Michael Robotham - Shatter

Her gaze is now fixed on the water. I know she’s listening.

‘Your arms and legs will survive intact but the cervical discs in your neck or the lumbar discs in your spine will most likely rupture. It will not be pretty. It will not be painless. Someone will have to pick you up. Someone will have to identify your body. Someone will be left behind.’

High in the air comes a booming sound. Rolling thunder. The air vibrates and the earth seems to tremble. Something is coming.

Her eyes have turned to mine.

‘You don’t understand,’ she whispers to me, lowering the phone. For the briefest of moments it dangles at the end of her fingers, as if trying to cling on to her and then tumbles away, disappearing into the void.

The air darkens and a half-formed image comes to mind- a gape-mouthed melting figure screaming in despair. Her buttocks are no longer pressing against the metal. Her arm is no longer wrapped around the wire.

She doesn’t fight gravity. Arms and legs do not flail or clutch at the air. She’s gone. Silently, dropping from view.

Everything seems to stop, as if the world has missed a heartbeat or been trapped in between the pulsations. Then everything begins moving again. Paramedics and police officers are dashing past me. People are screaming and crying. I turn away and walk back towards the barricades, wondering if this isn’t part of a dream.

They are gazing at where she fell. Asking the same question, or thinking it. Why didn’t I save her? Their eyes diminish me. I can’t look at them.

My left leg locks and I fall onto my hands and knees, staring into a black puddle. I pick myself up again and push through the crowd, ducking beneath the barricade.

Stumbling along the side of the road, I splash through a shallow drain, swatting away raindrops. Denuded trees reach across the sky, leaning towards me accusingly. Ditches gurgle and foam. The line of vehicles is an unmoving stream. I hear motorists talking to each other. One of them yells to me.

‘Did she jump? What happened? When are they going to open the road?’

I keep walking, my gaze fixed furiously ahead, moving in a kind of dream. My left arm no longer swinging. Blood hums in my ears. Perhaps it was my face that made her do it. The Parkinson’s Mask, like cooling bronze. Did she see something or not see something?

Lurching towards the gutter, I lean over the safety rail and vomit until my stomach is empty.

There’s a guy on the bridge puking his guts out, on his knees, talking to a puddle like it’s listening. Breakfast. Lunch. Gone. If something round, brown and hairy comes up, I hope he swallows hard.

People are swarming across the bridge, staring over the side. They watched my angel fall. She was like a puppet whose strings had been cut, tumbling over and over, loose limbs and ligaments, naked as the day she was born.

I gave them a show; a high-wire act; a woman on the edge stepping into the void. Did you hear her mind breaking? Did you see the way the trees blurred behind her like a green waterfall? Time seemed to stop.

I reach into the back pocket of my jeans and draw out a steel comb, raking it through my hair, creating tiny tracks front to back, evenly spaced. I don’t take my eyes off the bridge. I press my forehead to the window and watch the swooping cables turned red and blue in the flashing lights.

Droplets are darting down the outside of the glass driven by gusts that rattle the panes. It’s getting dark. I wish I could see the water from here. Did she float or go straight to the bottom? How many bones were broken? Did her bowels empty the moment before she died?

The turret room is part of a Georgian house that belongs to an Arab who has gone away for the winter. A rich wanker dipped in oil. It used to be an old boarding house until he had it tarted up. It’s two streets back from Avon Gorge, which I can see over the rooftops from the turret room.

I wonder who he is- the man on the bridge? He came with the tall police constable and he walked with a strange limp, one arm sawing at the air while the other didn’t move from his side. A negotiator perhaps. A psychologist. Not a lover of heights.

He tried to talk her down but she wasn’t listening. She was listening to me. That’s the difference between a professional and a fucking amateur. I know how to open a mind. I can bend it or break it. I can close it down for the winter. I can fuck it in a thousand different ways.

I once worked with a guy called Hopper, a big redneck from Alabama, who used to puke at the sight of blood. He was a former marine and he was always telling us that the deadliest weapon in the world was a marine and his rifle. Unless he’s puking, of course.

Hopper had a hard-on for films and was always quoting from Full Metal Jacket — the Gunnery Sergeant Hartman character, who bellowed at recruits, calling them maggots and scumbags and pieces of amphibian shit.

Hopper wasn’t observant enough to be an interrogator. He was a bully, but that’s not enough. You’ve got to be smart. You’ve got to know people- what frightens them, how they think, what they cling to when they’re in trouble. You’ve got to watch and listen. People reveal themselves in a thousand different ways. In the clothes they wear, their shoes, their hands, their voices, the pauses and hesitations, the tics and gestures. Listen and see.

My eyes drift above the bridge to the pearl-grey clouds still crying for my angel. She did look beautiful when she fell, like a dove with a broken wing or a plump pigeon shot with an air rifle.

I used to shoot pigeons as a kid. Our neighbour, old Mr Hewitt who lived across the fence, had a pigeon loft and used to race them. They were proper homing pigeons and he’d take them away on trips and let them go. I’d sit in my bedroom window and wait for them to come home. The silly old bastard couldn’t work out why so many of them didn’t make it.

I’m going to sleep well tonight. I have silenced one whore and sent a message to the others.

To the one…

She’ll come back just like a homing pigeon. And I’ll be waiting.

A muddy Land Rover pulls on to the verge, skidding slightly on the loose gravel. The woman detective I met on the bridge leans across and opens the passenger door. Hinges groan in protest. I’m wet. My shoes are covered in vomit. She tells me not to worry.

Pulling back onto the road, she rips through stiff gears wrestling the Land Rover around corners. For the next few miles we sit in silence. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Veronica Cray. Friends call me Ronnie.’

She pauses for a moment to see if the irony of the name registers. Ronnie and Reggie Kray were legendary East End hard men back in the sixties.

‘It’s Cray with a “C” not a “K”,’ she adds. ‘My grandfather changed the spelling because he didn’t want anyone thinking we were related to a family of violent psychopaths.’

‘So that means you are related?’ I ask.

‘A distant cousin- something like that.’

Wipers slap hard against the bottom edge of the windscreen. The car smells vaguely of horse manure and wet hay.

‘I met Ronnie once,’ I tell her. ‘It was just before he died. I was doing a study for the Home Office.’

‘Where was he?’

‘Broadmoor.’

‘The psychiatric prison.’

‘That’s the place.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Old school. Well-mannered.’

‘Yeah, I know the sort- very good to his mother,’ she laughs.

We sit in silence for another mile.

‘I once heard a story that when Ronnie died the pathologist removed his brain because they were going to do experiments. The family found out and demanded the brain back. They gave it a separate funeral. I’ve always wondered what you do at a funeral for a brain.’