‘She was cleverer than she let on.’ Another sniff. ‘But it wasn’t her idea. It was mine.’
It was the first thing Bethany had given me, the first indication that she could answer my questions. Progress, if she hadn’t been planning to kill herself.
‘What was your idea?’
‘To hide. To wait.’
‘For what?’
‘For it to be over.’ Her voice was fainter; I had to strain to hear her.
‘For what to be over?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
We turned onto the main road and a river of red brake lights stretching into the middle distance: London traffic at its least helpful. I could see the train station and I popped open the door of the car before Derwent had actually stopped. There was a risk in asking any more questions, I knew, but it was a risk I had to take. I was running down the road towards the station, trying to keep my voice level.
‘Bethany, I understand you might not like me asking the question, and I know it might be hard to answer, but do you know who killed Chloe?’
A van driver was inching forward, impatient even though the traffic was clearly going nowhere. As I ran by, he nudged the bumper of a car that was pushing in from a side street. The car’s driver leaned out of his window, instantly incensed, and yelled something that for sheer offence took my breath away. The van driver shouted back.
‘What was that?’ Bethany sounded terrified.
‘Nothing.’
‘Is it to do with William? Is he OK?’
‘He’s fine. I’m not near him any more. It’s nothing to do with him.’
There was a tiny silence. ‘If you’re not near him, where are you?’
‘Bethany, I just want to make sure you’re all right.’
Silence.
‘Bethany?’
I was talking to dead air.
26
I got to the front of the queue to speak to the yellow-jacketed man from Network Rail by shoving and holding my warrant card up, making no friends.
‘Where are the engineering works still going on? Show me.’ I stuck my phone under his nose with the map on the screen.
‘They’re on the up line towards central London. That’s why this station is closed and there’s a rail replacement bus service in operation.’ He’d raised his voice for the last bit; I did not appreciate him multi-tasking by addressing the queue of frustrated commuters.
‘Show me exactly.’
He gave me an odd look but pointed at the map. ‘About half a mile from here. Near enough to East Putney tube station. The District Line is running, if you want to try that.’
‘Is there anywhere nearby that overlooks the tracks?’
The man shrugged but someone in the queue behind me said, ‘Yeah, there is. There are two footbridges across the tracks, one on Oxford Road near the art college and one on Woodlands Way.’
Think fast. Guess right. She would want to be undisturbed.
‘Which one is busier?’
‘Oxford Road, I suppose.’
I ran, my phone to my ear to call Derwent. ‘You still in traffic?’
‘Yeah. I’ll dump the car.’ He sounded deeply tense. ‘I can see you. Where are you going?’
‘Woodlands Way near East Putney tube. It’s a left off the Upper Richmond Road.’ I could hear him flipping through the road atlas. ‘There’s a footbridge. There’s another on Oxford Road, before that, but I think she’s on Woodlands Way.’
‘I’ll check it out. Have you called it in so BTP can be informed?’
‘You do it,’ I said, short of breath already, and hung up. British Transport Police had jurisdiction over the railways and the land surrounding them. It was both courteous and correct to inform them about Bethany, but I wasn’t going to wait for them to find her. The road noises – well, Upper Richmond Road was part of the South Circular Road and the traffic was pretty much constant.
I almost went straight past Woodland Way, in part because it wasn’t an idyllic bosky grove but a narrow dead end that ran between some lock-up garages and a block of flats. Maybe the trees were on the other side of the railway line, I thought, racing down to where the District Line ran overhead. Beyond it there was a narrow bridge, blocked off for vehicular access and only really wide enough for bikes and pedestrians anyway.
There was no one on the bridge.
Fuck.
I stopped under the bridge, hearing a train rattle overhead, struggling to breathe. I’d guessed wrong. Derwent would get her, I told myself, wishing like hell I’d turned down Oxford Road. I’d run past it. I’d gambled and I hoped like hell Bethany wouldn’t lose.
The phone purred to life in my hand. I answered with, ‘Did you get her?’
‘I was just going to ask you that. No sign of her.’
I closed my eyes for a second in despair. ‘I thought she had to be around here somewhere. It’s the obvious place. I could hear the trains.’
‘I’ll go back for the car and drive round the area. Try calling Bethany again.’
I hung up. Turner’s phone was locked. I’d have to hope she was willing to answer a call from a strange number.
I walked across to the bridge as I waited for the call to connect. I could see the men who were working on the track a little way away, ten or twelve of them in hard hats and bright orange boiler suits. The parapet of the bridge was chest-high on me – high enough to prevent accidents, but not high enough to stop suicides. They came in handfuls, I knew, one inspiring another, and they caused chaos across the transport network. There were stations where it happened relatively often, where the fast trains went through in a blur of metal and noise and the difference between life and death was a split second. There was nothing the drivers could do. The human body was not designed for high-speed impact with a train.
A mobile phone chirped somewhere nearby and I looked around, trying to work out where the sound was coming from as it stopped halfway through the ringtone. Then I found myself listening to the voicemail message, the generic one from the phone company. Did teenagers even listen to voicemails? I killed it and hurried to the end of the bridge, where a high, sharp-tipped metal fence blocked off access to the embankment. There was a gate in the fence to provide access for the men who were working on the line, but it was padlocked. A fan of metal spread across the angle between the bridge and the fence to stop people climbing over the edge of the parapet and dropping down to the embankment – but Bethany was small …
‘Scuse me, love.’ It was a cheerful man in an orange suit, heading down to the tracks.
‘Can you let me through this gate?’ I was holding up my warrant card.
‘Sorry, I’m not allowed to let anyone through. Health and safety—’
‘It’s an emergency.’
Something in my face or my voice convinced him he didn’t want to get between me and what I wanted. He unlocked the gate and held it open for me. ‘Stay away from the tracks and listen for the trains.’