ahead of them; a row of orange cones placed evenly across all three lanes and the hard shoulder. Behind this meagre barrier, three traffic police Rovers were parked end to end. The six officers that had arrived in them to set up the roadblock were now having to deal with a growing crowd of drivers who had climbed out of their vehicles to find out why the hell the motorway was being closed like this.
Jenny turned round to look out of the rear window of the taxi. Behind them, the traffic had backed up very quickly. They were wedged in a river of inert trucks, vans and cars that stretched into the distance as far as she could see.
‘We’re going nowhere,’ said Paul Davies, the man Jenny had met only hours ago, and who she was sharing the taxi with.
‘It looks like that, doesn’t it?’ she replied.
Paul looked up at a driver who passed by them on foot to join the gathering crowd up ahead. ‘I’m going to find out what’s up.’ He opened the door and stepped onto the road.
‘I’m coming too,’ said Jenny, equally anxious to find out.
Jenny walked single file behind Paul as he made his way forward, weaving through the parked cars and trucks, finally reaching a knot of bewildered drivers remonstrating with the policemen.
‘Can’t fucking well block it like this!’ a truck driver was shouting, ‘I’ve got a fucking load I need to deliver this afternoon. ’
A traffic cop standing opposite him, behind the thin line of cones, shook his head sympathetically. ‘Sorry mate, the way’s closed until further notice. There’s nothing we can do about it.’
‘This is to do with that lunchtime press conference,’ a man standing beside Jenny said.
She turned to him. ‘What’s that?’
‘Did you not hear it?’ he replied with a look of surprise.
‘No, what happened?’
‘The PM? You don’t know about that?’
She shook her head.
‘It looks like we’re going to be totally screwed. He said they’re going to ration petrol and everything else.’
Jenny could see the people around her were beginning to catch on to how serious the situation was getting. These weren’t just angry people, she could actually sense an undercurrent of growing panic, like a low charge of static electricity floating amongst them. Not good.
‘I got a feeling this is going to get pretty nasty,’ the man added in a hushed voice looking at her. ‘Somebody on the telly was saying we could all be starving by the end of the week.’
One of the policemen pulled out a dash-mounted radio handset from inside one of the Rovers. ‘Everyone, please return to your vehicles!’ he said, his voice crackling over the loudspeakers on the roof of his car. ‘This motorway will not be re-opened. You will all need to go back the way you came!’
A burly man at the front lost his temper and angrily kicked one of the cones aside. He stepped towards the policemen. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding!’ he said throwing a hand back to point at the jam behind him, ‘I’ve got eighteen wheels of articulated back there with a full fucking load. How the fuck do I turn that around, you stupid—’
‘Step back behind the barrier!’ shouted one of the policemen.
‘Or what?’ he shouted, his face inches away from the nearest officer. ‘This is bullshit!’
Several other drivers advanced behind the trucker through the gap in the cones, as if that was an open door.
‘Everyone please step back!’ shouted the policeman on the microphone. ‘This is an official police line!’
Jenny could see the truck driver continuing to shout, his words lost in the growing cacophony of angry voices. He raised a hand, balled into a fist and shook it near the officer’s face. It seemed the traffic cop decided that that was enough to be interpreted as a threatening gesture. He reached out for it and began twisting the truck driver’s arm into an arrest hold. The trucker’s other hand swung around, clasped into another fist and smashed into the officer’s chin, dropping him effortlessly. Jenny watched with growing alarm, as three of the other policemen rushed to the aid of their fallen colleague, whilst the vanguard of angry people that had surged through the gap in the cones increased in number.
Paul turned to her. ‘Jesus, this is getting out of hand!’
People surged past Jenny as she watched the policemen wrestle with the truck driver on the ground. A young woman started picking the traffic cones up and moving them to the central aisle, whilst