a portly middle-aged man wearing an expensive-looking suit decided that someone needed to take the initiative and back the police Rovers out of the way so they could all pass. He opened the driver-side door of the nearest one and climbed in, started the engine and began reversing it slowly across the motorway to the hard shoulder to clear the way forward.
The policeman holding the microphone barked an order, ‘Stop the vehicle immediately and get out!’
What happened next seemed to occur too quickly; all in a matter of seconds.
One of the traffic police, pulled out of the struggling scrum of bodies, stepped smartly to the back of his Land Rover, opened a door and swiftly produced what appeared to be a firearm. For the briefest moment she thought, assumed, hoped, that everyone had seen the weapon; the brawl would instantly break up, and the person behind the wheel of the police car would stop, and sheepishly step out.
He has a gun . . . a traffic copper with a gun. Jenny thought that should be enough to bring everyone to their senses, instantly.
But that didn’t happen.
The policeman levelled the gun at the moving police car and fired. One of the headlights exploded. The sound of the gunshot stopped everyone in their tracks; the squirming trucker on the ground, the three policemen holding him down, the young woman collecting cones, and everyone else milling around nearby - they all froze as if someone had just hit a magic pause button.
The man with the smart suit inside the police Rover raised his hands.
‘Get out of the vehicle!’ shouted the traffic cop on the microphone.
He stepped out of the Rover, his hands timidly raised above his head.
And that really should have been the conclusion to the little drama. But it wasn’t.
The gun went off a second time.
The man in the expensive-looking suit staggered backwards as his nice, smart, crisp, white business shirt exploded with a shower of dark crimson. For a moment Jenny couldn’t believe what she was seeing, for a moment thinking someone in the crowd had inexplicably decided to shoot the man with a paintball gun.
He slumped back against the car and then slid down to the ground.
The traffic cop holding the gun looked like he had gone into shock, his jaw hung open, his face ashen. Jenny could see this wasn’t meant to have happened. It was an accident; he’d been holding the gun in a way he shouldn’t - finger resting too heavily on the trigger, the weapon not aimed down at the ground as it should have been. These men weren’t trained to use firearms, that was obvious, they were out of their depth, these guys were panicking.
‘Shit. I didn’t mean to . . .’ the policeman with the gun cried loudly, staring at the body in disbelief.
One of the crowd of drivers standing near to him, a big man, recovered his senses and broke the static tableau; he reached for the gun and snatched it out of the policeman’s hand.
Replaying this in her mind later, Jenny suspected this big man, was removing the gun from the policeman in shock, not to use it on anyone, merely to take a dangerous element out of the equation.
But in the highly charged atmosphere of the moment, the gesture was misinterpreted.
The policeman with the microphone, whipped a second gun out of his car and aimed it at the man. Amidst the noise of people crying out and shouting, Jenny wasn’t sure whether a warning was called out before the traffic cop fired. His shot clipped the man, who dropped to his knees clutching his upper arm.
The crowd that had been surging forward began to scatter in all directions. Paul grabbed Jenny by the arm and led her back towards their taxi, the driver standing beside the vehicle craning his neck to see what was going on.
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘This is going to get worse.’
Jenny looked back at the blockade. The other traffic police had pulled back to their vehicles and produced their guns and were, thankfully, firing shots in the air to scatter the crowd, and not aiming at them instead.
This is Britain still, right? Not apartheid-era South Africa, or Tiananmen Square? Jenny’s racing mind asked in disbelief as she and Paul hastily made their way back from the police line.
They’re just trying to disperse the crowd, that’s all.
But then she heard the loud growl of a diesel engine beside her, and a large container truck lurched forward, effortlessly shunting