strip, Kenneth Aubrey had decided upon a road accident involving a container lorry and three cars — one of them a Mercedes, the others Volkswagens.

He stood under the shelter of dark trees above the level of the road, the rain sweeping between him and the scene below. Behind and to his left, in a lay-by, the squat white shape of an ambulance waited, seemingly inappropriate to the erected carnage he was watching. The ambulance was still, its engine turned off, a fug steaming its windows.

Aubrey watched the mobile crane lowering the crushed bodies of the two Volkswagens painstakingly into the middle of the road. Small wet figures scurried around it, arranging the two wrecks as if in some display of modern sculpture. After perhaps twenty minutes, during which time he began to imagine the damp from the needle-coated earth under his feet was seeping into his Wellingtons, and he was resting on a shooting-stick, the Mercedes was towed up by a breakdown truck, unhooked, and men pushed it towards the two Volkswagens. Aubrey heard the rend of torn metal as it was edged into a grotesque three-pointed star against the smaller cars.

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