Chapter 2: Jonathon and Ekaterina: the accident

April 1999

Statistically it was just another road traffic accident. A lorry shed part of its load which struck the vehicle driving behind, killing the driver and front-seat passenger.

What made this accident different, however, was the human interest that thrust it to the top of television news bulletins and newspaper front pages all over the world.

The facts were simple enough: Luke and Penny Ogilvie, driving a well-maintained two-year-old five door salon car, were several car-lengths behind a lorry carrying a large metal cylinder. On a flat stretch of road with sweeping curves, in daylight on a dry road, the cylinder fell from the back of the lorry, bounced on the road and landed on the bonnet and front seats of the Ogilvie’s car, killing the couple instantaneously.

The first call to the emergency services was logged at 0947 and was made by an almost hysterical woman:

“Oh God, there’s been a horrendous accident...”

At this point she began sobbing and, after some scuffling noises, a man took up the story.

“A big lump of rusty iron just fell off a lorry and smashed into the Ogilvie’s. It’s carnage. I can’t tell you.”

The man’s voice was cracking with barely controlled emotion, but he was able to give more details when prompted by the emergency operator. After he had given the location and was assured that police and ambulances were on their way, he added:

“The doctor’s here. I’ll try to get him to talk to you;” then he broke down in tears and the operator heard him say, through his sobs, that he couldn’t face going any closer to the destroyed car.

It was some time before a clearer picture began to emerge. The local television news at One O’clock reported that there had been a serious accident on the A814 close to Roseneath involving a private car and a lorry. No information was available at that time about the occupants of the vehicles or the extent of their injuries.

The police at the scene had already established much of the relevant information by that time. The lorry had left the Naval Base at Coulport at around 0915; it was routed along the A814 to avoid the steep hills on the alternative routes. Luke Ogilvie, a thirty-eight-year-old civil engineer was strapping his six year old daughter Kate into a car seat at the rear of their family car. Daddy had to perform this task since Kate was stroppy about still using her car seat when her brother Jon, just turned eight, used a grown-up harness; Luke admitted to being fanatical about car safety and he was the only person who could convince Kate that she should buckle-up. It was her father’s obsession that saved her life and that of her brother.

Penny, at thirty-seven, had returned to full-time teaching at the local Primary School that year after a couple of years as a part-timer. She had taken time off work when Jon was born and remained a stay-at-home Mum until Kate was settled in school. They were using some of the extra cash from her job to pay for a holiday at Centre Parcs about a three-hour drive away. Their neighbour told police that they hoped to be on the road by nine o’clock, but Penny had told her that they would think themselves lucky if they drove off by ten.

In fact, they went through Kilcreggan village, less than a mile from home, at about 0935, climbing the hill out of the village. At some point, they caught up with a lorry carrying a large, rather rusty metal cylinder. Before the top of the hill, the local grocer and his wife joined the convoy. And before they began the descent, another car joined them. Once back on the level, the speed of the convoy increased to about forty miles per hour; the cars left substantial gaps since they were all locals, aware that there was no place to overtake for another three miles on the far side of Clynder village.

A fourth car had joined the string when, about a mile from Rosneath village, the cylinder dropped off the back of the lorry, bounced on the road and landed on the bonnet and front seats of the Ogilvie’s car. Luke and Penny died instantly when the car stopped in its own length with the cylinder embedded in the engine compartment. The backs of the front seats were pushed against the seat squabs of the rear seats, but Kate and Jon were physically untouched.

It was the grocer’s wife in the car immediately behind who first contacted the emergency operator.

“I knew I had to let people know,” she said later, “But as soon as the operator answered the horror overwhelmed me and I went to pieces. Eric, bless him, wasn’t much better but he managed to hold himself together until he tried to go forward to talk to the doctor and his legs wouldn’t obey him.”

They were on their way to the highlight of their year: the annual dinner and dance of the Small Shopkeepers Association was being held in Glasgow and they had booked themselves a room in the hotel that was the venue. They had set off early to meet her sister so the women could buy dresses for the big occasion. Eric and his brother-in-law planned to hand over their credit cards and adjourn to a cosy pub where they could exchange views on the state of Scottish football and other topics of importance.

Instead, they had to be driven home and endured weeks of nightmares. Eric never again drove himself beyond Helensburgh and his wife would only get into a car if he was driving. Both of them preferred to catch the ferry to Gourock, travelling onwards by train.

In the car behind them was the local GP, Doctor Peter Willis. He was heading to Helensburgh for a golf match; he was not due to tee-off until one o’clock, but experience had taught him that he had to get out of the village quickly, leaving his patients to the locum. If he was physically present, he would inevitably be sucked into a consultation. This morning, he had briefed the young woman who was substituting for him and was in his car before the first patients entered the waiting room.

It was the presence of the doctor and the recent history of the driver of the fourth car that propelled this tragic but commonplace story into world prominence. John McVey had spent a frustrating time establishing that the blame for a minor parking accident was not his. The case, on both sides, was based on observations and John’s lawyer was constantly carping about the lack of physical evidence. John now drove everywhere with his digital camera on the passenger seat.

As soon as he pulled up, he took his camera and ran forward to record the aftermath of the accident.

“I suppose I must have been in shock,” he told the television journalists who hung on his every word. “I don’t remember looking at the car or thinking about Penny and Luke: I just took pictures so the lawyers would have evidence.”

The mainstream media cut the interview at that point, but less scrupulous outlets kept the cameras running when, after a pause, he added: “Once I’d finished I spewed my guts up when it really hit me!”

One of the reasons that John kept shooting was the absence of the lorry. It was stopped by police nearly twenty miles away. The driver was unaware that he had lost part of his load, claiming that he thought he hit a pothole.

While Eric and his wife huddled together beside their car and John was snapping away, Doctor Willis ran to the stricken car and wrenched open the back door where Kate and Jon were sitting totally quiet and with utterly blank expressions.

“Their eyes were open, but I was hoping that they weren’t functioning since what they would see must scar them for life. Where their Mum and dad had been there was now twisted glass and metal with blackening blood and clots of human tissue. I wanted to grab the kids, but I knew that I had to be slow and gentle.”

Reaching in, he carefully released the straps of Kate’s car seat and lifted the unresponsive child into his arms. As he straightened with the little girl clutched to his chest and with tears running silently down his aging cheeks, John was pointing his camera in that direction and took the picture that moved the world to pity.

The Doctor thrust Kate into John’s arms and leant deep into the car to release Jon and pull him free of the carnage. Jon, like his little sister, was awake but almost unresponsive: as Doc Willis straightened up with his new burden, the little boy convulsively grasped the old man around his neck.

The early-evening news carried a report of the deaths and the survival of the two children, pronounced unharmed by the local GP, it was said. By late evening, John’s picture of the weeping doctor holding the stricken child filled our television screens. The reporters had also got hold of the fact that Doctor Willis had been present at Kate’s birth. His claim that the attending midwife did all the work was dismissed as becoming modesty.

The media circus moved onto the Rosneath peninsula, interviewing anyone prepared to talk to them. Eric gave one interview, but his wife flatly refused to talk to anyone, even her own sister. John was the only eyewitness who spoke at length about the experience. The headmaster of the school Kate and Jon attended was the main source of local colour. Their dead Mother had taught alongside him before and after the births of the children. As quickly as it moved in, the media caravan moved on to fresh stories.

There was one little flurry a day or two later when the Pope mentioned in a speech that he was praying for Kate and Jon ‘saved by a miracle’, as he put it. That caused a brief outbreak of bigotry: the Ogilvie’s were Church of Scotland with Jon regularly attending Sunday school. They were prepared to concede that the survival of the children was miraculous, but it had to be made clear that it was a Protestant miracle and no part of it belonged to Roman Catholics.

They say that dustcarts come after the Lord Mayor’s show; cleaning up in that case takes no longer than the show itself. In the case of the accident that orphaned Jon and Kate Ogilvie, the incident lasted for a fraction of a second and the media frenzy for no more than a couple of days, but the cleaning up went on for many years. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how it can ever end for the children involved.

The official investigation sought to establish how such an accident had happened. The police measured at the scene and the lorry was subjected to detailed forensic analysis. The local press gave comprehensive accounts of the investigation, but they had lost interest before a substantive solution was reached. What quickly showed up was a series of minor offences that tied up the time of police and courts, but which failed to explain why the chain holding the metal cylinder parted, releasing havoc.

The police had been asked if they would escort the lorry, replying that they did not have the resources at that time. The owners of the lorry were under pressure to move the cylinder without further delay, so they decided to go without an escort. The driver phoned on the morning before he set off to ask for a change of route to avoid the steepest hills; the firm agreed but forgot to notify the police of the change of plan. Fines were levied but still no one knew why the cylinder had fallen off the lorry.

It was secured to the bed of the trailer by a mild-steel chain shackled to fixed bolts. The chain had passed inspection only weeks before but the link closest to the nearside shackle had rusted so that it was significantly thinned. It was the breaking of this link that caused the accident but there was no explanation of why that single link had failed. It had required a painstaking search to discover the pieces of the shattered link, scattered as they were by the accident.

The lorry was searched for corrosive substances as was the area where the trailer had been sitting for some weeks prior to the journey. The cylinder had been part of a communications tower that had collapsed in a storm; it was retrieved from the salt waters of the loch and loaded on the trailer while the collapse was investigated. The cylinder was not implicated in the collapse, but it was retained on site until the enquiry concluded. Once released, the manufacturers wanted it back as quickly as possible to make a thorough inspection.

It was several years before a comprehensive report on the road traffic accident was completed. It had reached no conclusions on the cause of the thinning of the link in the chain. At that stage the documents were sent for review by an experienced investigator who had taken no part in the enquiries; this is a standard procedure since it is recognised that working too closely to a problem can lead to you missing things. The review officer spent his weekends sailing Loch Long class yachts and he solved the problem on his first reading.

The chain was of mild steel but the shackle was stainless-steel; both the shackle and the first link had been lying in a pool of sea water that had collected around the fixing bolts on the lorry. The water must have been there all the time the cylinder sat on the trailer. Every yachtsman knows not to connect mild and stainless in sea water since they form a galvanic battery that leeches metal from the mild steel. The accident was now explained, and the police could get on with other investigations.

The local newspaper carried a story on an inside page when the mystery had been solved but no one else paid attention. If the hunt for the cause of the crash was almost totally ignored, the fate of the orphans was even worse. It was well known in Kilcreggan that Penny had been brought up in a Home after her mother died of a drug overdose. She was an active campaigner against drugs, well respected even by users since she made no secret of her personal anguish.

Luke was born in the village, the son of one of its few famous citizens. Olaf Ogilvie was lead vocalist of a group in the seventies that came close to rivalling the Corries for a while. Olaf composed and wrote the lyrics for many of the group’s songs, but they had a well-publicised aversion to recording studios and had only ever recorded one album with just one of Olaf’s songs on it.

The family had always been a bit wild – local opinion was that there was some tinker blood on their past – but Olaf went completely off the rails. He was born at the end of the Second World War, spoiled by his mother and largely ignored by his father who returned from military service in Italy with a thirst for alcohol arising, he insisted, from the gratitude of Italian peasants freed from the Nazi jackboot.

There was a good deal of speculation at the time of Olaf’s birth centred on the chances of a ten-pound bouncing baby being nearly two months premature as claimed by his doting mother. His father was barred from the local hotel bar for punching an old school friend who suggested that there might have been an American contribution to the conception.

Olaf grew up to be tall, dark and irresistible to ladies, especially married ladies of a certain maturity. He left the village for a while after the local butcher threatened him with a meat cleaver, returning with Molly – and a marriage certificate that she showed without much persuasion. Molly had been born in the village in 1940 after her pregnant Mum was evacuated from Govan for the duration of the War.

Mrs McGurk, Molly’s Mum, scandalised the village when she started attending events held by the Yanks that had moved into Rosneath Castle. Most of the younger women went to the dances in the Burgh Hall, dancing with the GIs, but very few risked their reputations by visiting the foreign soldiers in their lair.

Mrs McGurk appeared on VE night inadequately draped in a Union Jack hastily adapted to an evening dress, but she was gone before VJ night taking Molly with her. It was twenty years before Olaf brought Molly back to the village as a new bride and another two years before she gave birth to Luke. She became quiet and withdrawn when asked about her time away from the village and Olaf got very irate if the subject was raised in his hearing.

There were some complications following Luke’s birth and it soon became known that Molly could have no more children. When Olaf departed without leaving a forwarding address, Luke was three years old. Village opinion was divided: half the women felt Olaf had some justification since his wife could no longer give him children but much of that was due to pique that Molly would still not talk about the missing twenty years.

Olaf’s group had been playing in clubs and pubs mainly in the West of Scotland but then they had a brief spell of international success in the years around Luke’s birth. It was rumoured that Olaf went straight to Nashville when he left Molly and the child in Kilcreggan. It is almost certain that he never again set foot in his native village.

The village men took no part in the deliberations on Olaf’s doings, of course, but they were glad enough to see the back of him with his uncertain temper; several made overtures to Molly, a noticeably pretty woman, but she made it perfectly clear that she was glad enough to live with Luke as the only male in her life.

Molly got a job in old Fleming’s grocery store and was effectively managing the business within two years. Luke was a popular boy with much more of his mother’s gentle nature than the aggressive vitality of his father, although he was tall and strongly built like his sire.