The Impossible Dead

9



‘That was quick,’ Malcolm Fox said into his phone. Evelyn Mills was on the other end of the line. The eavesdropping operation had been given the green light.

‘My boss decided we didn’t need to refer it upwards,’ she explained.

‘Why not?’

‘My guess is, he reckons it might have been knocked back.’

‘I like the sound of your boss.’

‘He reminds me a bit of you, actually.’

‘Then I’m flattered. How long till you’re operational?’

‘Need a telephone engineer to help us with the landline.’

‘Us?’

‘I’ve got help: two youngsters from CID. Mobile phone will take longer – first things we’ll have access to are numbers called and calls received …’ She broke off. ‘You know all this already.’

‘True.’

He heard her give a short sigh. ‘It’ll be end of play today for the landline; some time tomorrow for everything else. Unlikely Scholes would bother e-mailing Carter, so I was going to skip the key-stroke surveillance.’

‘Fine by me. And thanks again, Evelyn.’

‘It’s what neglected friends are for, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Just one thing, though – Scholes isn’t an idiot. Might explain why he went to Carter’s house. It keeps their conversation private. Could be all we end up with are texts to arrange more meetings.’

‘I know.’

She gave another sigh. ‘Of course you do. I keep forgetting how much alike we are. Maybe that’s why we hit it off that time.’

‘Are you sure you want to say any more? This may not be as secure a line as we’d like.’

She was chuckling as Fox wrapped up the call.

‘Sounds like a result,’ Kaye commented. All three of them were crammed into the storeroom, door slightly ajar, Joe Naysmith keeping watch for spies and dawdlers.

‘Everything should be up and running by tomorrow. Home phone could even be tonight.’

‘That’s efficient. Care to share the secret of your success?’

‘No.’

‘Just her name, then.’

‘Plus,’ Naysmith added, turning towards his colleagues, ‘whatever it was you thought she shouldn’t be saying over a non-secure line.’ He jumped as someone thumped on the door, pushing it open. Superintendent Pitkethly stood there, face like thunder.

‘Would I be right in thinking the three of you just paid Teresa Collins a visit?’

Fox rose to his feet. ‘She’s made a complaint?’ he guessed.

‘In a manner of speaking. They found your name on a business card on her chair – when they went in with the stretcher.’

She saw immediately the effect her words had had, and kept quiet for a moment, the better to savour the discomfort on the three faces.

‘A passer-by saw her at her window, smearing blood on it from her wrists. He called the paramedics.’

All three men were standing now, eyes on Pitkethly. Kaye was the first to speak.

‘Is she …?’

‘She’s in hospital. Wounds don’t look too bad. Question is: what drove her to it? From the look of you, I’d say I’ve got my answer.’

‘She was hysterical,’ Naysmith blurted out. ‘We left her to it …’

‘Having calmed her down first, obviously,’ Pitkethly said, twisting the knife. ‘I mean, this is a woman who’s had a traumatic experience. Fragile enough to begin with, and with a history of drug use. I’m assuming you didn’t just walk away?’

‘We don’t answer to you,’ Fox stated, regaining a little of his composure.

‘You might have to, though.’

‘We’ll make our report.’

‘And will there be conferring beforehand?’ This question came from DCI Peter Laird, who had just arrived at Pitkethly’s shoulder. Fox sensed that there were other spectators in the corridor. He pushed past Pitkethly and saw that he was right. Laird wasn’t bothering to suppress his pleasure at this turn of events.

‘I mean,’ Laird went on, folding his arms, ‘you’ll want to make sure you’ve got your stories straight.’

‘She’s going to be all right, though?’ Joe Naysmith was asking Pitkethly.

‘Bit late to be showing concern,’ she answered him. Fox got right into her face.

‘Enough,’ he said. Then, to Kaye and Naysmith: ‘We’re out of here.’

‘Going so soon?’ Laird was waving with the fingers of one hand as they stalked down the corridor.

‘I’ll need those statements,’ Pitkethly called after them.

As Fox pushed open the door to the outside world, he saw Scholes hurrying in from the car park.

‘Looks like I missed the fun,’ he said with a grin. Fox ignored him, but Kaye gave him a shoulder-charge that almost felled him. Scholes didn’t react. His laughter followed them to the Mondeo.

‘Where to?’ Kaye asked.

‘Home,’ Fox stated.

They didn’t say anything for the first few miles. It was Naysmith who broke the silence. ‘Poor woman.’

Kaye just nodded.

‘Reckon we should have stayed?’

Kaye looked to Fox, but saw he wasn’t going to answer. He was staring out of the passenger-side window, forehead almost touching it.

‘I can’t see that we did anything wrong,’ Kaye announced, trying for more certainty than he felt. ‘We were the ones making her frantic, so we left.’

‘But it was me, wasn’t it? Telling her Carter was out …’

‘Wasn’t our job to keep the facts from her, Joe.’

‘You sound,’ Fox interrupted, ‘as if you’ve already got your report off-pat.’

‘It was her way of crying out for help,’ Kaye persisted. ‘We’ve all seen them.’

‘I haven’t,’ Naysmith corrected him.

‘You know the type, though. If she’d really wanted to top herself, she wouldn’t have stood at the window like that, showing all and sundry what she’d done.’

‘What if nobody’d been passing, though?’

‘Then she’d have phoned herself an ambulance. Like I say, it happens.’

‘I can’t help thinking—’

‘Then don’t think!’ Kaye snapped at Naysmith. ‘Let’s just get back to civilisation and write up what happened.’ He looked towards Fox again. ‘Come on, Malcolm, back me up here. She could have snapped any time, just our bad luck it happened when it did.’

‘We could have tried calming her down.’

‘In case you’ve forgotten, she was screaming fit to burst. Two more minutes in there and every nut-job in the neighbourhood would have had us cornered.’ Kaye kneaded the steering wheel with both hands. ‘I can’t see that we did anything wrong,’ he repeated.

Fox saw that they were on the M90 again and had already passed Inverkeithing.

‘I need you to do me a favour,’ he said quietly.

‘What?’

‘There’s a lay-by just before the bridge. Pull in and let me out.’

‘You going to be sick?’

Fox shook his head.

‘What then?’

‘Just pull over.’

Kaye signalled to move into the inside lane, saw the signpost for the lay-by and signalled again. It was an area for large loads to stop, preparatory to being escorted to the other side of the estuary. Fox got out of the car and felt the fast-moving stream of traffic attempting to suck him on to the carriageway. There was a pavement, though, and it led to a walkway that crossed the road bridge.

‘You’re kidding,’ Kaye called out to him.

‘I need some air, that’s all.’

‘What the hell are we supposed to do?’

‘Wait for me on the other side, as near to the old tollbooths as you can get.’

‘Want me to come with you?’ Naysmith asked, but Fox shook his head and slammed shut the door, turning his collar up. He had walked thirty or forty yards before a break in the traffic allowed the Mondeo to pass him with a single toot of its horn. Fox waved at it and kept walking. He had never crossed the Forth Road Bridge like this before. He knew people did it all the time: joggers and tourists. The noise from the carriageway was punishing, and the drop to the Firth of Forth seemed vertiginous, but Fox kept going, drawing in lungfuls of fumy air. There was a dog-walker coming from the opposite direction. She wore a scarf tied tightly over her hair, and offered him a nod and a smile, neither of which he returned with any degree of success. To his left he could see the rail bridge, much of it under wraps for maintenance. There were islands down there, too, and over to the right the port of Rosyth. The wind was ripping at his ears, but he felt it was as much as he deserved. Kaye was right, of course: a cry for help rather than a serious effort. But all the same. They’d dropped a bomb on her with the news of Paul Carter, then simply walked away. No call to social services or whoever else might willingly check on her. A neighbour? A relative in the area? No, they’d cared more for their own skins and that bloody Mondeo.

Fox hadn’t encountered too much violence or tragedy during his years on the force. A few drunken fights to break up when he’d been in uniform; a couple of bad murder cases in CID. Part of the appeal of the Complaints had been its focus on rules broken rather than bones, on cops who crossed the line but were not violent men. Did that make him a coward? He didn’t think so. Less of a copper? Again, no. But it was in his nature to avoid confrontation, or ensure it didn’t well up in the first place – which was why he felt he had failed with Teresa Collins. Every moment of his time with her could have been played differently, and with a better outcome.

Fox rubbed his hands down either side of his face as he walked. His pace was quickening, the wind growing more biting still as he reached the halfway point. He was in the middle of the Firth of Forth now, steel cables holding him aloft. He was depending on them to do their job and not suddenly snap. Without knowing why he was doing it, he broke into a run – jogging at first, but then speeding up. When had he last run anywhere? He couldn’t remember. The sprint lasted only a few tens of metres, and he was breathing hard by the end of it. Two proper joggers gave him a lengthy examination as they passed.

‘I’m all right,’ he told them with a wave of his hand.

Maybe he believed it, too. He took out his phone and snapped the view, just so he wouldn’t forget. South Queensferry was below him now, with its blustery yachts and boat trips out to Inchcolm Abbey. He started looking for the Mondeo ahead of him, but couldn’t see it. Had they had enough and left him to it? He double-checked the few parked vehicles, then heard a horn behind him and turned to see Kaye pulling in, having just crossed the bridge.

Fox opened the passenger-side door. ‘How did you manage that?’ he asked.

‘Joe here got worried you might be going to jump,’ Kaye explained. ‘So we went round the roundabout, crossed back over into Fife, did the same at the other end … and here we are.’

‘Nice to know you care.’

‘It was Joe, remember – I’d have left you to it.’

Fox smiled, got in and fastened his seat belt. ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said.

‘Nice walk?’ Naysmith asked from the back seat.

‘Cleared my head a bit.’

‘And?’ Kaye asked.

‘And I’m fine.’

‘We could have sworn we saw you jogging.’

Fox gave Tony Kaye a hard stare. ‘Do I look the type?’

Kaye smiled with half his mouth. ‘Wouldn’t have said so.’

‘Then I wasn’t jogging, was I?’

‘That’s your version of events, Inspector.’ Kaye glanced at Joe Naysmith in the rear-view mirror. ‘We’ll always have ours. But in the meantime, can I assume we’re headed back to base?’

‘Unless you want to visit a car-wash first.’ Fox watched Kaye shake his head. ‘Okay then. Let’s see if the news gets to Bob McEwan before we do …’