The Bridge

by Stuart Prebble

  “What the fuck? What the hell is going on…?” He was still struggling to process the scene which confronted him.

  “There’s nothing to worry about, Michael.” Stephen was sitting at the central seat in front of the sound console and was operating the equipment. “Apparently a few people have told the police that they think the voice of the man they are looking for sounds a bit like yours. They have to check everyone who’s reported to them, they said, just for the purposes of elimination. So we haven’t asked them for a warrant or anything. I hope that’s all right with you?”

  He could hear the words and he was beginning to be able to sort out what they meant, but the true import of what was going on still eluded him. Could it possibly be the case that someone somewhere thought he was the Madman who had killed eleven children? Even as the idea floated across his consciousness, Michael felt himself having to work hard to temper his reaction.

  “I’m sorry to seem dense. I’m not usually quite so slow.” Despite his best efforts, he felt that he was beginning to lose control of himself. He took off his jacket and threw it down on the chair. “Are you people listening to a recording of my voice to see if it matches the voice of a mass murderer?”

  “As your colleague here says, Michael,” said the detective, “we are obliged to check everyone who’s been reported as having a voice similar to the one on the tape, and that includes you.”

  “But the radio said there have been hundreds of calls. Loads of people have rung in to suggest people with similar voices. How come you’ve got to me as what must be one of your first checks?”

  “We’re prioritizing people who’ve been named by the greatest number of callers. That’s the only way we can do it.”

  Michael thought that his otherwise unjustifiable indignation was at last getting some traction. There was a hint of sarcasm in his tone as he asked his next question. “And how many people have called in to say it sounds like me?” The detective reached into his pocket and flicked open the pages of a notebook, which seemed to arrive instantly at the relevant place.

  “Twelve.”

  Michael sat down hard on the sofa, clutching his head as if trying to force the information inside. “What? I don’t understand. What are you saying? That twelve people have phoned you to say that they think that the man on the Madman tape is me?”

  “I don’t think that’s what anybody is saying, Michael,” said Stephen. “Certainly that’s not what anyone here is saying, but the police have asked the public to let them know of anyone they think sounds like the man on the tape, so that they can be eliminated from their inquiries. And that must include you if only for the reason that twelve people who know you seem to think so. I for one don’t think for a moment that you are the bloke the police are looking for, and nor do any of the others here, obviously. We’re just doing what the police have asked us to do.”

  “So you phoned the police and told them that you work with someone who sounds like the Madman?” Michael did not know whether to be hurt or furious.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Stephen. “It wasn’t me, or at least it wasn’t just me. It was eight of us from here. You do sound like the Madman. Your voice sounds like his. That fact might help the police, even though the Madman obviously isn’t you. Or you are not him.” Stephen waved his arms around helplessly. “Whatever.”

  “Obviously,” said Michael, still completely nonplussed.

  “We were just about to make a spectrogram comparison with your voice and his,” said the detective, “so that we can rule you out and get on with checking the hundreds of other people whose friends and colleagues are as public spirited as yours are.”

  Michael felt that he had no choice but to sit quietly as the process continued, if only so that the misunderstanding could be cleared up quickly and be over. He now understood why the people on the reception desk had seemed preoccupied when he entered the building, and there had been no one in the corridors as he walked through. He watched the screen as Stephen set up the equipment so that it would project one graph on top of the other. The spectrogram was usually used in the suite to measure sound patterns on a digital recording, which helped when cueing background effects or commentary on a TV program. At the same time it was also measuring all aspects of the quality of a voice and in theory ought to be able to confirm that two recordings were made by the same person.

  He felt a shudder go through him as Stephen played a few words from the tape which had become so familiar overnight. “I may be mad, or it may be the rest of you who are mad. Who is to say?” The recording suite was designed to absorb sound, but the words seemed to echo around the room and bounce into and out of the corners. Once again, Michael knew that he was unable to be objective, but as he listened to it now he thought he would have known in an instant that the voice was not his own. Or perhaps it was simply that he did not want it to be so. It was, of course, irrational to feel such hostility to the idea that his voice sounded similar to that of the Madman; how could that matter? In a way he should hope that the two were indeed similar, because the comparison might help the police to track down the geographical background of the real killer. But such was the evil associated with the Madman and his dreadful crimes that Michael thought that no one would wish to be compared to him in any way, even the most tangential.

  At last the kit was set up and ready to make the comparison, and on the screen Michael could see two graphs, one colored red and one colored blue, superimposed over each other.

  “So just to explain how this works,” said Stephen. “The machine takes about twenty different aspects of the timbre of someone’s voice and attributes a high and low to them on the graph. An individual speaker usually keeps within the same measurements whatever they are saying.”

  “Even if they are speaking at a different volume, or speaking into a different recording device?” asked the detective.

  “That’s right,” said Stephen. “These aspects of a person’s voice are fixed in any circumstances. They would be difficult to disguise.” He turned to Michael. “With any luck, Michael, this’ll take about three minutes, and we can let these good people get on with what they should be doing.” If it was an attempt at an apology, it was too little and too late.

  “Let’s get it over with,” Michael said, and sat back on the sofa, folding his arms tight across his chest. “Let’s see if the Madman wants to order from the lunch menu.” But there was no trace of levity from either the speaker or from anyone listening.

  On the control desk behind him, Stephen pressed two buttons at once and opened two faders in parallel. Immediately there came the sound of two voices, speaking across each other. One was the voice of the Madman, continuing with the words he had used in the recording received by the police, the other was Michael reading out items from the menu. Had it not been so serious, it might have been comic. On the screen in front of the gathered audience, a wavy blue line began to run from left to right, and over it a separate wavy red line did the same thing.

  “The blue line is the recording the police brought us this morning,” said Stephen. “The red line is the recording of Michael we made a week or so ago.”

  No one spoke as the two recorded voices were played alongside each other, and the two lines progressed across the screen. Each voice was reflected in its own highs and lows at different times as their own individual syllables were spoken, but neither line went higher than the other at the top parameter of the graph or lower than the other at the bottom.

  Michael felt a knot forming in his stomach as the significance of what he was witnessing slowly began to dawn and then to become inescapable. He found himself willing the top scale of the blue line to go markedly higher than its equivalent on the red, or the graph of the red line to do the same along the bottom register—but neither of them did. After a further ten seconds it was clear what the machine was indicating; nonetheless, the policeman asked the question.

  “Is this machine telling us what it seems to be telling us?”
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  There was silence. Everyone turned to look at Stephen, but he did not speak. He could not speak. After a further five seconds the detective walked across the room and stood in front of Michael.

  “Michael Beaumont. I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of James Mitchell. You do not have to say anything, but it will harm your defense if you fail to mention, when questioned, anything that you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be used in evidence against you. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

  Michael tried to stand up, but his legs would not obey him. When finally he opened his mouth, he found he had no voice and had to clear his throat before any words would come out. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

  * * *

  Alison was eating lunch at her desk at the travel agency when one of her colleagues returned to work with the stunning news that police hunting the Madman had made an arrest. The whole office erupted in a spontaneous cheer, as though an invisible weight had been lifted from their shoulders. Just as the individual incidents had united everyone in their revulsion, so the prospect of an end to the national nightmare felt like a cause for collective relief. Of course, they wanted to feel sure that the police had gotten the right man.

  “Did they catch him trying to do another one? Does anyone know the circumstances?”

  “It’ll have been that tape. Someone will have recognized it as their son or brother and grassed him up.”

  “Would you turn in your own son or your lover? Even if you thought he was the Madman?”

  In the fast-flowing discussion which followed, Alison recalled what Michael had told her the previous night about the supposed similarity between his voice and that on the tape, but said nothing. The call to her mobile phone came in at exactly the same moment as she saw the TV news crew appear on the pavement on the other side of the street opposite the agency. Personal calls at work were not encouraged, and so usually she kept her phone switched off. Now she was rummaging in her handbag to stop the ringing as quickly as possible. She saw that the call was from an unknown number and was deciding whether to answer it when she looked up again and noticed that the news crew on the opposite pavement had now been joined by four or five other people, some with cameras and some without. She was aware of growing interest among her colleagues, several of whom were collecting at the window to try to see what was happening. Alison answered.

  “Is that Alison Parsons?” said a voice she did not recognize.

  “Yes, it is. Who is this?”

  “My name is Frank Miller, senior crime reporter from the Daily Mail. I wonder if we could just get your reaction to the news that your boyfriend, Michael Beaumont, has been arrested by the police investigating the Madman murders?”

  Alison sat still and silent. She could not move, but remained transfixed, staring straight ahead, until she looked again through the window and saw that a dozen people had now gathered and were crossing the road as a group and heading in her direction. She could feel her mind struggling to take in the sudden onset of events, and a moment later the individual images in front of her began to swim and blur. The telephone hit the floor a split second before Alison keeled over.

  * * *

  It was five or six minutes before Alison began to return to consciousness and found herself lying on a couch while three of the women she worked with attended to her. She recognized that she was in the back office, which was primarily for storage but which was sometimes used as a staff room. Her friend Angela was wafting a tea towel up and down to create a draft of cool air, while Pauline was standing to one side and fiddling with an electric fan which had not worked since the previous summer. Another woman from the office called Denise was perched on the edge of the seat next to her and holding a wet washcloth on her forehead. Alison was taking all this in and wondering what on earth had happened when the cause of her demise flooded back into her mind. She raised the palms of her hands to cover her face.

  She could hear what sounded like an argument going on outside the door, between her other colleagues from the agency and the journalists trying to get access to her. It was a free-for-all, in which she could decipher phrases like “The public has a right to know” and “She must have known what her boyfriend was doing.” Her mind was swimming in a chaos of thoughts, and she felt profoundly grateful to have these few moments to try to impose some kind of organization on them. As the noise from outside grew in volume, she tried to listen to more of what was being said, but then became aware of police sirens approaching from a distance. It was not the sound of a single car but of several merging from all directions into one, a level of cacophony usually associated with a major response by emergency services to a serious crime or accident. Moments later she heard the slamming of car doors and then more raised voices from outside.

  FOURTEEN

  So before we start, Mr. Beaumont, can we just make sure we’ve got a few of the basics sorted out?” The face of Detective Chief Superintendent Norman Bailey had become well known to Michael, as it had to virtually everyone else in Britain, and now the familiar look of determination from the police press conferences had acquired a renewed graft of steel. “Can you confirm your home address as number sixty-five Old Bridge Street, Hampton Wick, and that that address is an apartment which is just about four hundred yards away from Kingston Bridge?”

  Michael had at first said he would not need the services of a solicitor. This was such an elementary mistake, he said, that he would be able to establish his innocence in just a few minutes. However, the police had insisted, and now he glanced over at the young man who seemed only just a little older than himself and was dressed in a dark gray suit which looked as though it had been borrowed from his father. Earlier he had introduced himself to Michael as Gordon Giles, and now he nodded to Michael to confirm that he should answer.

  “Yes, that’s my address. Until recently I lived there with my grandmother, but she went to live in a care home a few months ago.”

  “We’ll get on to that in a minute. Let’s take a step at a time, shall we?”

  Michael felt that his head was swimming, and he looked over at a tiny yellow light on the recording machine which confirmed that the tape was turning. He found himself wondering why the police were not yet using digital recording, but then remembered that he needed to concentrate or more important matters. He wondered whether what he was experiencing was some sort of clinical shock and pushed his fists hard into his eyes to force himself to remain focused.

  “Yes, of course. Sorry.”

  “And can you confirm that your girlfriend’s name is Alison Parsons and that she resides at sixteen Arlington Terrace in Brighton and that that address is just about half a mile from Brighton Pier?” Bailey sat back in his chair and raised his bushy eyebrows in inquiry. He used the tip of his index finger to push a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles back from the bridge of his nose.

  “I see what you’re getting at,” said Michael. “But if you just let me explain, I know exactly where I was on all the times and days when these incidents occurred, and you can check my story and we can clear this up within minutes.” He looked again at the young lawyer who leaned across to him and whispered.

  “Just answer their questions. Don’t give them any information they don’t actually ask for.”

  Michael wanted to say that that was probably good advice for a guilty man who was trying to evade suspicion, but that he was not guilty, and so he just wanted to cut to the chase and get out of there. Then he realized that the lawyer was probably giving him advice based on the assumption that his client might indeed be the man the police were looking for. He turned back to face the detective.

  “Yes, that’s right, and I was with her, in her apartment in Brighton, in bed when the second incident occurred.”

  “But you confirm that you were in Brighton?” The question came from a younger woman officer.

  “Yes, I was in Brighton when the second incident occurred, and as I told you, I was with my girlfriend,
Alison. But I was not on Waterloo Bridge when the first one happened, and I have witnesses who can prove it. Also I was not in Kingston when the third one occurred. I was in Brighton, again with Alison, and she can confirm that. Just ask her and we can sort this whole thing out immediately.”

  “We plan to, Michael,” said the senior detective. “She’s on her way here right now, and I’m sure she will corroborate your story. But meanwhile, let’s make the best use of the available time by allowing us to ask you a few more questions.”

  The younger detective constable took over the interview and asked him whether he could remember what he was wearing on the relevant days and where those clothes might be now. Michael replied that he could not be certain at this distance in time what clothes he had on, but he was sure that they were not the same as those which the Madman had been described as having worn; if they had been, he would have noted it on the day.

  “Do you own a gray sweatshirt, the type with a hood?”

  “No, I don’t. I never have. I don’t like those things.”

  “And what about blue jeans and white T-shirts?”

  “Of course I do. Everyone does. But on the day of the incident in Brighton I think I remember that I was wearing a blue T-shirt and khaki cargo trousers. I recall it because Alison and I both noticed that lots of people seemed to be dressed the same as the news said the Madman was dressed, and obviously I wasn’t. But I still don’t understand; like I told you, at the time of the incident I was in bed.”

  “Alone?”

  “No, not alone, with Alison. I told you that.”

  “Yes, I meant alone with Alison. She is your alibi?”