Vaughan pursuing Catherine and planning a crash

Vaughan pursuing Catherine and planning a crash is not a single attempted collision but an extended choreography of surveillance, imitation, and rehearsal. Robert Vaughan follows Catherine Ballard through the airport roads and expressways, repeatedly testing how their cars might meet, while the narrator watches with an excitement that converts the threatened woman into an instrument in Vaughan’s larger design. The pursuit matters because it joins the practical mechanics of traffic to a sexualized fantasy of impact, and because its apparent target is eventually revealed to be only a stand-in for another death.

Origins and Context

The pursuit develops within a world already organized around collisions, inquiries, and institutional attempts to classify injury. After the narrator’s collision with the Hamiltons, the police and coroner return an accidental-death verdict and bring no charge of manslaughter or negligent driving. Catherine accompanies him from the inquest to the airport, touching his shoulder as though searching for the new wound that has appeared there, while the surrounding flyovers resemble immense bodies locked together. This official language of accident contrasts with the narrator’s private understanding of bodily impact as an experience involving guilt, sexuality, and physical knowledge.

Catherine’s own conduct is bound to that collision. In the hospital she repeatedly discusses the wreckage of the narrator’s car, describing the crushed radiator grille and blood spattered across the bonnet with the persistence of a voyeur. Her interest is not presented as ordinary sympathy: it turns the accident into an object of shared attention and erotic hostility. The narrator’s desire for Helen Remington is likewise shaped by the death of her husband, Charles Remington, as though sexual contact could reunite the dead man with the bodies and machinery that produced his death. These earlier entanglements prepare the ground on which Vaughan can make pursuit appear both dangerous and intimate.

Vaughan brings a more deliberate technical intelligence to the same field of fascination. Once a computer specialist and a prominent television scientist, he had advocated computerized control of international traffic systems before a motorcycle crash ended his television career. The accident left his legs broken by a truck and his face laterally displaced by injury, its scars, missing teeth, and self-cut hair preserving the memory of impact in his public identity. His battered Lincoln Continental, deliberately associated with the limousine in which President Kennedy died, makes his vehicle another extension of his historical and personal obsession with fatal collision.

The Pursuit Begins

Catherine telephones the narrator from her office to report that Vaughan has followed her to the airport. The narrator watches traffic edge along the motorway and feels his sexual response intensify as he imagines Vaughan somewhere among the thousands of vehicles. Catherine says that Vaughan has already been waiting for her at the entrance to the car park, and another witness, Vera Seagrave, reports that Vaughan is pursuing his film actress while the police search for him after an American serviceman has been killed on the Northolt overpass. Vaughan’s pursuit therefore moves between private harassment, public pursuit, and a widening chain of actual traffic deaths.

Unable to remain in his apartment, the narrator drives to the roof of the multi-storey car park beside the airfreight building. From there he sees Vaughan waiting at the junction of Western Avenue and the flyover. Vaughan does not conceal himself. He pushes the heavy Lincoln into the traffic stream, lying against the door sill almost sleepily as he surges forward when the lights change. His left hand drums on the steering wheel, and he swerves from lane to lane as if reading the road through its tremors. The apparent carelessness is highly controlled: he advances toward Catherine, withdraws, allows other cars to intervene, and then resumes a watchful position behind or beside her.

The resemblance between the two drivers becomes part of the spectacle. Vaughan begins to imitate Catherine’s driving, including her upright posture and repeated use of the brake pedal. Their brake lights move together along the expressway like the exchange between a long-married couple. The image converts pursuit into a distorted courtship: proximity is achieved through synchronized driving, and hostility becomes a form of mutual choreography even though Catherine has not consented to the relationship that Vaughan is staging.

Rehearsal at the Flyover

The narrator follows them, flashing his headlamps at obstructing cars. Catherine climbs the flyover ramp behind a line of fuel tankers, while Vaughan accelerates away at the junction and the narrator races through the roundabouts and intersections beneath the elevated roadway. When Catherine’s sports car appears, Vaughan brakes at the last moment, circles the roundabout fast enough to roll the Lincoln onto its off-side wheels, waits for the tankers to pass, and then surges forward. The traffic layout becomes a set of mechanical gates through which the three cars are repeatedly brought toward or away from impact.

The expected crash does not occur. Vaughan’s car crosses the marker lines on a collision course with Catherine, but he pulls away at the final moment and disappears beyond the roundabout on the northward carriageway. The narrator catches only a battered front fender and cracked headlamps confronting a truck driver. Later, in the basement garage of the narrator’s apartment house, he feels the imprint of Vaughan’s car in the body panels of Catherine’s sports car: not the mark of a completed collision, but the physical trace of a rehearsal and a promise of death.

The distinction between rehearsal and event is central to Vaughan’s method. He has already visited the Road Research Laboratory with the narrator, watched calibrated vehicles strike concrete target blocks, and screened slow-motion films of test collisions in his apartment. The repeated impacts first calm and then arouse the narrator, who later imagines himself at the controls of the crashing vehicles while driving alone under sodium lights. At the Laboratory, damaged cars and plastic mannequins display predicted wound areas on their skulls and abdomens, turning future injury into a measured diagram. Vaughan’s pursuit applies this experimental logic to living drivers: different approaches, speeds, angles, and collision modes are tested before the decisive crash.

Escalation and Complicity

The rehearsals continue for days. Vaughan follows Catherine along the expressways and airport perimeter roads, waits in the damp cul-de-sac near the narrator’s drive, and appears in the high-speed lane of the overpass with his battered car tilted on its springs. The narrator watches him test the possibilities of head-on collisions, side impacts, rear-end collisions, and rollovers. The Lincoln itself records the process: impact points deepen across its right-hand fender and doors, the metal becomes a rusting fretwork, and two rear windows are broken while it waits in traffic on the Northolt expressway.

Catherine never mentions the pursuit to the narrator. Their relationship settles into an ironic calm, the stylized affection they display at parties when either is openly taking another lover. Yet the narrator admits that neither he nor Catherine initially understands the full purpose of Vaughan’s conduct. Catherine is not the true object of the final design; she is a substitute in an elaborate rehearsal for a more important death. This revelation changes the meaning of every earlier encounter. The pursuit is not simply Vaughan’s attempt to possess Catherine through violence, but a preparatory performance in which her car, routes, habits, and reactions provide variables for a later act.

The narrator is not a detached observer. He repeatedly positions himself where Vaughan can be seen, follows the cars through the traffic, and waits for the anticipated collision. His response is one of gathering euphoria and surrender to what he calls an inevitable logic. The pursuit becomes, for him, a spectacle resembling the early stages of a love affair, even as he compares his watching to seeing his own daughter become involved in one. The comparison exposes the moral instability of his role: he recognizes danger, yet his fascination turns danger into intimacy and makes observation a form of participation.

Meaning and Aftermath

Vaughan’s pursuit fuses the automobile with the body as a social and sexual technology. The traffic jam on the route from the motorway junction to the Western Avenue flyover presents the twentieth century’s enormous energy as motionless pressure: rows of vehicles, brake lights, windshields, and passengers trapped in an immense pause. Around the accidents that punctuate this system, police, ambulances, firemen, engineers, spectators, and breakdown crews transform wreckage into a public ritual. Vaughan reverses that system’s safety procedures, using roads intended to regulate movement as a laboratory for designing injury.

The narrator’s earlier accident supplies the emotional material that Vaughan’s experiments organize. In the hospital, physical injury restores the narrator’s attention to his own body and gives sexual force to his guilt over the dead man. In Vaughan’s apartment, crash photographs, scars, damaged vehicles, and sexual postures make impact appear as the final marriage of sexuality and machinery. Vaughan’s body carries the same logic: scars form handholds across his abdomen and chest, while his permanently erect, incorrectly re-sectioned nipple and other wounds turn past crashes into a map for imagined sexual acts. Catherine’s pursuit extends this map onto the roads, where the position of each car becomes both a tactical problem and an erotic sign.

The sequence ends without the immediate crash the narrator expects, but it does not resolve the danger. Vaughan’s withdrawal at the junction is itself a successful rehearsal, and his increasingly damaged car shows that the experiments are accumulating material consequences. The police remove Vaughan’s photographs and equipment from Vera Seagrave’s dark-room, yet they cannot catch him. The failure of institutional pursuit parallels the failure of the narrator’s moral resistance: the police see a criminal chase and a traffic death, while the narrator sees a developing ritual whose erotic logic he increasingly shares.

The pursuit also foreshadows the final catastrophe. Vaughan’s fascination with fatal impact culminates in his pursuit of a film actress and his death beneath the flyover, where his body lies in postures that parody the crash photographs covering his apartment. His imagined climax joins death to the actress’s orgasm, while the narrator and Catherine later stand among derelict cars and the narrator recognizes that he is designing the elements of his own crash. In this larger pattern, Catherine’s pursuit is the bridge between fantasy and enactment: it converts an abstract desire for collision into repeated traffic movements, rehearsed angles, damaged metal, and a model that can be carried forward into a final death.