Peter Guttridge - The Thing Itself

The bridge was essentially to carry a water pipe, which was cased in a ten-foot-high wall of brick. The walkway to the left of this casing was about four feet wide. As protection for people on the walkway, there was a low wall topped by a rail. The wooded ravine was an almost perfect V.

We had scarcely gone more than hundred yards when my wife, glancing down at the trees and the river so far below, lurched.

‘Vertigo?’ I said with concern.

‘I’m not going any further,’ she said. ‘This wall is too low.’

‘“Have ye courage, O my brethren? He hath heart who knows fear but vanquishes it, who sees the abyss but with pride.”’

My wife looked at me as if I was mad.

‘Nietzsche,’ I said. She snorted.

A couple of giggly teenage girls were approaching from the other side. I moved back against the iron rail and my wife flattened herself against the aqueduct wall to allow them to go by.

The walkway was now deserted beyond us. My wife began to perspire, craning her neck to look down again. It was a dizzying drop. I liked the feeling of walking in space. I took a couple of snaps.

‘Can we go back now?’ my wife said sharply.

‘I’d like a picture from the other side. Wait — I’ll be back soon.’

‘Wait for you?’

But I was already striding off.

‘Come back!’

I waved.

‘Five minutes.’

I disappeared behind the tower at the far end of the bridge. As I did so, two men in dark suits stepped on to the walkway and set off briskly towards the centre of the bridge. I followed a rough trail up through the trees. I could still glimpse the aqueduct with the town above it.

I saw my wife start to totter off the walkway. I found a spiral staircase pretty much intact in the tower. I went up two steps at a time and came out on to a magnificent view. From this height I could see the snow-streaked mountains rising behind the sprawl of Spoleto.

My wife had stopped on the bridge, facing the two men in dark suits whose laughter I could hear from the tower. She was standing a little stiffly, looking everywhere but down into the ravine. I took her picture.

I trained my camera on her as the two men purposefully approached.

My wife stepped back to let the two men go by. They didn’t go by. I had paid them well. They lifted my wife into the air and out over the parapet. There was nothing but air between her and the silver thread of water. The men dangled her over the parapet, her skirt falling down over her head. They let her go.

I took her snap. Arms flailing, she fell to the river so far below.

I telephoned her brother.

‘You’re a dead man,’ he said.

‘I’m staying in Italy for a while.’

‘That won’t save you.’

‘You know that Mussolini hates the Mafia? Most of the Mafiosi here are either dead, in prison or in hiding. I don’t recommend you do anything rash.’

‘I can wait,’ he said.

‘You’re going to have to.’

I gazed at the wall in front of me. It was as blank as my heart.

We give ourselves airs. Significance. Every life is sacred. No, it isn’t. After the Great War only an imbecile would believe that.

Life is nothing. We are animals, and animals die. When the spark dies, you become a thing. What are we, after all? Bone and gristle. Meat and muscle. Is a knee joint sacred? Has a shoulder blade a soul?

Life is not sacred, although it is perhaps a gift. You have it and it is snatched away as I snatched away the lives of my mistress and my wife.

As mine will one day be snatched away.

Today

Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist was reading the Guardian with increasing irritation when her phone rang. She ignored it, focusing instead on the offending article, from the newspaper’s crime correspondent.

The headline read: ‘No Action To Be Taken Against Police Officers Involved In Milldean Massacre.’

The article went on:

The Police Complaints Authority today announced that no action is to be taken against any officers from the Southern Police Authority in connection with the so-called ‘Milldean Massacre’ in which four people were shot and killed in a police raid on a house on the Milldean estate, Brighton, last year.

A spokesperson said that whilst a report from the Hampshire police, who had investigated the incident, was ‘highly critical’ of the system that was in place for armed response operations in the Southern Police Authority, it had been unable to conclude exactly what had occurred during the operation and thus was unable to assign blame.

The spokesperson added that the Hampshire police regarded this as ‘highly unsatisfactory’ but felt unable to say whether the officers involved were being deliberately obstructive or were just responding to the chaos of such an operation. An additional problem was that only one of the dead people had been identified: Stephen Strong, known as Little Stevie, a male prostitute.

Since the massacre two of the officers involved have died in suspicious circumstances, one has committed suicide and three have retired due to ill health. Only one — Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist — continues as a serving police officer, though she will never again be part of an armed unit.

The only scalp taken as a consequence of the Milldean Massacre was that of high-flying Chief Constable Robert Watts. The morning after the killings he defended his officers in terms that were felt to prejudice the official investigation beginning that day.

Watts — a much-decorated former army officer and the youngest chief constable in the country — had been generally regarded as a poster boy for modern policing. Married with two children, he refused to resign for his error of judgement but did so when newspapers published accounts of his affair with Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist.

Whilst there was no suggestion that he was protecting DS Gilchrist, who has been fully exculpated by the inquiry, the revelation of the affair and her proximity to the massacre was regarded as significant.

The violent robber Bernie Grimes, the man the armed police were attempting to detain, remains at large. Indeed, it is speculated that he was never in the house that was raided. The Police Complaints Authority, Hampshire Police and Southern Police have all declined to answer accusations that the armed raid was actually on the wrong house.

Commenting on the fact that the report will remain confidential, Southern Police’s Chief Constable Hewitt said: ‘There is nothing to be gained by publishing the report. The killings were a tragedy but we must put the past behind us. We now have systems in place to ensure that such a terrible error does not occur again.’

Sarah Gilchrist dropped the newspaper on the low table beside her. Bastards. She hated that nothing had been resolved, that she was no nearer knowing exactly what had happened. Especially given all that it had sparked: the arrival of Balkan gangsters, grotesque medieval deaths, a bloodbath in the Grand Hotel and another in a village outside Dieppe. John Hathaway, Brighton’s crime king for the past four decades, left to die, stuck on the end of a pole on a cliff-top.

She shuddered at the thought of her own close encounter with the psychopathic Bosnian torturer Miladin Radislav, also known as Vlad the Impaler. He’d come for her as part of his vengeful rampage through Brighton. She vividly recalled his grey face and his cold eyes as he bore down on her on the beach whilst she was embroiled with a gang of feral girls. The irony was that his arrival had saved her from them.

She swallowed bile and lowered her feet from the wrought iron framing the balcony and looked down on the pretty garden below her. She had liked it here at first in Clarence Square. It was central — the shops were just up the road, the sea just down it — and it had been a little oasis of sunny quiet. In the daytime at least.