Strangers on a Bridge

by Louise Mangos

  My eyebrows creased and my mouth turned down at the corners with a fleeting smile. Simon was sticking up for me, in his own way. If I couldn’t explain to him what had possessed me to allow my emotions to be so manipulated by Gerry, then perhaps Gerry could tell him.

  I looked up sharply as Gerry appeared, backing through the door into the room, accompanied by a court official who stood aside to let him cross the threshold. He was on his way back to the witness chair when Simon rushed into the room and grabbed him by the shoulders. My hands flew to my mouth. There was a scuffle and fists started to swipe, but it was a comical parody of a fight, every flailing arm missing its mark, like toddlers in the playground. I heard an involuntary ‘oof’ and couldn’t tell whether it came from Simon or Gerry. The searing brightness of a camera flash galvanised the court officials into action. I was sure they’d never seen anything like this in a Swiss courtroom before.

  Simon drew back his fist to try and place another punch, but a security guard, sent for when the commotion started, grabbed his arm to detain him. Simon was led out of the room and I felt a deep, welling sadness that he wouldn’t be there to support me in his own silent way for the remainder of the hearing.

  But I wouldn’t be there for much longer anyway. They’d already made up their minds. I could see it on their faces, and I could play this game of deceit no more.

  There were no jury deliberations, and even if there were, there was no longer a case to argue.

  In my head, as loud as a shout, I pleaded guilty.

  As I was led out of the courtroom to return to the holding cells, I passed Gerry sitting in the hallway with his head in his hands. His dishevelled hair sprouted like silky dark snakes between his fingers.

  The guard holding me firmly by the elbow hesitated as I halted in front of Gerry. Perhaps he had witnessed what happened in the courtroom and felt sorry for me to the extent that I was allowed this one last glance at my Judas.

  Gerry looked up slowly, and I was at a loss to describe what I saw in his red-rimmed eyes. Something between raw anger and hopeless sadness.

  ‘Why, Gerry? Why?’ I asked quietly, and he shook his head. ‘After all you told me about letting things take their course. How your father would never be well. How you never wanted to see him again. Why?’

  ‘You, more than anyone, should know that family is the most important thing. I have been torn. He was my father, Alice. Blood is thicker, and all that. You need to be made to answer for what you have done. But that’s not all. My father had a piece of you, and I realise I never can. You will never be mine. I realised after we spent the night together I could never completely possess you.’ He paused. ‘But if I can’t, no one else will either.’

  I stared at Gerry open-mouthed and couldn’t speak for the madness of it. I wondered if, after everything – after convincing myself he was the key to my freedom – he’d known better than me all along.

  ‘You have to believe me, Simon, I was only with him because I was afraid he would reveal my secret. I could never be sure, but I often suspected he had guessed the truth. And then when we were together and I realised he had… fallen for me… the things he was saying. He didn’t say outright, but I misread his devotion to me, thought he would cover me whatever. I can’t believe I got it so wrong.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Alice? That’s the one thing that eats me up. I can’t believe you didn’t trust me enough to confide in me at the beginning. You heard the defending lawyer. It was a crime of passion. If you had come clean at the start, things wouldn’t have gone this far. Now we have to deal with the perjury and contempt of court. Why, Alice, why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wanted to protect you,’ I whispered, tears catching in my throat.

  We were sitting in a holding area in the courthouse while they decided on my sentence. As my husband, Simon had been allowed some private time with me, and all I wanted to do was cling to him. My rock. My knight. I couldn’t believe I had been so stupid, since the very beginning. But he wouldn’t touch me.

  I couldn’t believe my infatuation with Gerry had led to such an error of judgement. I felt despair hiding behind a wave of incomprehensible emotion, but forced it down while I was in the company of Simon. I would wait until I was alone to open the floodgates.

  ‘I didn’t want to implicate you,’ I said once my trembling voice had recovered. ‘I know my deed can never be excused. But I can’t turn back the clock. What would be the point of going over all the mistakes I’ve made over the past year? What good would that do? I don’t have the answers you’re looking for. And for that, and all the other shit, I am so, so sorry. I don’t know how many times I can say that. I feel truly horrible.

  ‘The thing I feel most terrible about is losing the ability to trust you,’ he said. ‘And… maybe losing your love.’

  ‘Never my love, Simon. Never my love.’

  At this point, neither of us could speak any more.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  After my sentencing they moved me to the all-female Hindelbank Prison near Bern. I was given five years for manslaughter – Totschlag – but not for murder. The judges decreed I was an offender under serious distress, provoked by the victim, and under undetermined serious threat. This constituted a crime of passion, and I might be considered for parole in as little as a year, although as a foreigner I wondered if I would get to apply for it at all.

  The biggest issue the court had was with the magnitude of my deceit and therefore my perjury while being questioned originally as a witness. It was one thing to be driven to murder someone. It was another to try and cover all my tracks, apparently. All my sorry mistakes meant that someone, namely Simon, would have to cough up some massive police and court administrative fees to the federal and cantonal governments.

  I didn’t know whether I would have Simon’s support when the time came for me to fight for parole. I was only allowed one phone call a week. We weren’t allowed mobile phones. There was one phone booth on each floor of the cellblock, but I had to fight for my place in line each time with a sorry bunch of women who were mostly drug smugglers, and spoke only Spanish or an array of Asian languages. When I did get through to Simon and the boys at home, those behind me in the line kept up a constant barrage of caterwauling or arguing among themselves, so it was hard to have any kind of coherent conversation.

  I was only allowed visitors once a month, which I found the hardest of all. Simon chose to visit with the boys after I’d settled. It was very hard for me not to cry when they all piled into the visitors’ room. Oliver did all the crying for both of us anyway. After a genuine hug from Leon, he spent the time shuffling his shoes on the floor under his seat and craning his neck to observe all the cool stuff he could tell his friends about the inside of a prison. I didn’t think it was good for them to be there.

  In the end, I told Simon not to bring them again, until we all had an idea of how life was going to be from then on. I didn’t know whether it was worse to have to say goodbye to them at the end of a visit or not see them at all, and I was too humiliated by my environment to be sure they would keep my memory fresh in their minds. Perhaps it was better for them to forget their mother was a convicted killer. Although how could they forget that? They said the kids at school were okay with them, but I wondered how long it would be until some parent forbade their children to associate with the sons of a murderess. So in the end I chose not to see them, as though by cutting them off from me would protect them from the hostility of their peers.

  I could tell Simon was reluctant to visit after that. He was having a hard time dealing with the whole thing. The report of the farce at the trial had been in the paper. I imagined everyone in the village and at school would be horrified. Perhaps Esther might have a grain of sympathy, knowing I had been concerned from the beginning. But I think even Kathy was shocked. She didn’t write to me, and if she had tried to get a message to me through Simon, he didn’t pass it on.

  ‘You can’t imagine the shit I’ve
had to face at work. Jenkins seems to think I had a hand in it somehow. Your “misdemeanour”, as he put it. The flipping cheek of it, as it was him who sent me all over the place to support the Russian deal last summer. If I’d been around more, and had seen how much that creep was affecting your life, perhaps I’d have paid more attention. There’s always a part of me that will take a little blame.’

  My eyes watered at his words, and my brows creased with emotion.

  ‘But don’t go thinking I’m condoning your actions,’ he finished.

  The tiny moment of compassion had passed. And I knew he was now thinking about Gerry and me as lovers. I wondered how long it would take for Simon to not feel disgusted every time he looked at me. I think he only dragged himself to the prison for a visit so he could bring news of the boys. I was still their mother, after all.

  Their overprotective mother. Not the Samaritan they used to think, but a criminal. A killer.

  Chapter Seventy

  JUNE

  Simon visited me on the first day of June, when the rows of regimented maize plants in the fields had grown to form a low corridor on either side of the road leading from the Hindelbank village.

  He brought a coloured pencil sketch from Oliver, and a short letter from Leon. Oliver’s creation showed our home surrounded by animals, not just the farmer’s cows, but cats, dogs and birds too. In the foreground, two adults sat at a round table, on the terrace in front of the house. Two kids – Oliver and Leon – swung on ropes in the trees to the side of the building. The drawing spoke of the yearning to have his family back together. Every time I looked at it, a lump wedged in my throat. I tacked it to my cell wall afterwards.

  I wanted to save Leon’s letter for later, but with conversation not exactly flowing between us, as though Simon was visiting a relative in hospital with a terminal disease, I kept my hands and eyes occupied by unfolding the paper, and silently read my eldest son’s short missive.

  I could almost hear the distaste in Leon’s words – his spidery cursive skipping impatiently across the paper. He wrote about getting a green belt in karate, how he’d managed to get a five in geography, a brief ‘I hope you are well’, forced out by his sense of obligation. I could feel his reluctance not only to put pen to paper, but to communicate with his mother at all. The love between us was of a delicate complexity. I was probably an embarrassment to him, to his social circle. Nothing cool at all about my actions any more. Thank God.

  My heart ached for them, all of them. I missed them so.

  As Simon stood up to leave, he uncharacte‌ristically gave me a hug, holding me silently. I could tell he was fighting emotions. I allowed my tears to flow unabashedly. There were only so many times I could say I was sorry. Sorry didn’t make anyone feel better. Oh, this wretched mess we had found ourselves in. My follies had piled up one after the other. I’d been grateful for my incarceration in one respect, and that was that it would give me time to try and work out a plan to make amends for all the hurt. Of course, we could not go back to the way we were. There was too much collateral damage. But I hoped I could patch things up somehow, pull my needle through the threads of the emotions I knew were still there, and sew us all together in a different kind of patchwork.

  The thing that saddened me most was that I knew Simon completely understood why I’d done it, why I’d committed murder to protect my family. I think he even understood the reasons behind my relationship with Gerry. He believed it had been born out of a misreading of his own rejection on one hand, and the need to keep the secret of Manfred’s murder on the other. He believed Gerry had tricked me via some kind of emotional blackmail without my really knowing.

  Simon kept saying he had his own guilt to deal with. A guilt that had him kicking himself for not asking more questions all those months ago about what was going on in my head and heart. Our new open communication gave me a grain of hope for us. But I couldn’t forget that his guilt was featherweight compared to mine.

  I didn’t think I’d be in this place for long, despite my lies, my deception and then my attempt to cover up the atrocity. Stalking had recently become a more recognised crime in Switzerland with the public exposure of my case. My court-appointed attorney, Herr Blattmann, promised to work towards having my sentence drastically reduced, and told me I might realistically be out in as little as a year.

  In the meantime, I wrote to Simon and the boys every day. I had plenty of time to perfect my drafts. I had nothing to talk about other than how sorry I was. It became a continual penitence, and I told Simon to throw the letters away if he thought I was repeating myself too often. I didn’t want this to appear to be obsessive behaviour. I had been to the edge of that too many times in the past two years, from both sides of the abyss.

  I often picked up the photo I treasured, of the boys and me standing outside the gates of Versailles two years previously. I remembered Simon taking the photo. The wind had blown my hair across my face, and I had just shaken my head to rid myself of all but a strand, which lay across my cheek. The boys were innocent, one just a teenager, the other gangling between childhood and puberty. Both were smiling at Simon, who held the camera, and made some quip about posing with their mother. The photo frame was made of simple, unvarnished pine, stained grubby by the many hands that had held it.

  I imagined the skin of the fingertips that had touched the wood. Manfred, who possessed the photo for weeks. Gerry’s prints were there too, on the glass.

  It was as though he was my first teenage love. The memory of him still sweet but bewildering. Between a fanciful crush on me and a morbid curiosity to find out if his father was truly suicidal, he would now be writhing in his own torment. He did not contact me, and I was sure he knew it would be futile to try, after all he had done. The fact that I was here, because of him.

  The last hands to touch this picture were my own, fingers feathering across the glass each day, wishing I could return to a time before my Samaritan deed, my charity, my crime and my incarceration.

  A Letter From The Author

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you so much for purchasing and reading Strangers on a Bridge.

  If you enjoyed the novel, I would be grateful if you could spare a little of your precious time to leave a review on the platform of your choice – Goodreads, Amazon, etc., which will help bring awareness of my work to a wider audience.

  Strangers on a Bridge was influenced by running in the countryside surrounding the Lorzentöbelbrücke, the bridge in the story, situated in central Switzerland.

  If you enjoyed the Swiss setting of this psychological thriller, I hope you will look out for more of my titles coming in the future.

  Thank you again, valued reader.

  Tschüss!

  Louise

  Acknowledgements

  Bouncing the seeds of an idea back and forth some years ago as we ran the trail in the shadow of the magnificent Lorzentöbelbrücke, Carolyn Forsyth was intrinsic to the conception of Strangers on a Bridge. She is also one of the members of the multinational book club who became my first beta readers.

  To others who have given feedback at various stages: Nicola Upson, Robert Peett, Andy Stafford, Alison Baillie, Louise Buckley, Kathryn Taussig, Vicky Newham and Antony Dunford.

  To my editor, Hannah Smith, for her enthusiasm and perspicacity, and the entire team at HQ Digital.

  For technical and legal stalking issues I thank Sargent Totti Karpela, CEO and former President of the Association of European Threat Assessment Professionals (AETAP). Many thanks also to Hansjürg ‘Johnny’ Baumann, Dienstchef, Zuger Polizei and Thomas Rein, Staatsanwalt, Zug.

  To my husband, Chris, for his feedback and continued support, and to our two sons, Max and Finn, for the hours I spend ignoring their laundry and hogging one end of our dining-room table. And lastly, to the spectacular landscape surrounding the Aegeri Valley in the Swiss canton of Zug, which continues to inspire me with the desire to write.

  If you enjoyed Strangers on a Bridge, t
hen why not try another thrilling read from HQ Digital?

  About the Author

  Louise Mangos writes novels, short stories and flash fiction, which have won prizes, been placed on shortlists and read out on BBC radio. Strangers on a Bridge is her first novel. It was a finalist in the Exeter Novel Prize and long-listed for the Bath Novel Award. You can connect with Louise on Facebook and Twitter @LouiseMangos, or visit her website, www.louisemangos.com,where there are links to some of her short fiction. She lives on a Swiss Alp with her Kiwi husband and two sons.

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