Bridge of Sighs

by Priscilla Masters

  She and the entire family went to bed with a glow of happiness which lasted right up until she walked through her office door on Monday morning.

  Monday, 3 April, 8.50 a.m.

  She could tell instantly that Jericho had news to ‘impart’ – a rather pompous word, in her opinion, that he was over fond of using. He was standing in the middle of the hallway, waiting for her, a spare frame, not tall, rounded shoulders, leaning forward, eyes focused in mock humility on the floor, where he looked in times of trouble. His mouth was pursed, his straggly grey hair almost quivering in anticipation. Bad news then. Jericho’s speciality. She could read all the signs. Sometimes she thought he had deliberately chosen a career as coroner’s assistant because it would give his macabre, almost ghoulish character a chance to blossom – like deadly nightshade.

  Martha greeted him, passed him and entered her office, closing the door gently behind her. She knew better than to prompt her officer. He would ‘impart’ soon enough. In fact, wild horses couldn’t have persuaded him to keep news to himself. He could have got a job as town crier. All she had to do was wait. Seconds stretched into a minute or more. But the troubling thing was that when he finally knocked on the door and she called him in, instead of blurting out his news he couldn’t even meet her eyes. And this puzzled her. Jericho was a person who loved passing on bad news. It was practically a hobby of his. And this patently wasn’t good news or he would have passed it on already and wouldn’t have looked so – she ran her eyes up his face – apprehensive. She knew the drill so well. With news to impart, his eyes would light up, his mouth drop slightly open so she could see those sharp lower teeth. He’d shake his unfashionably long grey hair as though mimicking a rather disapproving Dickensian character – maybe the ‘ever so ’umble’ Uriah Heep. He’d offer her coffee and chocolate biscuits if the news was harrowing or, he imagined, would prove particularly distressing to her – the death of a child, a motorway pile-up, a wife beaten to death by a husband, a murder, a suicide, a cot death, a house fire with tragic consequences. The list was endless. She’d heard them all from him first. All these events would send him into sympathetic mode. So working in a coroner’s office was the ideal place for him. His mournful demeanour and looks suited his role to perfection.

  Had he been given the part by a casting director, Martha would have applauded the choice. Clap clap clap. But today, here, on this early indication that spring – the season of optimism and warm promise, the season when a young man’s fancy was supposed to turn to love, maybe a middle-aged woman’s too – would finally arrive, she was pulled up short by a feeling of dread as though someone had dropped a black velvet curtain in front of the window that looked out over that lovely town and those blue skies, blocking out the view and replacing it with a shrouded nothing. What could this news be that was so awful he could hardly bear to pass it on?

  Yet he would.

  She waited, still observing. And picked up on something even more disturbing. On this bright, beautiful morning there was something even more worrying than usual, something foreign, some emotion she’d never read before. There was, deep in his grey eyes, when he finally looked up at her, a touch of sympathy. And now Martha was more than curious. She was apprehensive. He was sorry for her? Anxious now, she spoke. Quietly.

  ‘Jericho?’

  ‘Mrs Gunn …’

  The elongated pause worried her even further – almost frightening her.

  She was going to have to prompt him.

  ‘Jericho?’ She kept her voice soft and gentle, inviting his confidence.

  He was looking past her, towards the still half-open door as though he expected someone or something to walk through it. Trouble.

  ‘Jericho,’ she prompted again, trying to stem the anxiety that was rising.

  He gulped. ‘Mrs Gunn,’ he began, then wet his lips and his frown deepened, scoring his forehead with deep, unhappy lines. ‘You haven’t heard.’ It was a statement – not a question.

  ‘Jericho,’ she said again, gently prompting. ‘Heard what?’

  ‘About Inspector Randall’s wife.’

  And that stopped her breathing. Now she was puzzled. Alex’s wife? Erica Randall? The woman whom he claimed was mentally and physically unstable? The woman he claimed was a blight on his life?

  It was as though a black crow had entered through that door and now it flapped, unwelcome, around the room, cawing its harsh message and perching on her shoulder, claws embedded too firmly in her flesh for her to shake it free. And even if she opened the door it would not fly away.

  She kept her voice steady. ‘Heard what about Mrs Randall?’ It was taking a gargantuan effort to keep the panic out of her voice.

  ‘She’s died,’ Jericho said bluntly. ‘She fell down the stairs and died. Saturday night. Late.’ Now he’d begun, the words were accelerating, spilling out of his mouth uncontrolled. ‘The circumstances, Mrs Gunn.’ There was a note of accusation in his tone – or was she imagining it? ‘The circumstances are very suspicious. Even now they are questioning DI Randall down at the station. Detective Sergeant Talith wants to speak to you as soon as you arrive.’

  That was when her thoughts and vision turned into a tumbling, dizzying black screen, everything out of focus, waves of orange flickering in front of her eyes. She blinked, trying to control the picture throbbing, trying to return to the familiar room. She needed to sit down. She needed air.

  And so found herself sinking into a chair, head drooping into her lap, Jericho handing her a glass of water, his eyes carefully, neutrally blank, but she could read the emotion behind it. He pitied her. It was a new experience.

  Jericho knew she and the inspector were friends. More than friends. Much more than colleagues or simply acquaintances. They were close. Much closer than was right and proper for a widowed coroner and a married policeman, even if he claimed his marriage had been less than happy. Especially as he claimed his marriage had been – frankly – unhappy.

  Oh, yes, Jericho knew all right as he drove the dagger home with his next sentence.

  ‘They’re treating it as a suspicious death. It’s been referred to you, Mrs Gunn.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Monday, 3 April, 10 a.m.

  Monkmoor Police Station, Shrewsbury, is buried away in a large housing estate on the eastern side of the town. The station itself is a typical sixties cheap and ugly building. But it houses a largely happy force who cope with government cuts with a certain dogged acceptance and resilience.

  It was a building now so familiar to DI Alex Randall that he could have found his way around it in a blackout. But never like this. Never from this angle.

  It was a strange feeling, being on this side of the questioning. It felt unreal, this role reversal, this nightmare. He scooped in some long, slow breaths and listened to Sergeant Paul Talith almost with disbelief. ‘Just confirm your name, sir.’

  You already bloody well know it.

  He swallowed the words. ‘Alex Fergus Randall.’

  It was all very well responding as honestly and politely as he could to his own detective sergeant, but the penetration of his home life, the home life he had struggled so hard to keep secret from his colleagues, was painful. And when Martha learned the sordid details … Anticipating her response, DI Alex Randall winced. He was paying the price for having dared to dream the fool’s dream.

  His heart felt as heavy as the millstone that had hung around his neck for the last few years. That’s what Erica had been. Heavy, dragging, depressing. But, paradoxically, now he was freed from the millstone, he felt the burden had grown heavier. Perhaps it was because it hadn’t really sunk in that she was dead, but privately he knew it wasn’t that at all. It was the ambiguous circumstances surrounding his wife’s death that would form a cloud of suspicion over him, a permanently poisonous miasma. Like the sulphurous cloud that sits over a volcanic pool, it would cling to him, possibly forever. That was why, relieved of her physical presence, the cloud she had left behind seemed mor
e menacing and harder to free himself from. He felt no lighter because he could see all too clearly into his own future. And it was even uglier than his past.

  DS Paul Talith cleared his throat and apologized again. ‘I’m so sorry about this, sir,’ he said. ‘You understand we just need to know what happened.’ He gave a noisy, embarrassed scrape of his throat. ‘Fact finding, you know? In your own words.’

  DI Randall responded wearily, ‘It’s all right, Talith,’ he said, ‘I understand completely.’

  His mind right-angled, unexpectedly finding a track of its own, recalling Erica as she had once been before life and something else, nameless and terrible – something heavy and grey as a winter’s sky – had destroyed it, her own and his. In this memory she was still alive, not twisted and dying at the bottom of the stairs, eyes pleading into his. It was as though, in those final moments, she had become herself again. He drew in a deep breath and felt trapped in this dreadful position. He closed his eyes and saw her, the Erica of years ago. She was dancing and singing, humming and twirling, hands on pregnant belly, right in front of his eyes, tempting, unpredictable and oddly bewitching. Bewitching? His mind, always prosaic, objected to the word. Who did he think she was? Blaming events on witchcraft? She wasn’t a witch. But she had been a woman damaged by life’s events and in those last few months the damage had seemed to compound. Unpredictable since that one terrible day when their son had been born dreadfully, morbidly damaged, happiness had become a stranger to him and her, never visiting their home again except for the briefest of moments. The odd second when they could both forget. Little more than blinks of an eye. And lately she had been worse – bordering on violent. Unpredictable, sometimes looking almost mad, like the women who stared out of the windows of Victorian bedlam. She had almost frightened him, so he had taken to locking his bedroom door at night fearing that her threats of violence would come true and he would be found one morning, a knife sticking out of him. But, in the end, it wasn’t he who had been found dead but Erica herself. And, as far as he could tell, it hadn’t been during one of her violent, vindictive acts but a simple accident. The trouble was he could never prove it.

  And it had ended in this.

  He knew the procedure only too well. There would inevitably be a lengthy inquiry which he feared would lead nowhere except to leave a dirty residue. A permanent stain on him. A tide mark of scum. A question mark hanging over his head that he was powerless to remove. How could he? There had been no witnesses. Just the two of them. Neighbours would have heard screams and shouts, as they must have done on numerous occasions before. Randall was a realistic man, not given to bouts of self-pity or despair, but now he felt swamped by both.

  And he was brave enough to face that it could even mean he would have to resign from the police force. Everything that could have planted happiness in his life was drifting away downstream, moving farther and farther away, and he could not swim after it to retrieve it. He was man enough to face the facts, look upstream to the long river of his future and prepare himself for it as he now met DS Paul Talith’s eyes and recognized the sympathy that beamed out of them. He wanted to get this over with. And at the same time, as he folded his arms, he knew it never would be ‘over with’. It would always be a noose of loose rope lying around his neck waiting for the opportunity when someone would tug hard and unexpectedly. And then what? Oblivion.

  Inadvertently he put his hand around his neck as though to check whether the rope was already there.

  It was not.

  Talith prompted him. ‘In your own words, sir. In your own time.’

  10.28 a.m.

  Martha eyed the phone, knowing that, inevitably, it would ring.

  Any minute now.

  Soon.

  DS Paul Talith had waited until she would have been in her office for well over an hour. He was dreading it. His boss and the coroner had what might be called a cordial working relationship. He hadn’t even worked out how he was going to put this, but the call had to be made. Someone was dead. She was the coroner and as such had to be informed. It was the law. As he dialled the number reluctantly, he was hoping that inspiration would come and he would be able to speak his part.

  EIGHTEEN

  Jericho put him straight through to Martha, which told him the jungle drums had already beaten out their grim message. DS Talith hadn’t told the coroner’s officer what the call was about and Jericho hadn’t asked. He hadn’t needed to.

  DS Talith knew Palfreyman, the coroner’s assistant, ears to the ground, would already have known. Somehow he knew everything. As he waited for her to pick up the phone he had never felt more awkward.

  Martha eyed the phone and knew this was it. But she had had time to recover at least some of her equilibrium and she trusted she would deal with this professionally. As Talith stammered out his request she sensed his difficulty and spoke briskly, dispassionately, hoping her voice was leaking none of the emotions tossing around in her brain.

  She cued him in.

  ‘Jericho has only given me the fact that DI Randall’s wife has died in …’ That was when she paused, the word ‘suspicious’ sticking in her throat like dry bread, so she substituted with, ‘Apparently unexplained circumstances.’ Surely DS Paul Talith could not possibly know that as she spoke she was clenching and unclenching her fists. She continued in the same brisk, businesslike voice. ‘So you’d better fill me in on the details, Talith.’

  She was trying to make this job easier for him. There is nothing worse than an internal investigation, looking around the faces of your colleagues and reading suspicion and doubt.

  Talith cleared his throat. ‘Right then. The DI lives in Church Stretton, ma’am. In a semi-detached house in a small cul-de-sac. Apparently Mrs Randall – Erica, her name is – and the DI, ma’am …’ By every word he was selecting so carefully but oh, so clumsily, she could tell how hard he was finding this.

  ‘They didn’t have the most …’ And now Talith felt defeated. This was the home life his inspector had defended so tightly. This was too difficult, but he still pushed on: ‘Amicable of relationships.’ He got the words out quickly. This was toe-cringingly awful.

  ‘Mrs Randall was apparently …’ And now his words were slowing as though they were being dragged out of him under threat of torture. They were failing him. ‘They used to argue a lot, ma’am. She was, according to the neighbours, a strange and difficult woman. Unwell. There had been trouble before.’

  Martha heard the words. Unwell. Trouble.

  Get on with it, she wanted to say. Give me the details. I need to know. But Talith was still hedging. ‘She had a history of unpredictable behaviour. Last night, apparently, they were arguing again and to cut a long story short …’

  Please do.

  ‘To cut a long story short, Mrs Randall, Erica, she fell down the stairs. Her neck was broken, according to the medical examiner. She died quick. No one really knows …’

  But Martha had already jumped ahead. Falling down stairs. Her heart sank. Unless you find string tied around the top step, how do you ever prove whether someone fell or was pushed? It is impossible. Accident, murder, suicide? The words tossed around in her head like a dinghy in a force-ten gale. Deliberate, homicide, suicide. With no witnesses no one can ever be sure what happened. It could be the result of a fit of anger, attention seeking, a trip, a drunken fall or even a bit of all four. Did Erica drink? Martha didn’t even know that. A small push, a pique of fury, a hysterical woman and from the little Martha knew about Alex’s wife she was that. She was also unhappy. Unhappy people do not care what happens to them, whether they live or die. There is a carelessness in abject misery. And as for unpredictable behaviour, Alex had told her that his wife had a history of arson, of petty crime, ever since the tragic event in their past.

  DS Paul Talith’s voice cut in. ‘She would have died more or less instantly according to the police surgeon.’

  Martha hated herself for asking, but if she didn’t others would. ‘Were
there any signs of other injuries?’

  He knew exactly what she was asking. Is it possible that Detective Inspector Alex Randall, your boss and my friend, is a killer?

  And he answered as honestly as he could. ‘We don’t know, ma’am. They haven’t done the post-mortem yet but so far the pathologist says—’

  Her turn to interrupt. ‘The pathologist?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Doctor Sullivan.’

  To herself she nodded. Mark Sullivan would not get it wrong. He would not let friendship or even sympathy for a colleague stand in the way of the truth. His presence was a relief. This situation needed clarity, honesty and he would deliver both.

  ‘So far Doctor Sullivan says that Mrs Randall’s injuries were consistent with an accidental fall.’

  Satisfactory yet strangely unsatisfactory. The statement answered no questions. The word consistent is weak and uncommitted.

  ‘Paul.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘You understand I can’t investigate Mrs Randall’s death.’

  Silence from the other end.

  ‘I shall have to ask a colleague to take over the case. I’m … I wouldn’t … I couldn’t be entirely impartial. It would be unprofessional as well as open to question. And it wouldn’t be fair to Inspector Randall. Or to Mrs Randall.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘I’ll ask a coroner from a neighbouring area to take over, probably David Steadman from South Shropshire. I’ll speak to him today and get back to you. In the meantime, it would be a good thing for Doctor Sullivan to continue with the post-mortem. I’ll, umm …’