The Interpretations

  Mike said, ‘Come over here and take a look.’ He beckoned McCall to the southern edge of the tower leg, where it met the chain link fence.

  ‘Look here,’ Mike said, and he pushed the metal netting aside. ‘See? The fence isn’t actually attached to the tower so you can squeeze through.’

  ‘You can, maybe,’ McCall commented.

  ‘Me or Tom. Anyway, watch this.’ And he pushed himself through the gap between the fence and the tower leg. Then he turned round to speak to McCall again. ‘See. After a couple of feet it curves away from the fence. The whole thing curves so that there’s a space here between the fence and the inside wall of the tower leg. Can you see?’

  ‘I can see, I can see.’ Then he shouted as a couple of cars went by, ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  Mike struggled back onto the walkway again. ‘So what do you think of my new theory?’ he asked.

  ‘Depends exactly what it is.’

  They moved round the tower leg so that it separated them from the carriageway. It was quieter there.

  ‘Simple,’ Mike said. ‘Nobody saw him leave the bridge because he didn’t leave the bridge, he stayed on it. All he had to do was keep himself hidden for a few hours till everyone had gone and then slip away at maybe two or three in the morning. Hardly any traffic on the bridge and certainly no people, so it was easy.’

  ‘Easy?’

  ‘Well, you saw how I managed it.’

  ‘I didn’t see a thing. I had my eyes shut, remember.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m thinking about all the other folk. Mitchell, for example. He had his eyes open presumably.’

  ‘Mitchell was a long way behind.’

  ‘How do you know that? You said the fastest started last. He was the very last so he must have been the fastest of the lot.’

  ‘Not on that night.’

  ‘Now you’re changing your story.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Just listen. Tom’s . . . Tom’s got all this planned. He’s going to hide here at the north tower which is about two miles from the start. Now Mitchell is behind him and he knows he’s fast but Mitchell’s running a three mile race and Tom’s only running two. So Tom’s going to pull away from him. He knows he’ll be about two hundred yards ahead before Mitchell even starts. If he can stretch it to two hundred and fifty, he’s clear. It’s dark. OK, there’s lights along the bridge but you said yourself there’s a lot of glare so Mitchell won’t be able to see that clearly. Not at nearly three hundred yards away.’

  ‘Three hundred yards now. Tom’s getting faster all the time,’ McCall said. ‘Or maybe Mitchell’s getting slower.’

  ‘Mitchell was slow.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘By his standards, yes. Remember, he finished a minute and forty-three seconds behind Patrick Thomson . . .’

  ‘Having started only a minute after him.’

  ‘Exactly.’ And Mike repeated, ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So he lost ground,’ McCall said.

  ‘Certainly did. Which means that Tom could have been as much as a minute and a half ahead of Mitchell by the time he reached here. That’s about a quarter of a mile.’

  ‘Faster and faster,’ McCall said. ‘Faster and faster.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Mike went on, ‘he had plenty of time to slip behind the tower leg and then just stay there till . . . well, till whenever he wanted.’

  McCall leaned back against the railing. He looked at the wide silver tower in front of him and then raised his head, leaned back farther to take in the tower’s immense height, moving away from him up towards the first platform and then the top, the saddle on which the upper cable rested. The sky above and around the tower was still grey but the rain had reduced to a drizzle.

  ‘Sometimes you can’t see the top,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And I remember the first time I saw the bridge like that, with the towers disappearing into the cloud. I wondered how the hell we could build something so big that it could do that, have half on the ground and half in the sky. Still takes me a while to understand it and then maybe I don’t understand it anyway.’ He turned to Mike. ‘This new theory of yours. It’s not bad but I still don’t believe it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I admit I’m a bit puzzled why there’s no body but I dare say it’ll turn up. I’m sure of it, in fact,’ McCall said. Then he added, ‘I’ll give you a tip here, if you’re keen on this detective business. The most complicated answers are the least likely to be true. Simple answers always win. That’s what I’ve found, anyway. And you’ve not mentioned Gilfedder.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I knew Tom too, you know. Not that well, but I knew about him. I knew he was a very honest man, very moral . . . You’d agree?’

  ‘Pretty much, yes.’

  ‘So what I’m thinking is that the business with Gilfedder . . . that probably got to him. I mean it doesn’t matter how much everybody says that Gilfedder was in the wrong – in the original incident in the plant, I mean – that doesn’t really matter to Tom. Tom feels guilty about what happened. He feels responsible for what happened to Gilfedder – the shooting and so on. Oh everyone says he’s not to blame and he tries to get on with things as usual . . . But it’s nagging away at him. Gilfedder’s in a coma and it was him that got him into that state. So one evening he just . . . gives way. He’s decided on his guilt and he’s got to do away with himself. So he jumps off a bridge . . .’

  ‘Oh, come on. Half way through a race?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mike said. ‘I think it’s just plain daft.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you something else, then. If he’s still alive and he didn’t feel guilty enough with Gilfedder in a coma, he’ll feel guilty enough now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Gilfedder’s dead. Died this morning at half past ten.’

  10

  Today the Reverend McFarren was seventy-four years and one day old. A little over thirty-three years ago his father had died on his seventy-fourth birthday. This meant that the Reverend McFarren was now older than his father.

  But what did it mean, exactly, to be older than your father? He had thought about this a great deal in recent months. Now that he had reached and passed the moment of parity, did he feel any different? No. Did he believe that the event should be celebrated with a measure of self-congratulation? Of course not. Was he a wiser or better person? Not at all. Was he stronger?

  Certainly he was still strong. He believed this. But if he was still strong it was through God’s Will, not through any power of his own. It was God’s Will that he should survive to the age of seventy-four years and one day and if another day were to be added, and another day after that, it was only because God gave him the strength to go on. Because God had given him a Purpose. There was a Design. There was a Plan.

  God needed him to complete a Great Task.

  He assembled the documents before him on the kitchen table, removing them carefully from a big cardboard box. It was a large table and he was surprised – not quite alarmed but certainly surprised – at how many documents there were. In neat piles he arranged all the clippings from the Dalmore Herald, the North Star, the Aberdeen Press and Journal; there were even a few from the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman. There was a file containing all the letters he had written – to the local council, to his MP, to the Scottish Office, to the local, regional and national planning authorities and others to individuals and bodies whose names he had forgotten. To each of these letters was stapled the reply, if he had received one.

  A large bulldog clip held together the minutes from all the meetings he had attended. And there were transcripts of interviews with people involved in the case. These included Grenville, one of the Dalmore councillors, who was a small man in both body and mind, a time-server, a man of no faith and even less substance. Then there was Spondulick-Watt, the Secretary of State, a man as ridiculous as his n
ame. What nonsense he spouted. Almost as bad as his brother, the Director of Watttechnics, the company that had built the bridge.

  He picked up this bundle of papers and began to flick through the photocopied sheets. Yes, here was what Councillor Haddington had said on Grampian Television. This was a man who had only lived in the area for twenty years and believed he knew everything about it. Such arrogance!

  The tallest stack of information contained the official reports. There were nearly a dozen of them. The Reverend McFarren remembered that the seriousness with which these reports were treated depended on the quality of the binding. There were, for example, the spiral-bound efforts of the voluntary bodies – good, clear and generally well-argued – which nobody cared for, and the two dull, misguided and greatly biased reports prepared by the Scottish Office. These were each 400 pages long and cloth bound with beautiful marbled end-papers; obviously works which people took very seriously indeed.

  It had taken him six or seven years to collect all this information. The Reverend McFarren touched each pile of paper in turn, including the reports. There was something about the feel of paper, the intimacy of touch, that he liked.

  The very roughest of calculations suggested that he had in front of him something between a quarter and half a million words. The story of the bridge, the true story of the bridge, was hidden in these pages and it was up to him to extract it. He had realised long ago that this story could not be accommodated in a pamphlet; this time forty-eight pages would not be enough. So it was with a certain nervousness that he now wrote, on the first page of his otherwise blank notebook:

  The Duie Bridge

  Story of a Disaster

  (Sheeppark Publications No. 2)

  What if he was not up to the task? Or, even worse, suppose he had misread God’s Purpose and this was not the Task that was required of him? Then God would deny him strength. It would be obvious. The signs would be easily read.

  He put his notebook to one side. It was far too early to start writing. First he had to read everything again. He needed to arrange his material, to plan; he needed to focus on essentials. So, where to start? The clippings from the Dalmore Herald? The first of the two Scottish Office reports (‘The Duie Bridge: A New Beginning for the North of Scotland’)?

  Then he noticed something – a folder was it? – near the top of the stack of reports. He pulled it out carefully. It was an A4 manila envelope with MISCELLANEOUS printed on it. He had forgotten all about this.

  The first thing he found inside was a booklet produced by the Dalmore Museum shortly after the bridge was opened. The title declared that it was a ‘celebration’ of the new bridge. There were photos taken during the building of it, several of the completed structure and no fewer than ten of the opening ceremony. Not surprisingly there were no photographs of the Reverend McFarren and his band of protesters. There was, however, a photo of a hat.

  The princess’s hat! He smiled as he looked at the battered straw hat that had been blown from the princess’s head as she cut the ribbon to open the bridge. A local fisherman, Alec Briardale, had recovered the hat from the Duie Firth. And there he was, holding up the hook he had caught it with. Finally, there was a photo of the cabinet in the museum that displayed the hat and the hook.

  The minister shook his head. The things that were deemed to be important. Any insignificant relic that had a hint of celebrity to it. A glove worn by a queen, a drinking vessel blessed by a so-called saint, the winding-sheet that certainly never covered the body of God, a hat worn by a princess.

  He put the booklet back in the envelope and pulled from it the only other item it contained.

  He was puzzled. He could not remember what the document was, although the stamp of Inverness Library at the top of the first page told him where he had acquired it. Then he read the three words that began what was in fact a letter. They had been written with a quill pen in careful and regular hand-writing whose quality was not far short of copper-plate:

  My Dear Caulfeild

  He remembered. He had visited the library in Inverness to find out more about that earlier bridge over the Skiach, the Drumdyre Bridge, built in 1729 by General George Wade. He had thought of writing an introduction to his work which would place the new bridge within its historical context. He wondered if any of the issues that he knew had attended the building of the new bridge had also been important more than two hundred and fifty years ago, when the first bridge had been built.

  He found very little information about Wade. There was a book about the building of his roads but he decided he wanted more about the man himself. Then someone at the library discovered that they had copies of half a dozen of Wade’s letters. Five of these were reports to the King, George II, about how well or badly the programme of road and bridge building was going. These letters were full of detail, very correct in style and extremely dull. But the sixth item was a personal letter from Wade to a friend of his called Caulfeild, who had been his right-hand man during the years in the Highlands. This letter had been written in 1746, after Wade had finally retired. In fact he had less than two years to live.

  When the Reverend McFarren had first looked at the letter, he had seen that it was different from the others, both in style and content. He had taken home a photocopy of it but had filed it away without reading it. Now it was in front of him and he decided that it was the document with which he would begin.

  My Dear Caulfeild,

  It was with great pleasure that I received your recent letter, the very first, I am happy to relate, to reach me at my new residence in Highgate. Such were the difficulties encountered in the building of this mansion – more, I may say, than ever attended the construction of our roads and bridges – that I feared I would depart this world ere it were completed. However, I am now ensconced here if not in luxury then at least in a measure of comfort that is agreeable to me.

  Nevertheless, I am persuaded by divers members of the medical profession that my health, although in a tolerable condition for one of my age, is in need of constant supervision. These men, who seem intent on pinching and poking me, peering into my eyes and mouth and enquiring as to the nature of certain bodily functions the details of which I will spare you, display many admirable qualities but direct honesty is not one of them. They are convinced that, with care, I will live to be a hundred at the very least. They cannot understand that this prospect of longevity engenders within me no enthusiasm whatever. My remaining ambition in life is to be released from it before my cares and tribulations lie so heavy upon me as to render further acquaintance with this world both painful and pointless. But to them, these bringers of everlasting life, I say merely that I will be content to live as far as ninety-nine only and I will be happy to pay their bills until that time. At this they laugh, somewhat nervously it has to be admitted, they look one more time down my throat and then leave, promising, alas, to return on the morrow.

  To live with care, my dear Caulfeild, with care! Can you imagine me living with care? Not that my life has been lived recklessly, by any means – during our association of several years in the Highlands of Scotland you will know that our enterprise could not have been achieved without planning, without much assaying and foreknowledge, without, dare I say it, a great deal of care. However, had I wanted to dedicate the well-being of my body to a life of care I would never have become a soldier. When we first met, Caulfeild, my military career, in the sense of battles fought and victories won, was all but over. Indeed, when I contemplate my recent fortunes, or should I say misfortunes, in Flanders, I am forced to conclude that my reputation would have been better served if my energies, after my ten years in Scotland, had been confined to my parliamentary duties.

  Of course it is easy to look back and identify decisions that, at the time of their making, seemed incontrovertibly correct but which time, events and men have rendered unstable. But I regret little. I cannot bring myself to say that I regret nothing – no honest man, in my opinion, can make that claim – but I c
an with some confidence say that there is little that I would now change, given the insights afforded me by time and distance. I can add that of all my exploits my greatest satisfaction and deepest belief in a necessary endeavour well executed, derive from those years we spent together in the Highlands.

  Oh, do not mistake me, Caulfeild, the irony is not lost upon me that those very roads to which we both dedicated ten years of our lives in order to ensure the pacification of the Highlands, were used by that scoundrel, whose name I never utter, when he attempted to rebel against our King. Had he and his tatterdemalion army not had our roads to march upon, his journey south would have taken months rather than weeks and I am strongly of the opinion that his revolt would have been snuffed out ere it had begun. But we know too that when he was forced to retreat he was pursued with speed along those very same roads which denied him and his men the sanctuary that those wild places previously offered. And so we arrive at the argument. Would it have been better never to have built the roads in the first place, and thereby reduced the initial effect of the revolt, or are we to be applauded for providing the Duke of Cumberland with a swift and sure route whereby to pursue the rebels? I am wont to believe, Caulfeild, that you will concur with me when I say that we must look beyond that paltry rebellion and its suppression for the justification of our endeavours. If the people of Scotland, particularly those of the North, are to engage in commerce with England and build a society similar to that of its Greater Neighbour, then such means of communication are essential. It has always been my belief that the surest way to exercise control upon a rebellious nation is to show them our superiority in all things and convince them that their best endeavours should be devoted to its emulation.

  Of course there are those who are not given to change, whose wish it is to live only as their forefathers did, to be forever the same. I have never been able to understand why such people think as they do. They seek to deny that the place at which they stand was itself once different, that their ancestors only managed to survive at all by the success with which they wrestled with the tiny shifts and movements in the tide of history. The more I reflect upon life, Caulfeild, the more convinced I become that nothing stands still.