One Good Turn

53

Nina Riley climbed, hand over hand, like an agile spider on the rust-red web of girders of the Forth Bridge until finally, slick with sweat from the effort, she made it up to the railway tracks. She had no idea where Bertie was. Perhaps he had fallen to his death in the gray waters down below. She felt remarkably unper-turbed by his fate. He had been such an annoying boy, so obse-quious (“Miss Nina, you’re topping, you really are”). He needed a hefty dose of socialism or a good kick up the backside.

She looked up and down the tracks, no sign of a train. No sign of the Earl of Morybory, or whatever he was called. Her so-called archenemy. No sign of the circus troupe of clowns that had been dogging her steps for days. A faint cry interrupted her thoughts. It sounded like Bertie. Was he calling for help? She listened intently. A feeble “Help me, Miss Riley” drifted toward her on a stiff estu-ary breeze. She ignored it. Then a far-off rumbling noise. A train. It was time. She lay down on the tracks carefully, she didn’t want to dirty her new cream leather trench coat, although, of course, it was probably going to get ruined anyway.

She stretched herself as nice and straight as a railway sleeper across the tracks. If you were going to do something, do it prop-erly. It was a shame there was no one about to tie her to the tracks with rope. It would be good to finish on a Hollywood note. Or perhaps not, that wasn’t quite her style and she wasn’t a damsel in distress, she was a modern woman doing the sensible thing. The noble thing.

The train was louder now. Closer.

Sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, to be more exact. She was doing this for Martin. She was going to free him of her forever. She was going to take Alex Blake with her into oblivion, and Martin would be liberated, he could have a fresh start, write something good, for heaven’s sake, instead of this nonsense. Regrets, she had a few, of course. She had never had sex-Martin wouldn’t let her. And she had never been to Wales, she had always wondered what it was like, now she would never know.

A little flicker of something she’d never felt before crossed her features. She thought it might be fear. No going back now. This was it. The nanosecond that would change everything. It was coming. It was here.

She entered the blackness where there were no words. Let there be dark.

“And he just sits there and says nothing?”

“Mm. More or less.The police said when they arrived he was gibbering about wanting to go into holy orders.”

“‘Gibbering’? Is that a clinical term?”

“Very funny. I haven’t made an official diagnosis yet, but I would say that he’s in some kind of post-traumatic catatonia, a fugue state. He shot someone, killed someone. None of us really know how we would react in those circumstances.”

“Do you think he’s faking it? He’s a writer, isn’t he?”

“Mm.”

“What kind of things does he write?”