Seven Bridges

by LJ Ross

  “You had a key?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened once you were inside?”

  “We argued,” he said, in a low voice.

  “What about?”

  Lowerson looked up with dazed eyes.

  “Sorry?”

  “I asked what you argued about.”

  “Oh,” he said, and thought back to the ugly row they’d had, only the previous day and yet it might have been years, decades. The memory of it had taken on a sepia-hued quality, like an old movie reel he had consigned to the recesses of his mind.

  “We argued about my cat, Marbles.”

  Tebbutt scratched her ear and thought that this read like a classic case of a coercive relationship gone bad. She’d lost count of the number of times a cherished pet had been collateral damage, used as an emotional weapon.

  “What happened to the cat?” she asked, although she could have guessed.

  “Jennifer killed it,” he said, matter-of-factly. It helped to say it that way, or he’d break down again and never be able to go through with what he needed to say. “She was always insanely jealous because it was something I loved before her.”

  Tebbutt took a moment to gather herself together, having been moved by his last sentence more than she liked to admit.

  “You accused her?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I thought about it throughout the day and I knew, in my gut, she’d done it. The cat went missing when I was at work but Jennifer wasn’t. She had access to my flat, in any case.”

  “And when you accused her, she denied it?”

  “At first,” Lowerson said, with a sad little smile. “Once she really got into the swing of things, she didn’t bother to deny it. She said the cat was a mangy, flea-ridden creature and that she wouldn’t touch me again if I continued to own it. She’d said that before but…well, I loved that cat. I kept her and looked after her and Jennifer didn’t like it.”

  “What happened during the argument?”

  Lowerson gathered his thoughts, not wanting to make a mistake.

  “I—ah, I guess I saw red. I shoved her, I think.”

  “One hand, or two?” Tebbutt put in, mildly.

  “Ah, I think it was one,” he said. “I can’t really remember.”

  “Okay. You shoved her. Then what?”

  “She fell hard and hit her head on the radiator. I, ah, I grabbed her head and hit it against the metal, to be sure.”

  The words made him sick to his very core and Tebbutt watched his skin turn an unnatural grey.

  But not as grey as Jennifer Lucas, who now lay dead inside a refrigerated drawer.

  She hardened herself.

  “How did you grab her, Jack?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how’d you grab her? By the sides of her head, by the hair, by the neck…how?”

  Lowerson looked blank for a second, then he reached for another glass of water.

  “By the hair,” he said, and hoped that was right.

  Tebbutt scribbled something on her notepad and then circled it. Lowerson frowned, wishing he could read what she had written, then decided it didn’t matter.

  “Up until now, you’ve been adamant that you didn’t hurt her,” she said, after a pause. “What changed, Jack? Why the sudden change of heart?”

  His eyes welled, but he held himself together.

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  CHAPTER 19

  By eleven-fifty, hundreds of people had been safely evacuated from the train. Ryan watched them shuffling along the walkway, their heads bent against the wind and snow, and wondered how many had made it safely off the bridge. There had been no time for a head count and, in fact, the train crew hadn’t been able to say with any certainty how many passengers were on board. People got on and off all the time, some with railcards, some with advance tickets and some with no ticket at all.

  His radio crackled, and he heard that seven out of nine carriages were now empty, with the remaining two almost empty but for a wheelchair user and a man who was refusing to leave.

  Ryan hauled himself onto the train, passing through the empty carriages strewn with bags and half-eaten food until he reached Carriage C, where he found Phillips crouched beside a man of around twenty who was refusing to move from the vestibule area. His face was pale and drawn and he had the skinny, malnourished look of somebody who hadn’t seen a good meal in days. One of the stewards stood beside them, casting frequent glances over his shoulder towards the open doorway beyond.

  “Get going,” Ryan barked. “We’ll take it from here.”

  Phillips glanced across and Ryan saw concern writ large on his sergeant’s face.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  The man looked away, clinging with both hands to the edge of the wall.

  “This lad says he wants to stay on the train because he hopes it blows up,” Phillips said, sadly. “He says his girlfriend’s left him and taken the baby with her. He lost his job a couple of months ago and he’s just been rejected for another one. His name’s Luke.”

  Ryan looked away briefly, trying to manage his own sense of rising panic. There was no time to have the kind of careful, in-depth discussion that Luke needed, much as he might have liked.

  There was simply no time.

  “I’m sorry you’re feeling so low, Luke, but however you’re feeling now will pass,” he said, as time slipped through his fingers like sand. “I need you to understand that the decision you’re making affects more than just yourself.”

  “I want to die,” he muttered. “Can’t you just leave me on here?”

  He turned to Ryan with such a look of appeal, he felt his heart shatter.

  But there were others to think of.

  “No, Luke. I can’t.”

  With that, he reached across and simply hauled the man to his feet. It was such an unexpected action, Luke had no time to protest.

  “Listen to me, Luke. I know you’re a good bloke and you want to do the right thing,” Ryan grasped his shoulders and hoped he was right. “After all this is over, we’ll sit down with a pint and you can tell me all about it. But, right now? I need you to help me. I need your help. Do you think you can do it?”

  The man struggled with himself.

  “I-I don’t know how I could possibly help. I’m no use to anyone.”

  “Yes, you are,” Ryan told him, and led him towards the ladder leading off the train. He cast a quick glance in both directions and then stuck his fingers in his mouth to emit a loud, ear-popping whistle that caught the attention of Yates, a little further along the tracks. He gave her a hand signal and a moment later she was hurrying towards them. Ryan turned back to the young man hovering beside him. “See this lady? She’s a police officer and she needs you to help guide some of the older passengers along the tracks. I need you to make sure people are safe, Luke. Can you do that for me?”

  As Yates approached, Ryan gave her a meaningful look.

  “Luke wants to help us to make sure everybody makes it off the bridge safely. Including himself,” he added, as a warning as much as anything else.

  Yates was a quick study.

  “Thank God,” she said, with hardly a pause. “I could use another pair of hands. This way.”

  Once she had led him away, Phillips put a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  “You soft git,” he said, affectionately.

  “Yeah, well. Don’t let it get about.”

  * * *

  At five minutes before noon, the world watched.

  They tuned in from their homes and offices and waited with bated breath, unwilling to look and yet unable to look away until they knew whether The Alchemist would make good on his promise to burn up another bridge. Ryan had, by now, assumed that whatever device had been rigged had been set to a timer rather than manual detonation, otherwise there would surely already have been a second explosion in punishment for breaking the rules. On that analysis, the bomb had always been sc
heduled to detonate, regardless of whether or not they stumped up the cash in bitcoins.

  Either that, or their bomber had a heart, after all.

  Ryan wasn’t holding out too much hope.

  Passengers had been fully evacuated and all official personnel had been ordered to leave the bridge other than himself, Phillips and MacKenzie, who were checking the carriages one last time to make sure nobody had been forgotten. He was striding through Carriage A, at the front of the train, when he was met by the train manager.

  He looked ashen.

  “What is it?” Ryan demanded.

  “It’s Ben—the driver. I think he’s having a heart attack and we need to get off. We have to get off—”

  “Alright, try to stay calm. Where is he?”

  Ryan hurried after him towards the driver’s cabin and put an urgent radio call through to his team to make sure everyone else was off the bridge. With only a couple of minutes before noon, it was getting too near to the deadline for an ambulance crew to come onto the tracks; that would risk more lives than they’d save. Their best hope was to get the driver off the train and closer to the station, away from the blast zone.

  In the fleeting seconds it took them to cross from one end of the carriage to the other, it flashed through Ryan’s mind that, by staying on the train to help a stranger, he was risking his own life, too. In the past, it hadn’t seemed to matter so much because he’d been alone. He’d felt less constrained, less frightened about taking decisions that needed to be taken because he had been accountable only to himself. But now, there was someone he had vowed never to hurt and who he’d promised to protect—whether she needed him to or not—because he loved her more than anything or anyone else, including himself.

  There was Anna.

  He experienced a momentary twist in his stomach, a slow roll of nausea as he thought of what it must be costing her to watch events like these play out on television, or even to hear about them on the radio. It was true that he’d never lied to her and that she had known from the start what his job entailed. But there was knowing and then there was knowing.

  Ryan shoved the thought aside.

  It was too late for self-recriminations, too late for doubts that could cost lives. He needed to focus on the task ahead.

  As he and Imran reached the driver’s cabin at the front of the train, they were met by MacKenzie, who climbed the ladder leading up to the first doorway.

  “What’s happened? Ryan, we need to get off the bridge—”

  “It’s the driver,” he said, and wasted no more time before ducking inside the cabin. There, he found Ben Potter half-sitting, half-lying in his seat clutching his left arm. Sweat poured down his face, which was contorted with pain.

  “Where’s the First Aid kit?” Ryan demanded of the train manager, who looked as if he might keel over himself. “Is there a defibrillator, if we need it?”

  Imran hurried off to look for it, while Ryan leaned across to loosen the man’s clothing a little to make him more comfortable.

  “My lass,” Ben gasped. “Tell her—tell her—”

  Ryan cut him off.

  “It won’t come to that,” he assured him, because it was the right thing to do. They all needed to remain positive, not to start saying their goodbyes, as if the fight was over. “You’re going to tell her yourself.”

  The man panted, drawing in vast gulps of air, but nodded.

  “We need to get him out,” Ryan turned to MacKenzie. “You get his arms, I’ll get his legs.”

  She didn’t hesitate and reached beneath the man’s arms to clasp her hands in a sturdy grip around his upper chest.

  “Ready?” Ryan asked her.

  She gave a short nod.

  “On three…”

  It was an awkward job given the cramped space, and was made more difficult by the fact that Ben Potter was carrying quite a few extra pounds. With a monumental effort, they lifted him out of his chair and into the vestibule, where they paused to catch their breath.

  “S-sorry,” the driver gasped. “It’s my chest, I can’t—”

  His face turned white with pain and then his eyes rolled back in his head. His hand fell limply to the floor as he stopped breathing.

  “Mac—”

  “You pump his chest, I’ll do the airways,” MacKenzie was a more experienced First Aider, and fell to her knees beside Potter’s collapsed body.

  Ryan did as he was bid, muscles working as he compressed the man’s chest beneath the breastbone, pausing at the right times to allow MacKenzie to breathe air into the man’s lungs.

  “Come on,” she muttered. “Come on.”

  She cocked her cheek against his face and felt shallow breathing, while Ryan took his pulse and found it thready but still there. When Imran hurried back from the next carriage with a small canvas bag, they strapped a portable oxygen mask to his face.

  “It’ll have to do,” MacKenzie said.

  “Time to go,” Ryan muttered.

  “What time is it?”

  “Just turning noon,” he said quietly. “Our time’s up.”

  * * *

  It would take more than a few veiled threats from the British Transport Police to stop DS Frank Phillips helping the woman he loved. It made not a blind bit of difference that Denise MacKenzie was his senior officer, nor that she could handle herself in any situation. He would not stand by and watch her struggle, and the same applied to his friend. As far as he was concerned, he wouldn’t be losing his fiancée and his best man in one fell swoop.

  Not on his watch.

  As the iron clock in the railway station chimed the hour, Phillips ran faster than he had in years, spurred on by a healthier diet since meeting MacKenzie and an abiding need to be with her. When he reached the train door, he summed up the situation immediately.

  “Holy shitballs,” he said.

  “Frank, grab his legs,” Ryan ordered.

  The four of them manoeuvred the driver off the train with a series of grunts, each of them straining with the effort, but they weren’t home and dry, yet.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to get him the rest of the way,” MacKenzie said, brushing snow from her eyes. “He’s too weak to walk—”

  Phillips exchanged a glance with Ryan, who nodded.

  “We’ll get an arm each. No point in this ‘un having all those muscles if he’s not prepared to use them,” he jerked a thumb in Ryan’s direction, then draped one of Potter’s arms around his shoulders.

  “Times like these, I wish I’d eaten more spinach when I was a kid,” Ryan muttered.

  “It’s not spinach you need,” Phillips panted. “It’s a corned beef pasty.”

  They moved off as quickly as they could along the narrow pathway towards the station, to the sound of Potter’s shoes dragging against the gravel as they tried to hold him upright. MacKenzie and Imran followed, and with every passing metre they put a safer distance between themselves and the train, but they had no idea of knowing where a device may be hidden. EOD had checked all the obvious places where explosives might have been planted but there was a margin of error in all things.

  “Nearly there,” Phillips puffed.

  Paramedics waited by the edge of the platform to transfer Potter onto a stretcher but there was still a way to go.

  “Keep looking forward,” MacKenzie said, and put a hand on Imran’s back in a show of silent support. “Don’t look behind, just keep going.”

  Ryan and Phillips gritted their teeth as Potter passed out again and, in a final show of strength, they had almost reached the end of the bridge when the explosion hit them from behind.

  CHAPTER 20

  As the paramedics rushed to save Ben Potter’s life, Ryan and his team stood in an exhausted line on the farthest edge of the platform to watch another bridge go up in flames. The blast had thrown the rails into the sky with a deafening twist of metal and asphalt, blowing a hole in the mezzanine structure of the bridge that separated the upper and lower levels, somew
here near the second or third carriage from the front of where the train stood. The wind carried with it the strong stench of smoke and burnt chemicals, and they held their hands across their mouths to stave off the worst of it.

  “Exactly on time,” Phillips eventually broke the silence.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Ryan replied, turning to face him. “The blast came three or four minutes after noon. I know, because I was thinking—”

  He broke off. He didn’t need to tell them what they had all feared as they’d made their desperate run along the edge of the tracks.

  Any second now, they’d thought. Any moment now, there’d be an explosion.

  Wiping a hand across his dirty face, Ryan pulled himself together and turned to look at the men and women who had volunteered to come to the aid of others. A short way off, the EOD Unit were slumped on a metal bench, the team rallying around Sue Bannerman to praise her stoicism in getting through that first explosion and gathering her strength to help the evacuation effort. Even her captain could not find it in himself to denigrate the woman, for which Ryan was grateful. Not far off, officers from British Transport Police were talking to the train crew, who were clutching foil blankets around their shoulders to keep warm. Ryan would need to speak to them—to all of them—but first, he had something to say.

  “I want to thank all of you, for what you did out there,” he said. “It went above and beyond.”

  MacKenzie smiled.

  “Beats going over Cold Cases, any day of the week,” she quipped.

  “Aye, well, it’s tuna casserole in the staff canteen t’day,” Phillips reminded him. “That’s enough to get me out of the door, bomb scare or no bomb scare.”

  “I’ve always said you were a man of refined tastes,” Ryan said, and then excused himself. He found a relatively sheltered corner and made an important phone call.

  Anna answered after the first ring.

  “Ryan? Oh, thank God. I was so worried—”

  “I know,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. But I wanted to call to let you know I’m safe. You’re still stuck with me for another fifty years or so, if you’ll have me.”