Bridge of Sighs

by Priscilla Masters

  She turned towards him and got straight down to business. ‘You’ve had a few days since Gina’s death,’ she said gently. ‘Have you thought about it?’

  His mouth distorted even more. ‘I’ve thought of nothing else,’ he said, ‘but I suspect that isn’t what you mean.’

  She shook her head and he nodded.

  ‘You mean have I thought of any reason why Gina chose to die?’

  She waited.

  But he shook his head, eyes flickering away. ‘Nothing that makes any sense,’ he said, his bony face and eyes burning with intensity. ‘I …’ He screwed his face up to try and suppress his grief, but it didn’t work. It spilled out of him, shockingly raw, like guts spilling out of a Hara-Kiri slash. His eyes were hot, hurt and angry, squeezing out boiling tears. ‘I …’ He seemed to choke then and was unable to speak.

  She leaned forward, put a hand on his shoulder and waited. Sometimes silence is more eloquent than any words in the English language, or any other language in the world, a little space needed for grief to burst. He put his hands over his face and groaned.

  Finally he looked up. ‘I …’ It was a mammoth effort for him to continue. Someone who had seen all the horrors of a hostile world paraded in front of his eyes, someone who took those horrors, sanitized them and presented them to the ‘civilized’ world.

  His next sentence confirmed this. ‘I’ve worked in war zones in practically every continent.’ He licked his lips and continued.

  ‘I’ve seen people – good people, nice people, people I’ve just interviewed, soldiers I’ve got drunk with, colleagues I’ve swapped stories with, children I’ve picked up out of the dirt, given sweets to – I’ve seen them all blown to bits, maimed, screaming with pain, terrified. I’ve seen people starve to death in front of my eyes, too weak to speak and others too emaciated to unwrap the chocolate bar I’ve just given them. I thought I’d seen it all.’ He frowned and rubbed his forehead. ‘I thought I was immune to suffering.’ He looked at her directly then. ‘The life Gina and I planned together would have been a balm for all that, but instead …’ His eyes were on her. ‘Gone. All gone, Mrs Gunn.’ His voice and expression were bleak. ‘I thought when I came home from one of these places that I would have a home to return to. A loving wife. A son. Perhaps more children. And now …’ His hands fluttered.

  ‘She was …’ He couldn’t find the words and simply shook his head as though trying to shake off the memory. ‘She was a light in the darkness.’

  ‘And you can think of no reason why …?’

  He shook his head but she pressed him.

  ‘You must have asked yourself this, Mr Zedanski. What did you come up with? Why did she do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He ran his fingers through his dark and silky hair. ‘I don’t know,’ he said again, calmer now. ‘She had everything to live for. A career, a son. We loved each other. We had a life planned. A wedding. We’d planned to have more children. We both wanted a family. I loved her.’ He looked at her, an angry fire burning now in his eyes. ‘If something was wrong, why didn’t she just confide in me? Tell me? I would have helped her. We would have worked it out. But now?’ He held his hands out wide, letting in this empty future. ‘Now?’ He answered his own question. ‘Nothing,’ he said bitterly. ‘Nothing.’

  She remained quiet. There is no need to fill every silence with sound. She let him think.

  He did and reached his own unsatisfactory conclusion. ‘The only thing I can think of,’ he said slowly, echoing Mark Sullivan’s words, ‘is temporary madness.’ It was almost a hopeful suggestion but it was an empty cliché – nothing more. And in this case it was not the answer.

  ‘Anything else?’

  His face screwed up tightly again and Martha waited. But he continued down the road of the life they would have had.

  ‘We had plans for the house – Terence had decided he would board at school when he was thirteen. He was excited at the prospect. He’d be home for some of the weekends. It’s only a couple of miles up the road. Bridget – Gina’s mum – had a bungalow in the grounds. We have a couple of acres. We’re halfway through doing up the house.’

  For a split second she realized he had forgotten. His face had changed, softened. Still angular but the angles were less sharp.

  ‘We planned to landscape the grounds – make part into a nature reserve, a meadow, apple trees, beehives, owl boxes. A patch of Little England.’ He looked around him, cruelly waking now. ‘That was our dream. How could she destroy it?’ His anger was surfacing. Another stage in grief. ‘Why? And why now?’ He scratched his head in bemusement. ‘I have a flat in London. I’ll be going back there. My life is destroyed. It isn’t just her life she’s buggered up. It’s mine too. And Terence’s and Bridget’s. If she had a problem, why didn’t she confide in me? Why put her nearest and dearest – the people she loved and the people who loved her – through this? Our lives will never be whole again.’

  And now, for the first time, Martha almost smelt his stinging fury against the woman who had constructed so much before destroying it so completely. Anger is part of grief. But it is the selfish part of grief, the look what you’ve done to me part of grief. And riding on its wings comes an ugly emotion – self-pity.

  She sensed that now this had kicked in she would learn no more from Mr Zedanski. He looked up, smiled, slightly sheepish now but engaging her with a frank stare. ‘I suppose,’ he said, with a hint of bravery, ‘I may as well put the house on the market and return to some far-flung war-torn part of the world. There’s nothing for me here.’

  What could she say, except, ‘And young Terence?’

  ‘I can’t pick that up,’ he said, his eyes full on her. ‘She was the thread that would have bound us together. It’s no good now.’

  So the boy would lose a hero-father as well as his mother. And for what?

  She saw him to the door, closed it behind him and sat down to think.

  Even though Julius had gone he’d left behind a room full of turbulence, anger, anguish, pain. She threw open the windows and welcomed in the fresh, clean, cold blast of air. No answers yet.

  But ten minutes after he’d left and the turbulence had settled, her mind travelled a different track, somehow bound up with her own daughter, Sukey. Some men are so busy with their aspirations that their partners are dragged along in their wake. Was it possible that Julius’s powerful persona had made Gina feel her own personality was drowned?

  EIGHT

  Wednesday, 15 March, 4 p.m.

  Terence Marconi came in with his grandmother. He was a quiet, contained, thin boy with a strange, shadowy presence, almost sliding into the room after Bridget, a set expression on his face, eyes fixed on the floor, determined not to cry. Martha picked up on a wary, watchful child with a guarded demeanour. Whatever he knew he was not going to share. Martha recognized his stance. The boy had his defences up. He had his mother’s dark hair and was not unlike the stepfather he would not now have.

  Bridget, Gina’s mother, looked like a bag of sagging, empty, pale skin, as though the personality Dr Milligan had described had had the life sucked out of it. She was tidily dressed in a dark woollen jacket over black trousers and was surprisingly short. Her hair was salt and pepper, cut neat and framed a face that was alert and, before this incident, would probably have looked lively – even merry. Not now. Like her prospective son-in-law, she too must have lost weight over the last few days. Her clothes were loose, the skin on her neck saggy. She had a pleasantly quiet and polite manner, a soft voice with only the tiniest hint of an Irish brogue. Gina’s voice had been louder, more commanding, but she had also been easy to listen to, judging by the crowd of listeners at the ball. It had been a voice that would lull the court into agreeing with her. Maybe that was one of the reasons for her success as a criminal lawyer – a pleasant voice must be an asset to persuade a jury of your client’s innocence.

  Even if he was guilty? Perhaps Gina’s voice had been instrumental in freeing felon
s.

  ‘Thank you so much for seeing us,’ Bridget opened with as though they had been the ones to request the meeting. Polite and charming; her daughter had been the same.

  Martha responded in neutral gear, simply nodding. ‘I generally do,’ she said, ‘in cases which are tragic and unusual.’ Her eyes were on both of them, detecting, picking up on anything that passed between them, anything that would give her a clue. She spent the next few minutes running through the procedure of an inquest and preparing them for the sequence of events.

  The boy’s eyes lifted and flickered over her, briefly appraising before dropping back to the floor. She had the uncomfortable feeling he’d been sizing her up. Wondering whether to confide in her?

  Bridget continued. ‘Needless to say, we’re …’ She waited a long time before selecting her word. ‘Confused,’ she finally settled on, faded blue eyes bearing out her statement.

  Martha probed gently. ‘I’m sure you’ve tried to come up with a reason why your daughter … why Gina …’

  The boy’s eyes definitely were challenging her now, warning her not to trespass into forbidden country, not to use the words though they hovered in the air like a cloud of poisonous gas. Committed suicide.

  Martha chose a neutral word. ‘Died.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’ Bridget leaned forward to give her words some weight. Her tone had turned steely and vaguely hostile. Her defences were up too. There was no doubt she was defending her daughter. ‘She had everything to live for. She was successful and beautiful.’

  To her shock Martha read scorn in the boy’s eyes as he glanced across at his grandmother. He was mocking her for believing this fable. He knew something. But he was eight years old. A minor. Martha felt suddenly uncomfortable. How much could an eight-year-old know and how much would he understand? She met his eyes and read something else there. The boy was holding his breath, watchful and waiting, wondering whether she would pick up on something. What, for goodness’ sake? She turned all her attention on to him.

  ‘Terence,’ she said gently, then with a brighter smile, she tried to win his confidence by spending some time on safer ground. ‘Do you like to be called Terence or Terry?’

  ‘Terence,’ he said steadily, adding very politely, ‘if you don’t mind.’ His private school education was paying off.

  ‘I’m sorry about your mummy.’

  His eyes dropped quickly. Deliberately hiding his expression.

  She continued to address the boy. ‘I wonder …’ Granny Bridget’s hand was tight on his arm. Restraint? Warning?

  Martha continued anyway. ‘I wonder if you thought your mummy had seemed …’ She rejected the words ‘distracted’ or ‘depressed’, substituting instead, ‘Sad? Different. Lately.’

  The boy opened his mouth ready to speak but his grandmother’s grip tightened. He dropped his eyes, shaking his head. Martha felt frustrated.

  If there was a truth behind this, Grandma Bridget didn’t want it to come out. So there was little point continuing the interview. Neither would speak in front of the other. Access to the child without a responsible adult was not possible, or in fact legal, and the obvious responsible adult was his grandmother – the grandmother who would not speak in front of the child. Both were bound to silence by the other. Hands tied behind their backs.

  Bridget Shannon made an attempt to cheer up the boy. ‘At least we didn’t have to find the body,’ she said.

  It was such a small consolation that Martha didn’t respond immediately, instead focusing on the interview. ‘Mrs Shannon,’ she said gently, ‘shall we have a chat on our own? Jericho, my assistant, can keep an eye on Terence.’

  Bridget knew exactly what was coming. Defeated, she nodded.

  Jericho came when summoned and led the boy away, closing the door very carefully and deliberately behind him. It was time to stop chasing around the bush.

  ‘Mrs Shannon,’ she said, ‘there must be something behind your daughter’s suicide.’

  The woman’s eyelids flew open at the word but Martha remained steadily on course. ‘I don’t inevitably find the verdict suicide unless there is a note or incontrovertible evidence. Understand?’

  Bridget nodded, eyes wary, hands gripping each other as though left would support right and vice versa.

  She looked far beyond the window, perhaps seeing her daughter’s face in happier times hovering over the dome of the church.

  ‘At least I didn’t have to find her body. She spared me that. But I feel so guilty that I didn’t pick up on it.’

  Martha murmured something neutral.

  ‘I don’t know any details,’ Bridget added quickly, getting that out of the way, ‘but a month or two ago, sometime over the winter, something happened. Gina was always a very happy person. Always happy with her place and status in life. My daughter,’ she said, ‘had a very strong sense of right and wrong. And then six or eight weeks ago I found her sitting in her lounge, lights turned off, just staring into space. It was so unlike her that I felt cold, almost frightened. You know that saying “someone just walked over my grave” – well, it was as though someone had just walked over her grave. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, I do. What did you think it was?’

  ‘That’s the trouble. I don’t know. She said to me then: “If anything happens to me you’ll look after Terence, won’t you?”’ Bridget’s face froze, her eyes screwed up against tears. ‘I was really frightened. I thought she must have cancer or something.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Doctor Milligan,’ Martha responded. ‘There was nothing like that. Gina was in perfect health.’

  Bridget nodded. ‘Yes – she assured me she was well, she was fine, but I knew there was something.’ She halted so abruptly it was as though a thought had just hit her. ‘Mrs Gunn …’

  Martha anticipated her question. ‘Anything you say to me,’ she said, ‘will be kept in the strictest confidence. Nothing need come out into the public domain unless you want it to.’

  Bridget let out a breath. ‘I saw it in her eyes. A look I’ve never seen before. She was ashamed of something.’

  ‘To do with her personal life? Julius?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ The denial came sharp, hot and strong. ‘Julius is a saint. A lovely boy. We adore him, Terence too. No, whatever it was I don’t think it was anything to do with Julius.’

  ‘Then her work? Someone she was maybe defending?’

  Bridget’s face, turned towards her now, was pitiful, ageing in front of her eyes, collapsing in on itself. ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘Does Terence know?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. We’re finding it difficult to talk.’

  Martha was silent for a moment, absorbing this. Then, ‘I’ve spoken to Julius Zedanski,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘He doesn’t seem to know anything, so what are we left with, Mrs Shannon? Her professional life? She dealt with some …’ She recalled Alex’s words.

  Nasty people.

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’

  ‘Do you know anything about the cases she was involved in?’

  Bridget shook her head. ‘She didn’t tend to talk about it that much. To be honest, most of the time we were together lately we were discussing the wedding. It was going to be …’ And then she did lose it, shoulders heaving with sobs.

  Martha had seen tears before – too many, truth be told. She’d learned to put a wall between herself and her professional role. In this job it was essential to preserve her sanity. But the abject misery confronting her now was so raw it affected her.

  She asked Jericho to bring in a cup of tea for Gina’s mother and Terence returned, putting his arms around his grandmother, comforting her as though he was a fully grown man.

  The boy was intriguing her. Martha met his dark eyes and assessed him as he returned her gaze. Mature beyond his years with an almost adult understanding. Perhaps even beyond adult. She felt that he had a better handle on his mother’s state of mind than poor Bridget, who was distr
aught.

  Ten minutes later, they had discussed the release of the body, which could go ahead now the cause of death was not in any doubt. Gina had died of a high-impact vehicular incident. That was the easy bit. The difficult part was why.

  Bridget told her of the plans for the funeral. Heartbreakingly Martha’s instinct had been correct. St Chad’s Church, a distinctive landmark with its round shape and high tower standing over the quarry, which was the town’s play and recreational area and site of the famous annual flower show.

  It was only once the pair had left and the room returned to its usual stillness that something Bridget had said assumed a new significance.

  At least I didn’t have to find her body.

  Could this be the reason behind the manner and place of Gina’s suicide? Had she thought that carefully about location and planned to spare her mother or her son from making the discovery?

  NINE

  Gina’s partner’s email arrived late in the afternoon and Martha scanned through it. Gina had been a busy woman. And she saw immediately what Curtis Thatcher had meant.

  After her brilliant defence of Mosha Steventon, the floodgates to the criminal world had swung wide open. There were numerous cases of petty crime, burglary, theft, assault, Actual Bodily Harm and Grievous Bodily Harm but some stood out from the rest. Gina’s current case load consisted of a few more interesting cases.

  There was a Joel Tansey, appealing against a seven-year sentence for fraud. He’d been importing car parts, avoiding paying the VAT but claiming it back from the government. Gina was appealing against his sentence, citing new evidence, but scanning through the detail, Martha couldn’t see anything that would have convinced her that he was not guilty. The fact was he had not paid the VAT and had claimed it back. He had gone to prison and Gina was handling an appeal. But Tansey was currently banged up in HMP Wakefield and she couldn’t see how he could have got to her. Her visits to the prison would have been watched if not listened to by prison officers. And his access to the outside world would have been limited. According to Curtis Thatcher, the prison governor had stated that there was nothing untoward in their contact. But Tansey was smarter than most of her other clients. The trail of bookwork, claims and counter claims was dizzyingly complicated.