Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 1. Whole No. 791, July 2007

A Bridge Too Far by Zoë Sharp

Zoë Sharp’s writing career took off in 2001 with the publication, in the U.K., of the first book in her Charlie Fox series, Killer Instinct. The series was later picked up by St. Martin’s Press in the U.S., with the sixth book, Second Shot, due in September '07. Ms. Sharp describes Fox, who appears in this story, as “tough, self-sufficient... with a slightly shady military background...”

I watched with a kind of horrified fascination as the boy climbed onto the narrow parapet. Below his feet the elongated brick arches of the old viaduct stretched, so I’d been told, exactly one hundred and twenty-three feet to the ground. He balanced on the crumbling brickwork at the edge, casual and unconcerned.

My God, I thought, he’s going to do it. He’s actually going to jump.

“Don’t prat around, Adam,” one of the others said. I was still sorting out their names. Paul, that was it. He was a medical student, tall and bony with a long, almost Roman nose. “If you’re going to do it, do it, or let someone else have their turn.”

“Now, now,” Adam said, wagging a finger, “don’t be bitchy.”

Paul glared at him, took a step forward, but the cool blond-haired girl, Diana, put a hand on his arm.

“Leave him alone, Paul,” Diana said, and there was a faint snap to her voice. She’d been introduced as Adam’s girlfriend, so I suppose she had the right to be protective. “He’ll jump when he’s ready. You’ll have your chance to impress the newbies.”

She flicked unfriendly eyes in my direction as she spoke, but I didn’t rise to it. Heights didn’t draw or repel me the way I knew they did with most people, but that didn’t mean I was inclined to throw myself off a bridge to prove my courage. I’d already done that at enough other times, in enough other places.

Beside me, my friend Sam muttered under his breath, “Okay, I’m impressed. No way are you getting me up there.”

I grinned at him. It was Sam who'd told me about the local Dangerous Sports Club, who trekked out to this disused viaduct in the middle of nowhere. There they tied one end of a rope to the far parapet and brought the other end up underneath between the supports before tying it round their ankles.

And then they jumped.

The idea, as Sam explained it, was to propel yourself outwards as though diving off a cliff and trying to avoid the rocks below. I suspected this wasn’t an analogy with resonance for either of us, but the technique ensured that when you reached the end of your tether, so to speak, the slack was taken up progressively and you swung backwards and forwards under the bridge in a graceful arc.

Jump straight down, however, and you would be jerked to a stop hard enough to break your spine. They used modern climbing rope with a fair amount of give in it, but it was far from the elastic gear required by the bungee jumper. That was for wimps.

Sam knew the group’s leader, Adam Lane, from the nearby university, where Sam was something incomprehensible to do with computers and Adam was the star of the track-and-field team. He was one of those magnetic golden boys who breezed effortlessly through life, always looking for a greater challenge, something to set their heartbeats racing. And for Adam, the unlikely pastime of bridge swinging, it seemed, was it.

I hadn’t believed Sam’s description of the activity and had made the mistake of expressing my scepticism out loud. So here I was on a bright but surprisingly nippy Sunday morning in May, waiting for the first of these lunatics to launch himself into the abyss.

Now, though, Adam put his hands on his hips and breathed in deep, looking around with a certain intensity at the landscape. His stance, up there on the edge of the precipice, was almost a pose.

We were halfway across the valley floor, in splendid isolation. The tracks to this Brunel masterpiece had been long since ripped up and carted away. The only clue to their existence was the footpath that led across the fields from the lay-by on the road where Sam and I had left our motorbikes. The other cars there, I guessed, belonged to Adam and his friends.

The view from the viaduct was stunning, the sides of the valley curving away at either side as though seen through a fish-eye lens. It was still early, so that the last of the dawn mist clung to the dips and hollows, and it was quiet enough to hear the world turning.

“Hello there! Not starting without us, are you?” called a girl’s cheery voice, putting a scatter of crows to flight, breaking the spell. A flash of annoyance passed across Adam’s handsome features.

A young couple was approaching. Like the other three DSC members, they were wearing high-tech outdoor clothing—lightweight trousers you can wash and dry in thirty seconds, and lairy-coloured fleeces.

The boy was short and muscular, a look emphasised by the fact he’d turned his coat collar up against the chill, giving him no neck to speak of. He tramped onto the bridge and almost threw his rucksack down with the others.

“What’s the matter, Michael?” Adam said, his voice a lazy taunt. “Get out of bed on the wrong side?”

The newcomer gave him a single vicious look and said nothing.

The girl was shorter and plumper than Diana. Her gaze flicked nervously from one to the other, latching onto the rope already secured round Adam’s legs as if glad of the distraction. “Oh, Adam, you’re never jumping today, are you?” she cried. “I didn’t think you were supposed to—”

“I’m perfectly okay, Izzy darling,” Adam drawled. His eyes shifted meaningfully towards Sam and me, then back again.

Izzy opened her mouth to speak, closing it again with a snap as she caught on. Her pale complexion bloomed into sudden pink across her cheekbones and she bent to fuss with her own rucksack. She drew out a stainless-steel flask and held it up like an offering. “I brought coffee.”

“How very thoughtful of you, Izzy dear,” Diana said, speaking down her well-bred nose at the other girl. “You always were so very accommodating.”

Izzy’s colour deepened. “I’m not sure there’s enough for everybody,” she went on, dogged. She nodded apologetically to us. “No one told me there’d be new people coming. I’m Izzy, by the way.”

“Sam Pickering,” Sam put in, “and this is Charlie Fox.”

Izzy smiled a little shyly, then a sudden thought struck her. “You’re not thinking of joining, are you?” she said in an anxious tone. “Only, it’s not certain we’re going to carry on with the club for much longer.”

“'Course we are,” Michael said brusquely, raising his dark, stubbled chin out of his collar for the first time. “Just because Adam has to give up, no reason for the rest of us to pack it in. We’ll manage without him.”

The others seemed to hold their breath while they checked Adam’s response to this dismissive declaration, but he seemed to have lost interest in the squabbles of lesser mortals. He continued to stand on the parapet, untroubled by the yawning drop below him, staring into the middle distance like an ocean sailor.

“That’s not the only reason we might have to stop,” the tall bony boy, Paul, said. “In fact, here comes another right now.”

He nodded across the far side of the field. We all turned, and I noticed for the first time that a man on a red Honda quad bike was making a beeline for us across the dewy grass.

“Oh shit,” Michael muttered. “Wacko Jacko. That’s all we need.”

“Who is he?” Sam asked, watching the purposeful way the quad was bearing down on us.

“He’s the local farmer,” Paul explained. “He owns all the land round here and he’s dead against us using the viaduct, but it’s a public right of way and legally he can’t stop us. That doesn’t stop the old bugger coming and giving us a hard time every Sunday.”

“Mr. Jackson’s a strict Methodist, you see,” Izzy said quietly as the quad drew nearer. “It’s not trespassing that’s the problem—it’s the fact that when the boys jump, well, they do tend to swear a bit. I think he objects to the blasphemy.”

I eyed the farmer warily as he finally braked to a halt at the edge of the bridge and cut the quad’s engine. The main reason for my caution was the elderly double-barrelled Baikal shotgun he lifted out of the rack on one side and brought with him.

Jackson came stumping along the bridge towards us with the kind of rolling, twitching gait that denotes a pair of totally worn-out knees. He wore a flat cap with tar on the peak and a tatty raincoat tied together with orange bailer twine. As he closed on us he snapped the Baikal shut, and I instinctively edged myself slightly in front of Sam.

“Morning, Mr. Jackson,” Izzy called, the tension sending her voice into a high waver.

The farmer ignored the greeting, his eyes fixed on Adam. It was only when Michael and Paul physically blocked his path that he seemed to notice the rest of us.

“I’ve told you lot before. You’ve no right to do this on my land,” he said gruffly, clutching the shotgun almost nervously, as though suddenly aware he was outnumbered. “You been warned.”

“And you’ve been told that you have no right to stop us, you daft old bugger,” Adam said, the derision clear in his voice.

Jackson’s ruddy face congested. He tried to push closer to Adam, but Paul caught the lapel of his raincoat and shoved him backwards. With a fraction less aggression, the whole thing could have passed off with a few harsh words, but after this there was only one way it was going to go.

The scuffle was brief. Jackson was hard and fit from years of manual labour, but the boys both had thirty years on him. It was the shotgun that worried me the most. Michael had grabbed hold of the barrel and was trying to wrench it from the farmer’s grasp, while he was determined to keep hold of it. The business end of the Baikal swung wildly across the rest of us.

Izzy was shrieking, ducked down with her hands over her ears. I piled Sam backwards, starting to head for the end of the bridge.

The blast of the shotgun discharging stopped my breath. I flinched at the pellets twanging off the brickwork as the shot spread. The echo rolled away up and down the valley like a call to battle.

The silence that followed was quickly broken by Izzy’s whimpering cries. She was still on the ground, staring in horrified disbelief at the blood seeping through a couple of small holes in the leg of her trousers.

Paul crouched near to her, hands fluttering over the wounds without actually wanting to touch them. Sam had turned vaguely green at the first sign of blood, but he unwound the cotton scarf from under the neck of his leathers and handed it over to me without a word. I moved Paul aside quietly and padded the makeshift dressing onto Izzy’s leg.

“It’s only a couple of pellets,” I told her. “It’s not serious. Hold this against it as hard as you can. You’ll be fine.”

Michael had managed to wrestle the Baikal away from Jackson. He turned and took in Izzy’s state, then pointed the shotgun meaningfully back at the shaken farmer, settling his finger onto the second trigger. “You bastard,” he ground out.

“Michael, stop it,” Diana said.

Michael ignored her, his dark eyes fixed menacingly on Jackson. “You’ve just shot my girlfriend.”

“Michael!” Diana tried again, shouting this time. She had quite a voice for one so slender. “Stop it! Don’t you understand? Where’s Adam?”

We all turned then, looked back to the section of parapet where he’d been standing. The lichen-covered wall was peppered with tiny fresh chips, but the parapet itself was empty.

Adam was gone.

I ran to the edge and leaned out over it as far as I dared. A hundred and twenty-three feet below me, a crumpled form lay utterly still on the grassy slope. The blood was a bright halo around his head.

“Adam!” Diana yelled, her voice cracking. “Oh God. Can you hear me?”

I stepped back, caught Sam’s enquiring glance, and shook my head.

Paul was already hurrying towards the end of the bridge to pick his way down beneath the arches. I went after him, snagged his arm as he started his descent.

“I’ll go,” I said. When he looked at me dubiously, I added, “I know first-aid if there’s anything to be done, and if not, well—” I shrugged — “I’ve seen dead bodies before.”

His face was grave for a moment, then he nodded. “What can we do?”

“Get an ambulance—Izzy probably needs one even if Adam doesn’t—and call the police.” He nodded again and had already started back up the slope when I added, “Oh, and try not to let Michael shoot that bloody farmer.”

“Why not?” Paul demanded bitterly. “He deserves it.” And then he was gone.

It was a relatively easy path down to where Adam’s body lay. Close to, it wasn’t particularly pretty. I hardly needed to search for a pulse at his outflung wrist to know the boy was dead. Still, the relatively soft surface had kept him largely intact, enough for me to tell that it wasn’t any shotgun blast that had killed him. Gravity had done that all by itself.

I took off my jacket and gently laid it over the top half of the body, covering his head. It was the only thing I could do for him, and even that was more to protect the sensibilities of the living.

When I looked up, I could see half of the rope dangling from the opposite side of the bridge high above my head, its loose end swaying gently. The other end was still tied around Adam’s ankles. It had snapped during his fall, but why?

Had Jackson’s shot severed the rope at the moment when Adam had either lost his balance and fallen, or as he’d chosen to jump?

I got to my feet and followed the rope along the ground to where the severed end lay coiled in the grass. I used a twig to carefully lift it up enough to examine it.

And then I knew.

The embankment seemed a hell of a lot steeper on the way up than it had on the way down. I ran all the way and was totally out of breath by the time I regained the bridge. But I was just in time.

Diana was crouched next to Izzy, holding her hand. Paul and Sam were standing a few feet behind Michael, eyeing him with varying amounts of fear and mistrust. The thickset youth had the shotgun wedged up under Jackson’s chin, using it to force his upper body backwards over the top of the parapet. Michael’s face was blenched with anger, teetering on the edge of control.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” He didn’t take his eyes off the farmer as I approached.

“Yes,” I said carefully, “but Jackson didn’t kill him, Michael.”

“But he must have done.” It was Paul who spoke. “We all saw—”

“You saw nothing,” I cut in. “The gun went off and Adam either jumped or fell, but he wasn’t shot. The rope gave out. That’s why he’s dead.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Diana said, haughty rather than anguished. “The breaking strain on the ropes we use is enormous. No way could it have simply broken. The shot must have hit it.”

“It didn’t,” I said. “It was cut halfway through. With a knife.”

Even Michael reacted to that one, taking the shotgun away from Jackson’s neck as he swivelled round to face me. I could see the indentations the barrels had left in the scrawny skin of the old man’s throat.

Chances like that don’t come very often. I took a quick step closer, looped my arm over the one of Michael’s that held the gun, and brought my elbow back sharply into the fleshy vee between his ribs.

He doubled over, gasping, letting go of the weapon. I picked it out of his hands and stepped back again. It was all over in a moment.

The others watched in silence as I broke the Baikal and picked out the remaining live cartridge. Once it was unloaded I put the gun down propped against the brickwork and dropped the cartridge into my pocket. Michael had caught his breath enough to think about coming at me, but it was Sam who intervened.

“I wouldn’t if you know what’s good for you,” he said, his voice kindly. “Charlie’s a bit of an expert at this type of thing. She’d eat you for breakfast.”

Michael favoured me with a hard stare. I returned it flat and level. I don’t know what he thought he saw, but he backed off, sullen, rubbing his stomach.

“So,” I said, “the question is, who cut Adam’s rope?”

For a moment there was total silence. “Look, we either have this out now, or you get the third degree when the police arrive,” I said, shrugging. “I assume you did call them?” I added in Paul’s direction.

“No, but I did,” Sam said, brandishing his mobile phone. “They’re on their way. I’ve said I’ll wait for them up on the road. Show them the way. Will you be okay down here?”

I nodded. “I’ll cope,” I said. “Oh and, Sam—when they arrive, tell them it looks like murder.”

Nobody spoke as Sam started out across the field. He eyed the quad bike with some envy as he passed, but went on foot.

“I still say the old bastard deserves shooting,” Michael muttered.

“I didn’t do nothing,” Jackson blurted out suddenly. Relieved of the immediate threat to his life, he stood looking dazed with his shoulders slumped. “I never would have fired. It was him who grabbed my hand! He’s the one who forced my finger down on the trigger!”

He waved towards Michael, who flushed angrily at the charge. I replayed the scene again and recalled the way the stocky boy had been struggling with Jackson for control of the gun. It had looked for all the world like a genuine skirmish, but it could just as easily have been a convenient setup.

When no one immediately spoke up in his defence, Michael rounded on us. “How can you believe anything so stupid?” he bit out. “Adam was a good mate. I would have given him my last cent.”

“Didn’t like sharing your girlfriend with him, though, did you?” Paul said quietly.

Izzy, still lying on the ground, gave an audible gasp. I checked to see how Diana was taking the news of her dead boyfriend’s apparent infidelity, but there was little to be gleaned from her cool and colourless expression.

A brief spasm of what might have been fear passed across Michael’s face. “You can’t believe I’d want to kill him for that?” he said and gave a harsh laugh. “Defending Izzy’s honour? Come on! I knew right from the start that she’s not exactly choosy.”

Izzy had begun to cry. “He loved me,” she managed between sobs, and it wasn’t immediately clear if she was referring to Michael or Adam. “He told me he loved me.”

Diana sat back, still looking at Izzy, but without really seeing her. “That’s what he tells—told—all of them,” she said, almost to herself. “Wanted to hear them say it back to him, I suppose.” She smiled then, a little sadly. “Adam always did need to be adored. The centre of attention.”

“You’re just saying that, but it isn’t true,” Izzy cried. “He loved me. He was going to give you up but he wanted to let you down gently, not to hurt your feelings. He was just waiting for the right time.”

“Oh, Izzy, of course he wasn’t going to give me up,” Diana said, her tone one of great patience, as though talking to the very young, or the very slow. “He used to come straight from your bed back to mine and tell me all about it.” She laughed, a high brittle peal. “How desperately keen you were. How eager to please.”

“And you didn’t mind?” I asked, fighting to keep the disbelief and the distaste buried.

“Of course not,” Diana said, sounding vaguely surprised that I should feel the need to ask. She sighed. “Adam had some—interesting—tastes. There were some things that I simply drew the line at, but Izzy—” her eyes slipped away from mine to skim dispassionately over the girl lying cringing in front of her — “well, she would do just about anything he asked. Pathetic, really.”

“Are you really trying to tell me that you knew your boyfriend was sleeping around and you didn’t care at all?”

Diana stood, looked down her nose again in that way she had. The way that indicated I was being too bourgeois for words. “Naturally,” she said. “I understood Adam perfectly and I understood that this was his last fling at life while he still had the chance.”

“What do you mean, while he still had the chance?” I said. I recalled Michael’s jibe about Adam having to pack in the dangerous sports. “What was the matter with him?”

There was a long pause. Even Jackson, I noticed, seemed to be waiting intently for the answer. Eventually, Izzy was the one who broke the silence. “He only told us a month ago that he’d been diagnosed with MND,” she said. Her leg had just about stopped bleeding, but her face had started to sweat now as the pain and the shock crept in. When I looked blank, it was Paul who continued.

“Motor Neuron Disease,” he said, sounding authoritative. “It’s a progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. In most cases the mind is unaffected, but you gradually lose control of various muscle groups—the arms and legs are usually the first to go. You can never quite tell how far or how fast it will develop because it affects everyone in a different way. Sometimes you lose the ability to speak and swallow. It was such rotten luck! The chances of it happening in someone under forty are so remote, but for it to hit Adam of all people—” He broke off, shook his head, and seemed to remember how none of that mattered anymore. “Poor sod.”

“It was a tragedy,” Izzy said, defiant. “And if I gave him pleasure while he could still take it, what was wrong with that?”

“So,” I murmured, “was this a murder, or a mercy killing?”

Diana made a sort of snuffling noise then, bringing one hand up to her face. For a moment I thought she was fighting back tears, but then she looked up and I saw that it was laughter. And she’d lost the battle.

“Oh for God’s sake, Adam didn’t have Motor Neuron Disease!” she cried, jumping to her feet, hysteria bubbling up through the words. “That was all a lie! He wanted you to think of him as the tragic hero, struck down at the pinnacle of his youth. And you all fell for it. All of you!”

Paul’s face was blank. “So there was nothing wrong with him?” he said faintly. “But he said—”

“Adam was diagnosed HIV positive six months ago,” Diana said flatly. “He had AIDS.”

The dismay rippled through the group like the bore of a changing tide. AIDS. The bogeyman of the modern age. I almost saw them edge away from each other, as though afraid of cross-contamination. No wonder Adam had preferred the pretence of a more user-friendly affliction.

And then it dawned on them, one by one.

Izzy realised it first. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “He never used...” she broke off, lifting her tear-stained face to Michael. “Oh God,” she said again. “I am so sorry.”

Michael caught on then, reeling away to clutch at the bridge parapet as though his legs suddenly wouldn’t support him any longer.

Paul was just standing there, staring at nothing. “Bastard,” he muttered, over and over.

Michael rounded on him in a burst of fury. “It’s all right for you,” he yelled. “You’re probably the only one of us who hasn’t got it!”

“Ah, that’s not quite the case, is it, Paul?” Diana said, her voice like chiselled ice. “Always had a bit of a thing for Adam, didn’t you? But he wasn’t having any of that. Oh, he kept you dangling for years,” she went on, scanning Paul’s stunned face without compassion. “Did you really not wonder at all why he suddenly changed his mind recently?”

She laughed again. A sound like glass breaking, sharp and bitter. “No, I can see you didn’t. You poor fools,” she said, taking in all of their devastated faces, her voice mocking. “There you all were debasing yourselves to please him, hoping to bathe in a last little piece of Adam’s reflected glory, when all the time he was spitting on your graves.”

Michael lunged for her, reaching for her throat. I swept his legs out from under him before he’d taken a stride, then twisted an arm behind his back to hold him down once he was on the floor. Come on, Sam! Where the hell were the police when you needed them?

I looked up at Diana, who'd stood unconcerned during the abortive attack. “Why on earth did you stay with him?” I asked.

She shrugged. “By the time he confessed, it was too late,” she said simply. “There’s no doubt—I’ve had all the tests. Besides, you didn’t know Adam. He was one of those people who was a bright star, for all his faults. I wanted to be with him, and you can’t be infected twice.”

“And what about us?” Paul demanded, sounding close to tears himself. “We were your friends. Why didn’t you tell us the truth?”

“Friends!” Diana scoffed. “What kind of friends would screw my boyfriend—or let their girlfriends screw him—behind my back? Answer me that!”

“You never got anything you didn’t ask for,” Jackson said quietly then, his voice rich with disgust. “The whole lot of you.”

Privately, part of me couldn’t help but agree with the farmer. “The question is,” I said, “which one of you went for revenge?”

And then, across the field, a new-looking Toyota Land Cruiser turned off the road and came bowling across the grass, snaking wildly as it came.

“Oh shit,” Paul muttered, “it’s Adam’s parents. How the hell did they get to hear about it so fast?”

The Land Cruiser didn’t stop by the quad bike, but came thundering straight onto the bridge itself, heedless of the weight-bearing capabilities of the old structure. It braked jerkily to a halt and the middle-aged couple inside flung open the doors and jumped out.

“Where’s Adam?” the man said urgently. He looked as though he’d thrown his clothes on in a great hurry. His shirt was unbuttoned and his hair awry. “Are we in time?”

None of the group spoke. I let go of Michael’s wriggling body and got to my feet. “Mr. Lane?” I said. “I’m terribly sorry to tell you this, but there seems to have been an accident—”

“Accident?” Adam’s mother almost shrieked the word as she came forwards. “Accident? What about this?” and she thrust a crumpled sheet of paper into my hands.

Uncertain what else to do, I unfolded the letter just as the first police Land Rover Discovery began its approach, rather more sedately, across the field.

Adam’s suicide note was brief and to the point. He couldn’t face the prospect of the future, it said. He couldn’t face the dreadful responsibility of what he’d knowingly inflicted on his friends. He was sorry. Goodbye.

He did not, I noticed, express the hope that they would forgive him for what he’d done.

I folded the note up again as the lead Discovery reached us and a uniformed sergeant got out, adjusting his cap. Sam was in the passenger seat.

The sergeant advanced, his experienced gaze taking in the shotgun still leaning against the brickwork, Izzy’s blood-soaked trousers, and the array of staggered faces.

“I understand there’s been a murder committed,” he said, businesslike, glancing round. “Where’s the victim?”

I waved my hand towards the surviving members of the Dangerous Sports Club. “Take your pick,” I said. “And if you want the murderer, well—” I nodded at the parapet where Adam had taken his final dive — “you’ll find him down there.”

© 2007 by Zoë Sharp