The Bridge

by Stuart Prebble

  “And so we don’t even know if the bastard arrived in a car, on a bike, or even on foot?” Detective Constable Georgia Collins was Bailey’s deputy.

  The sergeant confirmed that both assumptions seemed to be true. The two senior officers walked to one side of the pavement.

  “What do you think, sir? Is it him?” asked Collins.

  “It’s him, all right,” said Bailey. “He is going to keep on keeping on until no one feels safe having their children anywhere near anything deeper than a puddle. I just wonder what the fuck is going through this sick bastard’s head.”

  TEN

  Michael woke early but tried to remain quite still to avoid disturbing Alison, who was lying curled up in the bed beside him. After half an hour spent staring at her bedroom ceiling, he was badly in need of coffee and was wondering whether he could make some without waking her, when suddenly the problem was solved by the radio switching itself on. Only a few words of the news bulletin were audible before her bare arm appeared from beneath the sheets and she fumbled to find the off switch.

  “Oh God,” she said, “I always intend to reset the timer at the weekends and always forget.”

  “Could we listen to that?” said Michael. “I thought they were saying something about Kingston.”

  “What?” She was still only half awake. “What about Kingston?”

  “On the news,” said Michael, and something was making him increasingly anxious. “Would you mind switching it back on?”

  Both instinctively sat upright in bed, unable to say anything sensible while the newsreader related the story of the events of the previous evening. The reporters seemed to have very little information beyond the basic facts, but such was the enormity of the crime that once again they were stretching every resource to find new things to say. Michael felt immediate horror that such an appalling crime could occur, and somehow it felt even worse that it had happened so close to his home.

  “God, I know it’s terrible to look at something like this from your own point of view,” he said, “but I’m just so glad we weren’t there last night.” Alison did not respond, and the two of them remained silent as the newsreader introduced interviews with reporters who had been to the scene and with the police. News coverage was open-ended on TV and radio, and Michael and Alison moved to the sitting room to watch the live reporting from the area they knew so well. At one point the camera panned across the riverbank, and Michael could just make out a corner of his own apartment building peeping between two more-prestigious blocks. “There goes the neighborhood,” he said, and immediately realized that his weak attempt at levity was entirely inappropriate. “Sorry,” he added quickly, but still Alison had not responded. He turned and saw that her face was transfixed in a stony stare and that there were tears streaming down both of her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe them away, and Michael continued to look at her as the dark droplets fell onto her T-shirt.

  “Oh, baby,” he said, “I’m so sorry. There’s you reacting like a normal and sensitive human being, and there’s me trying to be funny.” He reached forward and grabbed a handful of tissues from a cardboard box on the table in front of them. He handed them to her, but instead of taking them from him, Alison took the cue to cover her face with the open palms of both hands, and he heard a muffled sob as she seemed to try to regain herself. Michael put his arm around her shoulder and reached for the remote control. “Let’s not watch any more. There’s nothing we can do about anything, and it’s only depressing me and distressing you.” Alison agreed, and after a while Michael suggested that they should take a walk along the seafront to try to blow away some of the horror.

  The weather was warm but windy, and they retraced the path they had walked that first Sunday, along the promenade towards the marina. Their route gave them a chance to see every level of life in Brighton, from the rows of grand and elegant Victorian homes to the tackiest and most popular forms of seaside entertainment. It was the mix which gave Brighton its particular charm. The bracing smell of ozone in the air was overlaid from time to time by the sweet wafts of cotton candy, the aroma of cooking onions, and that familiar whiff of burning oil, remembered from childhood, as the miniature railway trundled past on its track at the top of the shingle.

  Hardly a moment had passed in the last few days when Michael had not been thinking about his last visit to Grandma Rose, and his view of what had happened alternated between extremes. Most of the time, he thought that he must have misheard what she said, and over and over again he replayed the words she seemed to be trying to whisper. Could it have been “Don’t see Alison”? How could it have been? It was ridiculous, the sort of thing that might happen in a nightmare, an odd narrative made of unrelated thoughts joined together. At other moments, though, Michael felt sure that he had correctly interpreted what she was trying to say, and if that were so, then somehow or for some reason his grandma must have recognized Alison. He recalled that first time he had brought her to meet Rose and the violence of his grandma’s reaction. They had all convinced themselves that it was coincidence, but maybe there was something more?

  A confusion of thoughts and feelings went around his head until in the end Michael worried that he was losing his grasp of reality. Surely he was making a mountain out of something absolutely trivial.

  “It’s unbelievable that that should take place just a few hundred yards from your place.” Alison’s words brought Michael back sharply to the present. He was glad that she appeared to have gotten past the apparently overwhelming distress which had affected her earlier. “What kind of a mind dreams up something like that?” she was saying. “To drop a heavy weight on a boatload of children? You just don’t know how to start believing it, do you?”

  “According to all the news I’ve read, killing children by drowning isn’t as unusual as you’d want it to be. They said on that program they made at work that usually the killer knows the kids…most often they are from the same family. There’ve been a few examples of random acts of this kind, but not many…”

  Michael was set to continue when the cell phone in Alison’s handbag started to ring. It was the third time it had happened since they left her apartment, but she had ignored it before and she was ignoring it now.

  “Don’t you think you should answer that?” he said. “It might be important. Whoever it is certainly seems to be persistent.”

  “I know who it is,” said Alison. “It’s an idiot girl from work who wants me to go to some silly bridal shower next week. Angela’s friend Pauline. I’ve said I don’t want to go, but she won’t take no for an answer.”

  They walked and talked some more, and gradually the sea air began to do its work, and Michael felt himself beginning to relax. The notion of “blowing away the horror” had some merit after all. On one side of the road, the cliff rose sharply up to a hilltop path, and Michael saw that just ahead one carriage of the funicular railway was coming down to meet them. He suggested that they might take a ride to the top of the cliff and enjoy the views on the way back from the different perspective. The attendant took their fare and opened the doors, and Michael and Alison were the only ones in the carriage as the wheels creaked and the mechanism groaned, gradually lifting them two hundred feet up the side of the cliff face. They stepped out at the top and stood for a while to enjoy the seascape.

  “Last time I stood on these cliffs was about ten years ago on a school trip, a project about our history as an island,” said Michael. “It’s so strange to think that this tiny stretch of water has protected us from invasion for a thousand years. The French have tried it, the Spanish have tried it, the Germans have tried it more than once. Just a few miles of water between us and being overrun by enemies.”

  Alison turned to look at Michael, her face suddenly breaking into a smile which he found difficult to read. “What a curious man you are,” she said finally. “Here I was, wondering where you’re going to take me for a plate of fish-and-chips, and here you are thinking about the Battle of Britain.
”

  “Well, that’s probably why you love me then…because I’m fascinating and unpredictable.” There was a moment of silence. She had not ever said that she loved him, but now she turned back to look out to sea and slipped her arm through his. She pressed the side of her body against him and leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “Yes,” she said at last, “must be.”

  They stood for a while without speaking, and occasionally he tightened the grip of his arm around her shoulder, and she responded by pulling him closer at his waist.

  “Set off back now?” he said.

  Alison said that she needed to use the ladies’ room before they started walking again and asked Michael to look after her handbag while she was away. No sooner was she out of sight than he could hear her cell phone ringing once again from within the bag. He saw the phone lying on top of her other belongings, and the light on the front panel said UNKNOWN NUMBER. He pulled it out and tried without success to locate the button which would shut off the noise. He thought he had found it when suddenly the ringing stopped and the flashing screen was replaced by a notice reading TEXT RECEIVED. He kept pressing buttons more or less at random, and before he knew it the incoming text was revealed.

  THERE’S NO POINT IN TRYING TO PROTECT HIM.

  Michael felt as though a cold hand had grabbed at his insides. He did not want Alison to think he was prying into her business, and for a moment he was undecided about what to do. Glancing quickly towards the entrance to the ladies’ room, and with fumbling thumbs, he tried to locate RETURN on the panel. He pressed several buttons before the message disappeared off the screen altogether, and was unsure whether he had deleted it. He replaced the phone in Alison’s bag just as she emerged and rejoined him. He handed it over.

  “Your phone was ringing again. I tried to find the button to stop it but don’t know what I’ve pressed. I hope I haven’t screwed anything up.”

  “You didn’t see who was calling?”

  “No, I think it said ‘unknown number,’ but by the time I got to it, whoever it was had rung off. It was probably that same woman from work—Pauline, did you say?”

  “Probably.”

  They continued their walk without speaking, and once again a whole new round of questions filled Michael’s head and began to multiply and overlap with one another. He had only just managed to find a perspective on the words he thought he heard from his grandma, and now there was this. THERE’S NO POINT IN TRYING TO PROTECT HIM? What on earth could that mean? Protect who? And from what? And who could such a message be from? Whoever the sender, Michael felt pretty sure that it was neither Angela nor Pauline. It all felt deeply troubling, but then again, all those doubts and questions were set against his increasing happiness about what seemed to be the deepening intimacy between them. She had recently owned up about her lie involving the deaths of her parents and about Joanna, and the admission had caused Michael to feel a weight lifting from his shoulders. He could completely understand why she might want to erase any memories of having been abandoned by her mother and father. Having dealt with those earlier uncertainties, the last thing he wanted now was a further series of doubts to get in their way. She had not said that she loved him, but neither had she denied it when the idea came up. He did not wish to break the spell by introducing another subject which would push her away. Several times he was on the brink of blurting out one of the questions which seemed to be accumulating, but already there was something in her demeanor which brought down a barrier that he felt unable to penetrate. He would bide his time, he decided. Clearly she still had secrets, but surely she would choose her own moment to share them.

  ELEVEN

  At the front of the dayroom, a magician was producing a white rabbit out of a hat. Michael smiled broadly at the thought that it was still possible to make a living by doing old-fashioned conjuring tricks, but then reflected that the man entertaining forty or fifty old folks at the Greenacres care home was unlikely to be doing it for the money. Magic had been his hobby since he was a small boy, most probably, and a chance to entertain an audience of real people was as much a treat for him as it was for those who were currently pretending to be amazed.

  Michael looked around at the men and women—mostly women—who were laughing and joking together in the dayroom. He thought, as so often he had before, how at first sight this seemed to be a group of old people, when in fact it was just a group of people who had been around for a long time. Yesterday they were sending their children to school and college, running a medium-sized engineering business, employing forty people, and paying their taxes. They were teachers, lawyers, musicians, shop assistants, and businesspeople. Now they were eighty years old and were watching a not-very-good magician performing tricks that might have impressed them when they were eight.

  When he found himself with time to spare at Greenacres, Michael had gotten into the habit of studying some of the individual faces of the residents. He discovered that if he looked carefully and for long enough, he could still see the eight-year-old boy or girl for whom this kind of entertainment had been designed. There they were, a bright young optimistic face, buried beneath many layers of experience and passing years, but deep down they were still very much present. Some had taken the opportunity of growing older to rediscover that eight-year-old’s carefree approach and humor. Many more had not.

  This was Saturday morning, and Michael’s grandma Rose was among the audience, and now when he looked at her he thought how she had grown old under the weight of the responsibility of raising him. He had watched as she transformed from the busy and bustling older woman she was when he was a child to the slower and slightly stooping elderly lady that she had gradually become. It had been like watching the postscript stages of the ascent of man—from upright to bowed over in the course of twenty years. The odd thing was that, if anything, it had been the onset of her progressive condition which had helped Rose to shed some of the burdens which reduced her and to rediscover the eight-year-old within. The developing Alzheimer’s had freed her of responsibilities and complications and released her to sit and be amazed each time the tiny ball vanished under one of three small red plastic cups and seemed to reappear under a different one. But what had been her progressive escape from the cares dictated by reality was now being reversed, and Michael fretted to know more about whatever it was that seemed to be blighting what might be her last weeks and months.

  He joined in the vigorous applause at the end of the entertainment, and only then did Rose look around and realize he was there and waiting to see her. Since he met Alison, there had been fewer opportunities for him to visit on weekends, and he hoped that she would be pleased. As it was, though, he thought her movements seemed significantly more labored than of late and that if anything it took her a moment to acknowledge him. She got up from her seat slowly, and they linked arms and walked carefully along the corridor to her private room, where he made her sit while he brewed a pot of tea.

  “That was fun, Grandma,” said Michael. “Was this his first time at Greenacres, or have you seen him before?”

  Rose turned to look at him when he spoke, seeming to notice him for the first time. When she replied, her words were an effort, as if she was struggling to stay alert. “Oh, Geoffrey’s been here loads of times. When I first knew him, he was the local butcher’s boy at a stall in the market. He went on to be a manager at the Co-op Bank in the high street. Now he’s reduced to patronizing old folks with nothing better to do and nowhere to escape to.” She paused, and Michael thought she had finished speaking when she added, “Like me.” Michael turned and saw that Rose seemed close to tears.

  Michael was sad to see his grandmother apparently so depressed, and he adopted as light a tone as he could while they had tea together and he told her all his news. When he asked how she was feeling, she said only that she had not been sleeping well, and after half an hour Michael sensed that she was tired and that he should leave. He was of two minds on whether to ask about the pho
tograph that he had found in her bureau. He had been waiting for the right moment, but Rose’s apparently fast-diminishing faculties made him worry that if he did not ask soon, the chance to do so might be lost forever.

  “Oh, just one thing, Grandma.” He reached into his inside pocket, feeling for the picture, which he had been carrying around with him. “I was looking for some stationery the other day, and I came across an old photo in a drawer. It’s a bit blurred, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before, and I didn’t recognize any of the people in it.” Michael handed the picture to Rose, who hesitated as she took it from him, and then held it up, moving it back and forth as she tried to bring it into focus.

  While she appeared to be looking and thinking, Michael took the opportunity to stand up and collect their teacups and saucers, and he carried them to the sink ready to be washed. He turned his back to her, and a few seconds passed before he realized that it had been a while since he asked the question. When he turned again towards her, he saw that Rose’s face was fixed in an expression he had never seen before—a mix of surprise and dismay. Gradually it seemed as though she knew what she wanted to say but could not find the words to say it.

  “Are you OK, Grandma?” said Michael, suddenly concerned that he had inadvertently upset her. Perhaps the photograph had triggered an unhappy memory. “Is it something about the picture?”

  Rose looked directly at her grandson, still unable to find the right words, and still apparently in growing distress. He saw that her head was gently shaking from side to side and that her hands were trembling. When she spoke, her voice was soft and suffocated.

  “It was a family who used to live next door to us before you were born. They broke up, and it was all very difficult for the children. I’d forgotten I had the picture, and it’s brought back some sad memories.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Grandma,” said Michael, and walked forward to put his arm around her shoulder. “I had no idea. I wouldn’t have mentioned it.”