Prologue
The Man in the Hut
The rail on the Greaves Bridge had been wrapped in orange tape for eleven months, and Isaac Moyo had reported it eleven times.
He thought about that now, with his tea going cold in the tin mug and the rain coming across the river in long gray sheets. It was easier than thinking about the telephone, which was ringing. It was a cream wall phone with a cord stretched by thirty years of men leaning away to look out of the window. It rang in the hut at the north end of the bridge at twenty-six minutes to nine on the fourteenth of November. He didn't pick it up. He was standing at the glass with one hand flat against it, and his breath was fogging a patch the size of a plate.
He was sixty-six. He had worked the bridge since the year it was painted green. He knew all its sounds: the hum of the cables in a north wind, the knock of a loose plate under a bus, the particular quiet that comes over the bridge when the river is high and the council has finally closed it. Tonight the river was high. The storm had a name, Odile, which someone on the radio had said with relish. The south road was already shut. Nothing had crossed in forty minutes, so he noticed the car at once.
It had stopped in the middle of the bridge with its hazard lights going. A small silver hatchback. For a long time nobody got out, and he thought, engine trouble, and reached for his coat. Then the driver's door opened and a woman stepped out into the weather in a yellow scarf.
The scarf was what he would remember. In all that wet, under the lamps, it was the only color. It blew out behind her like a flag. She stood by the car with one hand on the roof. She wasn't looking at the water. She was looking along the bridge toward his end, as if she were waiting for someone to come across.
And someone did.
Isaac saw her come out of the rain at the foot of the north road. She walked fast, head down, collar up, a slight figure in a dark coat. She passed under the first lamp, then the second, and he thought: same walk.
It was a strange thing to think. He had no reason for it. But as she came up to the car and the woman there turned round, and the two of them stood a few yards apart with the rain between them, the hair rose on his arms. They were the same height. They held their shoulders the same way, a little forward, like people carrying something small. Then the lamp above them swung in the wind and lit both their faces at once, and he blinked and wiped the glass with his sleeve. For one second there had been only one face. Then there were two.
The window, he told himself. Bloody condensation.
He heard the telephone stop. He didn't turn.
A long black car had come up behind the hatchback with its lights dipped and stopped at an angle across the lane. A door opened. A third person got out, older, in a pale coat, and walked toward the two women with a straight back and one arm held a little away from her body. A man sat behind the wheel, still. He didn't get out. The rain ran down the black roof in ropes.
There was talking. Isaac couldn't hear it. The hut was forty yards away and the wind took everything out to sea. But he could see the shape of it, like a play seen through a shut window. The older woman's hand came up, flat and firm. The one in the yellow scarf shook her head. The other, in the dark coat, stepped between them and was pushed aside. He saw the older woman reach out. He saw the scarf whip. Then the three of them moved toward the rail, the part wrapped in orange tape that he had been shouting about since December, and he said aloud, to the glass, "Not there. Not there, you daft cow."
It made a sound he heard even from the hut.
Not a loud one. A short, dry crack, like a plank broken over a knee. The tape sagged. Six feet of old iron railing leaned slowly out into the storm, and the woman in the yellow scarf, who had stepped back from the older woman's hand, went with it.
One of the others cried out. Isaac saw an arm shoot out and a fist close on the scarf. For a moment the yellow stretched tight across the dark, one bright line from a hand to a falling shape. Then it tore.
He didn't see her land. He was already moving.
He had the phone off the wall before he knew he had crossed the room. His thumb found the nine. He said it three times: Greaves Bridge, north end, a woman's gone over, the railing, she's in the river, send everyone. A girl's voice told him to stay on the line. He stayed. He watched through the glass as the long black car reversed with a whine and swung away, taking the older woman with it. The one in the dark coat stood alone by the broken rail with her arm still stretched out in front of her, holding nothing.
Then she ran.
The empty hatchback sat there with its hazard lights going, orange and orange and orange, in the storm.
The constable who came was young and soaked and not unkind. He took Isaac's statement on the counter in the hut at ten past nine, writing slowly in a notebook that kept going soft in the damp. A second officer stood out on the bridge in the wind with a torch, looking at the water.
"A woman," said the constable. "Yellow scarf. Stopped her car, got out, went to the rail. Did you see her speak to anyone?"
"There were three of them," said Isaac.
"Three."
"Two women. And an older one, from the long car. And a man driving it. I saw it plain."
The constable wrote. Isaac watched the pencil move. "Two women," the young man said again, patiently, to the page. "Of a similar age."
"With the same face."
The pencil stopped.
"You'd be surprised what rain does, sir," the constable said kindly. "And the glass." He looked at the hut's one window, the mug, the three-bar heater, and the old man's shaking hands, and he seemed to reach a decision that wasn't rude and wasn't quite respectful either. "It's a bad night. You've had a shock. I'll note what you remember."
"I'm telling you what I saw."
"And I'm writing it down."
"There were two of them. Same coat. Same walk. Same face, under the lamp. I'd swear it on my mother." Isaac heard his own voice go high and thin, an old man's voice, and was ashamed of it. "I know what I saw."
"I'm sure you do."
The constable licked the tip of his pencil, glanced once at the clock above the door, and wrote a line in small neat letters at the bottom of the page.
He wrote down one.