by C F Dunn
Once we reached the bridge, I made straight for the remaining parapet, stepping between the long bars of steel, until I found somewhere from which I could see the car. I was dismayed to see how little remained above water. Another paramedic wrapped a shiny blanket around my shoulders. “Ma’am, we need to get you to the hospital.”
From where I stood, I couldn’t see Matthew, but several policemen crowded the bank and one waded into the water towards the car as far as he could go. They were calling out.
The paramedic became insistent. “Ma’am, we need a doctor to take a look at you.”
“I’m not hurt, I’m OK, my husband’s a doctor.”
He must have thought I had concussion because he looked sympathetic and concerned. “Yes, ma’am, but you need to see a doctor.”
I couldn’t take my eyes from the car. “He’s down there – in the car. They’re both down there.”
The paramedic took in the scene as the patch of blue that was all that remained of my car grew smaller while we watched, the policemen withdrawing steadily up the banks as the river rose. They ceased calling and stood in a huddle, throwing quick, hopeless glances as the car finally gave up and, floating like a bloated cadaver over the branch, was cast downstream.
There was no sign of Matthew.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry…” the paramedic began. I looked at him; he had a kind face.
“He’s not dead. He can’t die.”
Heavy tyres ground to a halt beyond the overturned truck. A door slammed. The paramedic attempted to lead me towards the ambulance, but I resisted all efforts and he waved to his colleague for help. My voice rose shrill over the sound of rapid footsteps across the wooden planks. “He’s not dead!” As the steps neared, I broke free, foundering over my own feet towards the wheat-haired young man. “Joel! Joel, he’s not dead.”
Joel quickly read the river, the expression on the face of the paramedic, and caught me as exhaustion finally took my legs from beneath me.
Policemen fanned out along the bank, beneath the bridge, and downstream where rock projections obscured a bend in the river. In full spate, water the colour of clay shredded the banks in a relentless attack on the saplings growing too close. A policeman, ahead of the others by a hundred yards, began gesticulating towards the river, his shouted words drowned by its roar.
“They’ve found the car.” Joel canted his head towards the river. “There’s a body in it.” He grabbed me as I pitched forward. “Only one body, Emma; it’s not Matthew.”
I slumped onto the deck of the bridge from which I had refused to move ever since the search for the car began. The wooden planks steamed in the strong sun, and above the trees a golden mist rose. Such agonizing beauty. Joel had stayed with me, although I begged him to join the search. It was just as well. In my stupefied state I kept repeating, “I killed him, I killed him,” in response to police questions, and he had produced an ID card, and they left me alone.
Dazed, I let him fill in missing pieces of information, barely registering when he gave them Guy’s name and his next of kin. He didn’t reveal Guy’s relationship with his sister, nor did he mention the dead man’s connection to me. He explained what Guy had been doing at the conference, and where we were going in my car. I wasn’t asked where we had come from, so didn’t have to lie about the hotel, but when they tried to push for the details of the crash, all I could give them was, “I killed him”, and Joel soon put a stop to that.
He tried to forestall the approach of a young officer, but I struggled to my feet, grabbing the damp object from his hand. “Where did you find it?” I asked, my voice gravelly from shouting over the snarl of the river. He indicated several police officers analysing skid marks on the bridge planks, the truck driver waving his arms as he described the crash.
“Is it yours, ma’am?”
The brown leather hung limp, but, inside the bag, the journal remained unscathed. I closed my eyes. “Yes,” I said, “it’s mine.”
“And this?” He held out a small, shiny object. I took my mobile from his hand.
“Yes,” I nodded. “Thanks.”
He became distracted by movement along the river. An officer managed to reach the car. He raised an arm and beckoned. For a split second I thought Guy might still be alive, but then I caught sight of the empty zipped bag being passed along the line. I don’t think the enormity of it had fully registered until that point.
One man used powered metal cutters to remove the roof; two held on to him against the current. I stood transfixed by the scene. “I killed him, Joel. I killed Guy.”
The roof peeled back like a tin can. “Don’t look,” Joel advised, but I continued to gaze with undisguised horror until he moved, obscuring the scene from view.
I don’t know what made me look around – perhaps it was the rattle and tang of the steel reinforcing bars being gathered to one side; perhaps the shouts as they finally pulled Guy’s body from the wreckage. Yet neither of these seemed as significant as the sound of quiet steps across the bridge, nor the wash of hope like mountain air that inextricably flowed through me. Joel spoke first. “Hey, old man; thought the river’d got the better of you this time.”
Matthew raised a tired smile. “Not this time, Joel; not yet.”
Wordlessly I went to him. Neither of us spoke until, eyes closed, he leaned his forehead against mine. “When I saw your car go over the side, I thought I’d lost you.”
I ran my hand over his chest, his shoulders, my fingers over the frame of his face. The fire had gone from his eyes, and he looked grey in the bright noon light, but he was whole.
“You promised you wouldn’t put your mortality to the test.”
The weighty body bag being carried carefully along the rock-strewn bank compounded his hesitancy. “It pleased God to bring me back to you.”
“Matthew…”
“It took me some time to get out of the car, that’s all. I had to swim downstream until I could find somewhere to climb out. The current was very strong.” I wasn’t meant to see the exchange of looks between the two men.
“Yes, but so are you.”
“I’m not invincible.” He lifted his face and it looked as if he had aged over the last hours as he drank in the sun. He breathed the warm air, his colour returning. “Let’s get you home.”
“Sir, wait up there!” The sturdy policewoman making her way towards us halted when she took in the state of his clothes. Matthew pre-empted her next question.
“The river carried me downstream and it’s taken me this time to get back here. I’m fine,” he added as she began to hail the paramedics making ready to leave.
“Sir, I understand you’re a doctor.” She pronounced it “docta”, the Mainer way, comforting and familiar. “You were in the car with the deceased. Was he already dead when you reached him?”
Matthew increased the pressure of his arm around me until my involuntary shudder passed. “He died shortly afterwards.”
She had been looking at her notebook when he said it, so she wouldn’t have seen the telltale tight line that formed around his mouth, but I did. She asked him a few more questions, thanked him, and, with a curious look in his direction, went back to her colleagues.
After a brief conversation, Joel left. As Matthew led me past the emergency vehicles, he said, “Joel’s going to the hotel to tidy up any loose ends, just in case.”
Once in the safety of Matthew’s car, I spoke. “What happened to Guy?”
Matthew gripped the steering wheel in both hands, eyes fixed on the gap in the bridge where he had last seen my car whole. “I didn’t let him drown.”
“You… killed him?”
“I could do nothing to save him; it was only a matter of time.” I remembered the steel-pierced flesh, and the blood. I remembered Matthew’s face when he saw him, and the agony as he endured the dying man’s pain.
Lips compressed, he faced me. “I couldn’t let him drown, Emma; it was the only thing I could do for him. He didn’t suffer
.”
He had put him down as you would a dog.
He reversed neatly, negotiating the parked vehicles. Guy’s body lay loaded in a strapped gurney. Then the door of the ambulance closed, shutting him from view.
So he had killed him after all. Like an animal in distress, he chose to end his life rather than let him drown. Compassion had killed Guy – not hate, or fear, or vengeance. Matthew had acted out of compassion, but nothing could change what brought Guy to the brink of death. Where had my compassion been then? Where my faith?
“Emma, there will be more questions from the police. They will want to know the details of the accident, of course, but they will also ask why you were at the hotel at that time of the morning.” The journal lay mutely on my knees, shouting, “murderer” where once it had screamed, “thief”. I picked it up. “He had the journal?”
“Yes.”
“And you went to get it?”
I nodded.
“But he didn’t give it to you?”
I clasped the journal to my chest in an attempt to still its accusing voice.
“Emma?” He watched me carefully. I shook my head.
“Th… there’s a knife under one of the pillows. On the bed.”
Tyres protested as he drove the car off the road and brought it to a standstill in a wooded track. Wild-eyed, his pupils burned. “Tell me…” he bit hard on his lip, his voice straining. “Tell me he didn’t touch you – he didn’t hurt you.”
The book dug into my skin. “No, it wasn’t like that.”
“Like what? Like what, Emma?” His face twisted in revulsion. “No – no you didn’t. You couldn’t…” The car shook as his door slammed back. In misery, I saw his heart break in waves of magenta as he crashed through the undergrowth. I couldn’t bear to watch. Still clutching the journal, I clambered from the car and, stumbling blindly, ran.
Guy had won after all. He had pitched himself against my better judgment and, against my conscience, won. Not for us his certain, quick death but a lingering dusk at the dawn of our marriage. Matthew would never trust me again. I wish I had died; I wish the life had been crushed from me along with my years of guilt.
Scrubby bushes tore skin from my legs as I rushed headlong for the open road. My foot touched tarmac and I felt myself dragged backwards as the bass roar of an engine blasted past in the form of a slab-sided lorry. I landed on my back, staring into Matthew’s terrified face.
I swallowed. “I… I didn’t see it.”
“Why were you running?”
The sodden ground rapidly saturated my just-dry clothes. I tussled to free myself from the prickly shrubs, but he lifted me bodily and put me back on my feet. I avoided his eyes, but couldn’t evade his question. “You looked so upset…”
In exasperation, he threw his hands in the air. “Of course I’m upset. What else would I be if my wife placed herself in such a situation as… as…”
“I didn’t let him – I wouldn’t let him, but I had to get the journal, Matthew; he had all the evidence he needed. I had to buy some time and I didn’t know any other way, and… and he said he would let me have it if I slept with him.”
“And you believed him?”
“No.”
“Is that when you texted me?”
“I needed a get out.”
“And the knife?”
“In case you didn’t get the text.”
He bowed his head, pressing his knuckles against his brow. “So you decided to drive off the bridge.”
“No! I didn’t; it was an accident. I didn’t mean to… well, I did at first when he said he knew who you were, but I couldn’t when it came to it. Matthew, you have to believe me. I didn’t mean to kill him.” My voice climbed higher and higher until it broke. The anguish in his face made it worse. He held me against him as the woods steamed around us. I clung to him as the occasional car sped past. We held each other even when one slowed and came to a halt close by.
“You folks OK there?” I heard the gentle burr of the policewoman.
Matthew lifted his chin from the top of my head. “Thanks – we’ll be fine.”
“Just be sure you are now,” she replied.
The sound of her car driving away left us in peace. Matthew placed both hands around my face and raised it to look at me. “And we will,” he said. “We’ll be just fine.”
CHAPTER
31
Epitaph
“So, where did you go?” I asked him once he had run me a bath and I had soaked the gritty mud from my hair and from every crease of my skin. The patch of late afternoon sun shone hot, and this time I welcomed its heat, letting it drive away the memory of the cold river. Matthew continued squeezing water from my hair. He had checked the various bumps and abrasions accumulated from the crash, but I hid the marks on the inside of my thighs, glad to see they had already faded as if lessened by the flood.
“I went first to the library but the journal had been taken, then to Maggie’s. Ellie stays with her sometimes. Neither was answering her cell so I went over there to check it out, but they hadn’t seen Guy. I wanted you to stay at home, Emma; I wanted you to be safe.”
I had apologized tenfold when I appreciated how my sudden disappearance caused aeons of panic until Matthew received my text. His phone call in response had saved me from killing Guy… I choked – no, that was something his call had postponed; my subsequent actions ensured Guy’s death as surely as a knife driven into his heart.
“Matthew, I had to find him. When I guessed he had the photos, I knew he must also have the journal.” I slithered around to face him. “Guy hadn’t slept in his bed and I don’t think he’d been back long. Where had he been if not with Ellie?”
“Taking the journal, I presume.”
“No, he must have had it for a few days because he’d transcribed enough to work out who you were. He only needed physical evidence to prove it and he took that last night when he stole the photographs. He must have seen them that time Ellie showed him around. Matthew, I was so stupid. I shouldn’t have kept that photograph…”
He shook his head. “Hindsight is a very valuable commodity that wasn’t on the market last time I looked.”
“Huh! He must have known I wouldn’t go back to the hotel with him after the dinner. He must have been laughing all the way back from here.” I sat upright. “He said he had a contact in a forensic laboratory. He said he was sending the photographs to have them analysed. Sending or sent? I don’t know – I can’t remember.”
He stopped rubbing the wet tails of my hair. “When did he contact them?”
“He didn’t say, but it must have been after he left with the photographs. Could he have scanned them, sent them digitally?”
Matthew jumped to his feet, reaching for his mobile. “Any idea which lab he would send them to?”
Wrapping the towel around my hair, I slid off our bed and started to hunt for clothes. “I think he said something like the Forensic Research Unit. I’m not sure; I wasn’t thinking straight.”
He gave short, succinct instructions. He listened intently, spoke again, and then snapped the mobile shut. “Joel’s on to it. He did a sweep of the hotel room before the police arrived and retrieved the knife and various other items. He’ll go down to the morgue and see what was on Guy’s body. I’m guessing that anything Guy did he will have saved onto a flash drive.”
The initial elation of being home and safe quickly wore off as the implications of what Guy had said – what I had done – loomed ever larger in my mind until they blotted out the sun, and this one loose end created shivers of apprehension.
“Emma, it will be all right.”
I gave a wobbly smile, but everything felt flat. “I don’t see what Joel can do; no one will take any notice of a soldier.”
“No, they probably wouldn’t. I’m sorry – I thought you knew. Didn’t you ask Joel about his new job?” Puzzled, I shook my head. “He was headhunted by a national intelligence agency. His test scores were in
the upper limits – one of the best candidates they’d seen. It gives him access to restricted information.” It explained the police officers’ sudden change of attitude on the bridge, and why – even in my fuddled state – I thought Joel had grown into himself. Matthew raised a smile. “It’s only a pity he can’t let his mother know.”
“Why not?”
“It helps if he keeps a low profile, even at home. People are less wary if they think he’s… ordinary.”
“Like you, you mean?”
“I try my best. So you see, everything is under control.”
“For now.”
“And now is good enough.”
Or it would be had I not remembered that in all this, there was one person who would not greet Guy’s death with guilty relief.
Matthew took it upon himself to tell Ellie.
When, a few days later, she at last let me see her, she opened the door to her bedroom, her face drained of colour and avoiding my eyes while her own were pink-rimmed. Wordlessly, she went and curled up on her scrumpled bed. All around her lay evidence of bereavement in the untouched mugs, the scattered clothes, her dishevelled hair.
“Ellie, there’s nothing I can say to make this any better for you, but I am sorry.”
She hugged her pillow closer, bedraggled hair sticking to the wet patches on her cheeks. This was not the girl I had met all those months ago in the med centre, whose self-assurance bordered on arrogance and with a promising medical career ahead of her. Here was another of Guy’s castoffs, except this time I felt complicit.
I sat cross-legged on the floor next to her bed, plucking at a random piece of fluff on my trousers. I had been thinking this through ever since Matthew returned from seeing her on the evening of the crash. I had begged him not to tell her everything and reluctantly he agreed, although against his better judgment. “She needs to know the truth,” he said, but I persuaded him otherwise and he kept to the story we devised of a tragic accident that cut short the promise of their life together.
