The Bridge

by Stuart Prebble

  There seemed to be an unspoken pact between them in those few days that they would not venture back into the distant past or the series of horrors which had led them to where they now were. Many times Michael wondered what it must be like for his mother to know that she had given birth to someone who may be responsible for the murder of all those tiny children, but instantly he tried hard to expel such thoughts from his mind. That way lay madness for all of them, it seemed, and for the moment it was as though the normality brought by the ordinary business of everyday life was the best way to survive and get through the coming ordeal. They preferred to try to get used to each other gradually, building a new bridge towards dry land, rather than churning up the quagmire which had made the connection necessary in the first place.

  The police had scheduled a twice-daily telephone call with Michael to touch base about any developments in the hunt for Martin. Once again every newspaper, magazine, and news bulletin in the land headlined the story, and once again pictures of a face which could be Michael’s were everywhere. This meant that Michael could leave the apartment in only the most controlled circumstances, always having given prior notice to the police so that they knew to ignore tip-offs from the public in the relevant areas. The police had warned people not to approach Martin Bannerman if they saw him, but nonetheless it was impossible to rule out vigilante action by some public-spirited individual, with potentially appalling consequences for Michael in the case of mistaken identity.

  Michael spent many hours studying the face in the police photo. It was indeed very like his own face in shape and structure; but then again it was not his face in all the ways that environment and nurture can overlay. He thought that his brother’s complexion had a pallor which was no doubt consequent on having spent less time outdoors or in the sun. Possibly the frown lines on his forehead were the result of having spent more of his life in unhappy or challenging circumstances. The trace of a scowl around the mouth need not be permanent, but the physical record of recent years had left what was probably an indelible shadow. Michael wondered how this person, this parallel human being, could be so like him in so many ways, and yet unlike him in so many others.

  The police had agreed to keep the press and media as far away as they could from Rose’s funeral, and Michael and Margaret reckoned that there would be only twenty or so people attending. There was Elsie from next door, whose son Raymond was going to bring her. There was Mrs. Morrison and some of the other staff from Greenacres, including, of course, Esme. Three or four of the other residents from the care home were also able to attend, and Detectives Bailey and Collins had asked if they could come to pay their respects. Michael was pleased and surprised to receive a message that the nurse from the intensive care unit, Christopher, would also be present. Mrs. Morrison had kindly offered the use of a private room back at Greenacres for tea and some refreshments after the service.

  Michael went on calling and calling the numbers he had for Alison right up to the morning of the service. The travel agency said it had not heard from her, and her voice mail remained over capacity and unable to record anything further.

  It was a dry but windy day in June when the group of mourners gathered together to say goodbye to Rose Beaumont, formerly Rose Bannerman, formerly Rose Williams. It had been arranged that Michael would drive to Wandsworth Crematorium with Margaret, and Rose would be brought directly there by the undertakers. Two uniformed officers stood on each side of the iron gates at the perimeter, and there was a barrage of clicking and bright lights as Michael maneuvered the aging Vauxhall among and through the melee. The chapel was out of sight of the main road, and Michael saw that a number of people had arrived before them and were parking nearby. As he got out of his car, Michael was happy to see Esme just emerging from the passenger side of a blue VW, and a moment later was surprised and puzzled to see that her car was being driven by Sergeant Mallinson, who was dressed in civilian clothes and who now got out and walked around to stand next to his passenger. Michael went over and gave Esme a hug, and she smiled the smile he remembered so well from happier days at Greenacres.

  “I think you know Peter, don’t you?” She gestured towards the sergeant, who looked slightly uncomfortable out of his police uniform. “Peter lives three doors down from me. He’s been a good friend over the years.” Suddenly a number of questions which Michael had been asking himself for weeks were answered, and he also smiled broadly and extended his hand. Mallinson’s face eloquently reflected their mutual understanding.

  “Obviously I wasn’t able to say anything,” said the sergeant. “But I always knew that you couldn’t be the Madman. Not after what Esme had told me about you. I hope you understand that I had to go by the book?”

  Michael said that he understood completely. “Whatever was the reason, I’m grateful. Your few kind words gave me something to hang on to at the worst time of my life.” Once again he chose not to share the suspicions he had harbored at the time that Mallinson might be playing “good cop” to Bailey’s “bad cop.” They turned and went inside the chapel.

  Rose had been a regular churchgoer and had attended the same Methodist ministry in Hampton Wick ever since she moved into the area with Michael eighteen years earlier. The vicar who had known her originally retired some years before and was in the congregation, but the man who conducted the formalities had also known her for several years. As Reverend Tibbets began to recite the familiar words of the funeral service, Michael looked around, discreetly acknowledging the presence of anyone who caught his eye. He was keen to know who had come to his grandmother’s funeral, and most keen of all to see if there was any sign of Alison. There was not, and so Michael tried to concentrate on the words being spoken by the minister.

  “Rose Beaumont was someone we would simply call a good woman. Someone for whom nothing was ever too much trouble, and who was always looking for an opportunity to do a good turn for other people. There is no doubt that she was the epitome of that old cliché ‘a pillar of the community,’ but much more than that, she dedicated her life to bringing up her grandson Michael, who is here with us today. And Michael”—the minister turned and addressed him directly—“I know that she was very proud of you.” Michael attempted a smile of acknowledgment, but above all at that moment he felt relief that Rose had known in her last moments that he was no longer suspected of any crime and that he had been able to say goodbye to her properly. He was also grateful that she had died without ever knowing that her other grandson, Martin, was now the prime suspect in the hunt for the Madman.

  Eventually the recorded organ music was playing, and the coffin began to move away on the rollers which would take it behind the velvet curtains and on its final journey. Michael noticed that his mother remained seated for a few moments after everyone else was edging out of the chapel, and he stood beside her patiently, waiting for her to complete her thoughts. Outside, people were shaking hands and speaking of “a lovely service,” and Michael invited everyone to head back to Greenacres for tea.

  Michael opened the car door for his mother and was walking around to the driver’s seat when he looked up and saw a figure in the distance he immediately recognized. It was Alison. She appeared to be staring into space and only looked directly at him when he called her name. At first he thought she was about to turn and head in the other direction, but then Michael called again, and she remained still as he ran up behind her. She was facing away when he reached her, and he put his hands on her shoulders. He was about to turn her around to embrace her, when he felt a sudden jolt from the reality that the woman he thought of as his lover was in some way involved with the death of his baby sister, and he did not know how to be with her. When she turned to him, her face was wet from a fast-flowing stream of tears, and he was shocked to see cuts around her eyes and lips. Now they embraced, clinging together like two lost souls, and both with their hearts entirely ready to break.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Alison had arrived at the service in a taxi and said she wou
ld prefer to go in it back to Greenacres rather than to meet Michael’s mother for the first time, after so many years, in the crematorium car park. Once there, Michael made sure that those who had returned to the care home were directed to the private room which had been set aside. Esme told him that he need not worry about them—she would ensure that everyone was offered tea and sandwiches—and that they would all be content to talk among themselves. She had also spoken to Mrs. Morrison, who agreed to allow her office to be used for a small and very strange reunion.

  The two women greeted each other with courtesy and coolness, neither yet able to shake off the inhibitions caused by the circumstances and the history, and most of all by so many unanswered questions. Now the three of them sat on individual chairs, each in a separate corner of the room, and Michael felt like the referee between two combatants who were trying to get the measure of each other. Margaret was gently nodding her head, still trying to take on board the sequence of events from the time she had received the emergency message to go in to visit Rose at the care home.

  “I think that Rose must have worked out that Alison was Elizabeth,” said Michael to his mother. “And that’s why she had called you so urgently that day. She wanted to know what to do.”

  “I see that. None of us had seen Elizabeth for eighteen years, since she was eight years old, and we’d been told by the police that she had gone abroad. They didn’t say where it was, but we got the impression that it was far away. I’m sure we were all certain that we would never see or hear from her again.” She sipped her tea and thought for a few moments longer. “In her heart, I think that Rose always blamed Elizabeth for what happened to your baby sister, and then for the fact that her husband took his own life.”

  Michael caught sight of the renewed twinge of pain which flickered across Alison’s face, as though she had been physically slapped. “Which is, of course, entirely unfair,” he said quickly.

  “It may have been unfair, of course it probably was unfair, but nonetheless, that’s how she would have seen it. You two brothers were always the apple of her eye, and you can understand why it would have been tempting to blame an older child from outside the family who should have known better.” Nothing in Margaret’s tone indicated to what extent she herself believed what she was saying. “And then she dedicated her entire life to making sure that you had no knowledge, Michael, of all those events. You were so young at the time that you could easily not remember anything about them. So she must have had the shock of her life when Elizabeth turned up and she worked out who she was.” She put down her cup, again speaking her thoughts as they were coming to her and she was sorting them out in her own head. “But I still wonder what could have been so urgent. It had taken her a while to work things out, but once she had, I wonder why she regarded it as such an emergency.”

  Michael was at first confused that the reason for Rose’s alarm was not obvious to Margaret, but then he realized that she might not yet know the circumstances of Rose’s first meeting with Alison and himself.

  “Well, because it was me who brought Elizabeth to see Rose in the first place. I introduced her to Grandma as my girlfriend,” he said. “If it wasn’t bad enough that someone she thought she would never see again had turned up out of the blue, she must have understood that I was involved with a girl she held responsible for the death of my sister. She will have been horrified, and wanted to speak to you to discuss what to do. If she told me what the problem was, she’d also be telling me about the past, and that’s what she had spent her whole life trying to avoid.”

  Michael felt uncomfortable about having left the other mourners to their own devices, and the three of them agreed that they would return to the wake and then come back together a little later. They went to the common room, where Michael noted with some amusement that Esme had produced a bottle of sherry and that one or two of Rose’s former card-playing partners were in danger of getting tipsy. As he tried to focus on the niceties of friendly conversation about memories of Grandma Rose, Michael could not prevent his attention from returning over and over again to Alison. He watched her chatting to Rose’s former neighbor Elsie and the Methodist minister, apparently without stress or anxiety, and found himself amazed that she had been able to remain apparently so sane and stable in spite of her appalling ordeal.

  After the last of the guests had drifted away or returned to the dayroom, Michael asked Mrs. Morrison if it would be okay to use her office for a little longer to catch up on some lost time.

  “I don’t want you to think that the children’s home was some sort of Dickensian nightmare,” said Alison when everyone had resettled. “It wasn’t. Probably they did their best in difficult circumstances. Every kid in there had come from a tough situation of some sort, and they all had their own histories. Mine was worse than most because of the terrible stories which everyone had read in the papers before I got there—stuff about child monsters and evil incarnate—and for most of the time, no one was really certain whether or not I was guilty of anything. Either I was some dreadful child killer who had drowned a baby out of pure evil, or I was the victim of a horrible injustice which had taken me away from my family and led to me being blamed for something I had nothing to do with.”

  She stopped speaking and there was a long pause. Both Margaret and Michael were desperate to hear Alison’s own answer to the question which had been left hanging in the air, but neither wished to be the one to ask it. Alison was every bit as aware of the suspense as they were; she had faced comparable situations hundreds of times.

  “And do you want an honest answer?” Michael and his mother exchanged a look before nodding their heads. “The honest answer is that I don’t know. It was all a long time ago. I was eight, for heaven’s sake. I was playing in the house. Martin was somewhere else. I think he wanted to play with Amy in the bath, but I have no memory of running any water into it. I also have no memory of even lifting the baby into the bath, but I know that I must have done so, because Martin wouldn’t have been able to lift her without help. I remember being completely involved in a game I was playing with you, Michael, and the next thing I knew, I could hear your grandma starting to scream. Then all hell was let loose, and I was crying and crying, and people were yelling at me. I remember someone shaking me and calling me an evil witch, and being roughly handled as I was taken away. The rest is a complete blur. I get flashbacks of newspaper headlines and my parents in hysterics. In the end both had something like a breakdown and told the authorities they couldn’t cope. No one else wanted me, for obvious reasons, and I was more or less locked up. I never saw them, or any of the rest of you, ever again.”

  There was another extended pause, and finally Michael spoke. “Not until the bar in Brighton?”

  “No, not until then.”

  “But what about Joanna? Tell me what happened with her.” Michael turned to his mother and related the story of when they met Joanna in the French restaurant in Brighton. Then he returned to Alison. “Where does she figure?”

  “I was determined that when I left the children’s home I would start a new life. I changed my name and made a plan to go to Australia. I was there for eight years and eventually thought it would be safe to come home. I’d spent most of my time in the Midlands and the north, and so I thought that after eighteen years and a complete change of appearance, it would be safe to go back to Brighton. I got a job in the travel agency, and it was all going well, and then you and I met in that bar.” Now Alison turned to Margaret. “He and I hit it off straightaway, but I had absolutely no idea who he was. I thought that finally I’d met someone who could really mean something to me, and the last thing I wanted was for him to know about my past. So when a girl I’d known in the children’s home approached me when Michael and I were in a restaurant, I pretended that she had mistaken me for someone else.” Alison went on to tell how she had stupidly confided to Joanna when they were in the children’s home that she believed Martin had deliberately killed his baby sister by drow
ning. “Martin was taken to a secure place, and I hadn’t seen him since. Anyway, when she heard about the Madman murders, Joanna took it into her head that Martin might be the person responsible. She started pressing me to inform the police of the possibility, calling and texting me every hour of the day and night, telling me that I was trying to protect the killer and that I shouldn’t be doing it. Then things eventually got a bit out of hand.” Alison related the story of the meeting in Starbucks and how ashamed she was of what had taken place.

  For the entire time since Esme had told Michael about who Alison really was, his mind had wandered over every possible explanation for how she had come back into his life. He had agonized over his feelings for her, his emotions alternating between doubt and hope, and between suspicion and faith. Now her clarification of the history made him feel reassured, and her description of their first meeting in Brighton was a reminder of their happy times together. He reached across and took Alison’s hand in his. She looked back towards him, a half smile on her face, and he thought his heart might overflow.

  After a further few moments Michael turned again to his mother. Since they were in the full flow of revelation, it was important to understand everything he could about how they had come to the situation they were now facing. “Was there ever any sign when we were growing up that he was different? Anything at all which would give a clue as to what might have been going on in his head when he did what he did to Amy?” He had to summon a renewed effort of will to move on to what must follow. “Or what we suspect that he may have been doing these last few weeks?”