Seven Bridges

by LJ Ross

  “Why? Have you got an appointment or something? Where’s your solicitor?” she added, trying her best to dissuade him from doing anything foolish.

  “Where is Tebbutt?” he repeated.

  The duty sergeant was torn, but eventually nodded.

  “Alright, Jack. I’ll call up and see if she’s in.”

  Lowerson refused the offer of a chair in the waiting area and stood beside the main desk until he spotted Tebbutt buzzing herself through the security doors.

  Her eyes were deceptively placid as she strolled across to meet him.

  “Hello, Jack. I understand you wanted to see me?”

  “Yes, I—I did,” he said, and willed himself not to lose the little courage he had.

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t like to contact your legal representative?” she asked, within earshot of the duty sergeant. She could never be criticised for not giving the lad every opportunity to cover himself.

  “No, I don’t need anyone.”

  “Would you like to go into a meeting roo—”

  “I killed her.”

  The words came out in a rush, spilling over one another in their haste to break free. Sweat coated his forehead and his eyes darted around the room, unable to hold hers for more than a second or two.

  “I think you should sit down,” she said, after an endless moment.

  “I killed her,” he repeated. “I want to make a statement.”

  Tebbutt gestured towards the interview suite and the sound of their receding footsteps echoed like the beat of an executioner’s drum against the tiled floor.

  * * *

  Unaware of the latest development unfolding at Police Headquarters, Ryan and a small party of police volunteers arrived at Newcastle Central Station less than two minutes after leaving the Castle Keep. Since all roads leading to the High Level Bridge had been closed and traffic diverted to a minor bridge much further west, the streets were deserted as they made the short journey.

  “It’s like a ghost town,” Phillips remarked, as they approached the tall sandstone columns outside the station.

  “Look,” MacKenzie murmured, pointing to a shop window as they passed. Faces peered at them from the relative safety, customers and sales assistants alike waiting for the worst to be over. Many were unable to travel home, with the roads and all major forms of public transport having been locked down.

  Ryan glanced at their pale faces.

  “They look like mannequins,” he muttered. Or bodies.

  “It’s like something from a dystopian horror movie,” Phillips said. “I keep expecting to see them break through the window, like a zombie apocalypse.”

  “You’ve been watching too much late-night telly again,” Ryan muttered, then fell silent as the station manager hurried across to greet them.

  “Thank God you’re here,” he said.

  The station had been emptied too, with passengers and pedestrians having been evacuated to nearby shops and waiting rooms, a safe distance away from the platform giving access to the High Level Bridge.

  “Normally, the King Edward VII carries most mainline traffic through to Scotland,” he continued, as they hurried towards the end of Platform 2. “But the High Level is still very much in use. Sorry, I’m babbling.”

  When they reached the end of the platform, Ryan found a small group of railway officials and transport police waiting. He also spotted Gary Nobel and Kevin Wilson standing nearby, presumably discussing the best approach.

  “Have you spoken to Bannerman?” he asked.

  “I just got off the radio, as it happens,” Nobel replied. “I told her to keep looking for any other devices from the underside. If there’s a ladder connecting the upper and lower levels of the bridge, I’ve told her to be on hand in case we need her to come up and help.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “How’s she holding up?”

  Nobel looked at him as if he’d grown two heads.

  “What d’you mean?”

  Ryan almost laughed.

  “Never mind,” he muttered, and turned to the rest of the crowd. “Who has the T-key?”

  He referred to the implement that would allow them to open any window or door on the train; an innocuous piece of metal that wielded so much power.

  An engineer from Network Rail stepped forward.

  “I do.”

  “Alright,” Ryan said. “You’ve all been briefed about the dangers. Anybody who’s having second thoughts about coming onto the tracks, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  There was complete silence.

  “Good. Let’s get this show on the road, as quickly as we can. The time is”—he looked up at the large iron clock hanging from the rafters of the station—“eleven thirty-three. I want everybody off that bridge before the clock strikes noon.”

  With that, he shrugged a high-vis jacket over his body armour vest and stepped off the edge of the platform.

  CHAPTER 18

  Ben Cooper undid another button on his shirt collar and turned up the air conditioning in the driver’s cabin at the front of the train. A set of enormous wipers swooshed back and forth across the windscreen, scraping away a layer of snow that was growing heavier by the minute, and yet he felt as though he was burning up; one minute hot and bothered, the next, so shivery he might faint.

  He pressed shaking fingers against his temple as black dots swam briefly in front of his eyes.

  “Ben? Open up, it’s me!”

  Behind him, there came another knock at the cabin door and he leaned across to unlock it after hearing Imran’s voice calling out to him.

  A moment later, the train manager’s head appeared.

  “How’s the mood out there?” Ben asked.

  “Volatile,” Imran replied. “There’s only five of us on shift today and it’s just not enough to manage. I’ve got Carole and Will doing walk-throughs of the carriages so they stay visible and we’re taking three carriages each. But the minute our backs are turned, the passengers are up in arms again. Kids are crying, people are really panicking. I had one woman nearly pass out in Carriage E.”

  Ben swiped his sleeve over his clammy forehead and Imran cast a concerned eye over him.

  “Hey, mate, you alright? You don’t look so good.”

  The driver waved it away.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Just stressed, like everybody else.”

  Imran started to say something, then heard a commotion behind him.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “It’s kicking off again. I’ll be back in a minute—”

  “Wait,” Ben grabbed his sleeve and pointed out of the wide convex window. “Look over there.”

  Both men narrowed their eyes against the mist of the falling snow and then broke into broad smiles for, up ahead, they spotted a line of men and women in high-vis jackets walking carefully towards them.

  “They’re coming to get us,” Imran said, happily. “I’ll go and get things ready.”

  As he hurried back out into the carriage, Ben felt a twinge in his arm and gave it a hard rub, thinking it was time he got up and moved around. As soon as all this was over, he was going to go on that diet his girlfriend had been none-too-subtly nagging him about. The doc said the extra weight he was carrying didn’t help his asthma but, well, what was a bloke to do? He sat on his arse driving trains all day long; he wasn’t an Olympic runner. When he got home from work, all he wanted to do was sit down and relax with a nice chicken curry and a few chips to dip in. Where was the harm in that? He was a hard-working man.

  But the twinges kept coming, stronger this time, and he resolved to change his ways.

  Just as soon as he got off the train.

  * * *

  Ryan had eight volunteers from CID including himself and an engineer from Network Rail, plus three members of the British Transport Police joining him on the north side of the bridge. At the same time, he’d arranged for local police to access from the south to evacuate passengers from the carriages that were close
r to that end of the bridge and numerous ambulances and paramedics waiting to stretcher people away, should the need arise. The EOD Unit were already combing beneath the train, checking for any sign of a device hidden beneath its underbelly while their colleague Sue Bannerman did the same on the road and pedestrian level of the bridge, below. They had already checked the tracks for any sign of trip-wires and had pronounced it clear.

  Ryan banged a fist on the reinforced glass door of the first carriage and showed his warrant card.

  “DCI Ryan, CID! Open the door, please!”

  As the train manager nodded and released the internal mechanism with a loud hiss of compressed air, Ryan turned to Phillips and MacKenzie.

  “Mac, start unloading passengers from this carriage. I want it done in a safe and orderly fashion; I don’t want people rushing in a stampede. Nobody should try to bring their luggage with them, either. We’ve got the transport officers waiting at intervals from here all the way back to the platform acting as marshals to guide them along.”

  “Leave it to me,” she said, and turned to help Imran unfold a ladder that would allow people to disembark the train.

  “The rest of you, fan out and take a carriage each,” Ryan said. “Phillips? I need you to oversee the front end of the train, I’ll run down to the back end. Yates? You’re with me.”

  Suddenly, they heard the roar of a helicopter engine, its whirring propellers tearing through the clouds until it was directly above them. It hovered in the sky like a giant winged insect, buzzing around their heads. Ryan realised it must be a media helicopter, as he had already expressly forbidden the use of the police helicopter.

  “They shouldn’t be up there—” Phillips began.

  “It’s too late to stop it!” Ryan called out, above the roaring noise. “If they’re streaming live footage, the bomber could see this, if he hasn’t already. Let’s move! Move! Move!” Ryan shouted to his team, then broke into a run as the carriage doors were opened, one-by-one.

  * * *

  It was a sad truth that, in a crisis situation, most people reverted to their most basic selves and looked out for Number One. Unfortunately, this resulted in a mad, thoughtless dash towards the train doors as soon as they were opened and, in their haste, several people sustained minor injuries.

  Ryan’s team worked together with the onboard train crew and other transport officials in a seamless conveyor belt, grasping the hands of each person who stumbled down the ladder and onto the gravelled walkway. They saw every type of person, a blur of faces and a stream of colour as they worked against the clock to clear the train.

  In the middle carriage, a man with an arthritic hip began to lower himself down and was jostled from behind by an impatient crowd. He cried out in pain, clutching a hand to his leg as he fell forward.

  “Woah, lad! I’ve got you!” Phillips cushioned the man’s fall and found himself winded in the process, but there was no time to worry about that. He set the man on his feet again. “You alright, feller? Course, you are,” he said, when the man shook himself off. “Just follow the crowd in that direction and keep going as fast as you can, alright?”

  Further down the train, Yates held a toddler in her arms while its mother lowered herself down the ladder clutching another baby to her chest.

  “Careful, now,” she warned. “Watch where you tread.”

  The most able-bodied passengers fled the train like rats leaving a sinking ship, moving in a silent exodus along the outermost edge of the train line. Where they would have tried to run, officers shouted warnings and tried to reduce the constant and overriding threat of panic taking over.

  Ryan knew the feeling; he could feel his heart beating too fast, could feel the tightness growing in his chest as the minutes slipped by.

  “This way,” he said to a woman of eighty or ninety, who stood in the doorway of the train paralyzed by fear. He tried not to think about the wasted seconds and instead reached up to hold out a hand. “Take my hand, I’ve got you.”

  “There’s an offer,” the train stewardess joked, to make the woman laugh.

  “Best one I’ve had in forty years,” the woman replied, and Ryan flashed a smile as he took her weight and lifted her down onto the walkway.

  “There, now,” he said. “You see that handsome chap over there?”

  He pointed to one of the marshals standing further down the walkway.

  “Mm, not bad,” she agreed, and made him smile again.

  “Keep to this pathway and head towards him,” Ryan told her, pressing a gentle hand in the small of her back to nudge her along. “He’ll show you where to go after that. Take it nice and steady.”

  To his shock and surprise, the old woman gave his backside a none-too-gentle pat.

  “See ya, handsome!” she said, with a wink.

  As Ryan reached up to help the next passenger off the train, he marvelled at the tenacity of the human spirit, which seemed able to find humour in even the most extreme situations.

  * * *

  “Let’s run through this, one more time.”

  DCI Tebbutt set her pen back on top of her notepad and folded her arms comfortably across her chest.

  Jack Lowerson ran restless hands through his hair. How many more times did he need to say it?

  “Turning back the clock, tell me again when your first met the late DCS Lucas.”

  Lowerson closed his eyes, feeling sick and weary of all her questions.

  “I’ve already told you,” he said. “I met her about five months ago, when she transferred up from the Met to be our new superintendent.”

  “And, what did you think of her?” she asked, to throw him off guard a little.

  “What?” He ran an absent hand across his eyes. “What did I think of her?” he repeated, a bit distractedly.

  Smart. Attractive. Seductive.

  “I thought she was…I thought she was everything I’d been looking for in a woman,” he said, out loud.

  “But she was older than you?”

  “Yes, but I never noticed.” Until later. Until she chose to remind me, every day, he almost said.

  “She was also your senior officer. Your boss.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “How did you come to work with her, day to day? You were previously assigned to work with DCI Ryan, weren’t you?”

  Lowerson thought of how easily he had allowed himself to be manipulated, how he’d yearned to believe every honeyed word she’d spoken.

  “DCS Lucas offered me a promotional pathway, on condition that I went to work for her.”

  Even saying it out loud, he felt such a fool.

  Tebbutt continued to regard him with a patient, unthreatening expression while she took her time drawing him out.

  “Did that come as a surprise?”

  “Yes, it did,” he remembered. “I thought—I chose to believe her, when she told me it was on account of my previous work record.”

  Tebbutt raised an eyebrow.

  “No reason why not,” she remarked, to put him at ease. “You have an exemplary work record, Jack.”

  He said nothing, biting down hard on the soft flesh of his inner lip. There would be no more shining work record, no gold watch at the end of thirty years’ service. This would be the end of all that, but he’d made his choice freely.

  “How did you find it, working for DCS Lucas? How would you describe her management style?”

  Subversive. Manipulative. Divisive.

  “Business-like,” he said.

  “But you began a personal relationship with her, didn’t you?”

  Lowerson closed his eyes again, hardly able to keep them open all of a sudden. The adrenaline it had taken to drive himself down to the station was wearing off, leaving him tired and hollowed out.

  “Yes,” he muttered. “We had a personal relationship, almost from the start.”

  “You never felt that was…awkward?”

  “Not at the time, no.”

  “Who instigated the relatio
nship, in the very beginning?”

  “She did,” he admitted. But honesty compelled him to add, “I was very willing.”

  “How did you feel about her?”

  “I loved her.” I love her still, he thought, with self-loathing. It would take a good, long while for that old feeling to diminish and for his heart to catch up with his head.

  “I see,” Tebbutt murmured. “So, this went on for a number of months. Were your colleagues aware, to your knowledge?”

  “If they were, they never said anything,” he replied. He didn’t bother to add that he’d found himself more and more isolated from his friends. Each time he’d suggested seeing one of them, Jennifer always seemed to have arranged something else so he couldn’t go. That’s how it had begun.

  “Turning to the events of last night, then,” Tebbutt watched him closely. “Can you walk me through your movements once again, please?”

  Lowerson swallowed and reached for the glass of water on the table in front of him, finishing it in several gulps to ease the scratchy, burning sensation in his throat that came from a night spent crying.

  “I had the day off,” he said. “I’d spent Friday night with J—with DCS Lucas, at her home, but when she went to work in the morning I left and went back to my flat, in Heaton.”

  “Go on,” she urged him.

  Lowerson swallowed again.

  “I-I didn’t really do very much. I stayed at home watching some TV—”

  Thinking things over, he added silently.

  “—and then I went for a walk.”

  “Where? At what time?”

  “Oh, until around one, one-thirty,” he mumbled. “Nowhere in particular. Just around the streets. Jesmond Dene. The park. The church.”

  “The church? Are you a church-going man, Jack?”

  “Not usually, no.”

  “What made you go in, yesterday?”

  “I-I suppose I felt like I needed somewhere quiet to sit for a while.”

  Tebbutt rolled her pen between her finger and thumb, while she thought.

  “Then what?”

  “I walked home again and stayed there until…ah, until I knew Jennifer’s shift would have ended and she’d be back home. I drove across to her house around four-fifteen and let myself in.”