The Woman on the Bridge Read online

  For Carole.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Charlotte

  Charlotte

  Charlotte

  Maggie

  Charlotte

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  Maggie

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  Maggie

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  Maggie

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  Maggie

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  Pamela

  Charlotte

  Maggie

  Pamela

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  Pamela

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  Pamela

  Maggie

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  Maggie

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  Pamela

  Maggie

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  Pamela

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  Maggie

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  Maggie

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  Maggie

  Charlotte

  Maggie

  Pamela

  Rob

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Copyright

  What are little girls made of?

  What are little girls made of?

  Sugar and spice

  And all things nice

  That’s what little girls are made of.

  Charlotte

  Now – Friday Night

  Charlotte screams into the emptiness. All around, the world has dissolved from grey to inky blue to deepest black. Now it has no colour; it is just nothingness. Even the stars that had hung above her car like beautiful threats have disappeared, blinked clean out of existence like dead matches.

  On this black night, whipping along these dead roads, Charlotte could be anywhere. She presses the accelerator with her boot but, no matter how fast she goes, she outruns nothing that matters. The anger still sits in the car with her, panting like a beast. She presses on anyway, driving as fast as she dares, then faster still. Hurling her car around corners, hoping, for just a moment, to slam into something.

  Her knuckles turn white on the wheel, adrenaline boiling her from the inside as she scores a deep groove along this empty map. Her headlights bounce along, picking up startled animal eyes and sudden silhouettes at the side of the roads. Their glow briefly sketching gates and the swinging signs of small farms. Tyre tracks leading off towards unknowable lives.

  She goes faster still, trying to outrun her panic. Swinging around bends and adding ten, twenty to the speed limit. Why not? Thirty miles an hour over. Fuck it. What difference does it make when you’re alone on the road? You know very well what difference it makes.

  Charlotte curses her electric car, inherited from her mother, nearly new. Right now, she needs gears to crunch, an engine to roar. Instead, she whispers along like a ghost. To the outside world, to these bright-eyed animal witnesses, she must seem calm.

  Where is she anyway? Wales, she knows that because she surged over the Severn ages ago. But which bit of Wales, and how far from the border; those details are mush. She looks at her screen, but the map just shows the varicose veins of unnamed roads and the threat of a river up ahead. She could be anywhere.

  No one will hear me coming, she thinks, if they step out into the road. She eases off the accelerator but then she thinks of Anne. And then she hopes, by some mix-up of time and space, that her oldest friend might somehow stumble in front of her without warning. That she can’t stop herself from ploughing into her soft body, grinding her into this country dirt and whispering away again.

  She presses the pedal harder.

  Earlier Today

  If you’d asked Charlotte just seconds before it happened, she would have said everything was fine. And yet. When Anne came back from the toilet and tripped just slightly on the price tag of a Persian Lilihan rug, something shifted below the surface. Anne was always poised, never clumsy. Even as an eleven-year-old, Anne’s long straight back and keen eyes had aligned her more with the teachers than the other kids. Until you knew her properly, and few did. But today, something was off.

  Charlotte had offered Anne a cup of tea, and, as Anne had looked up from her screen opposite, the briefest shadow had passed over her face. Wasn’t it obvious then? Didn’t Charlotte suspect, in the pit of her belly, that the world had shifted a tiny degree off its axis? That the argument they’d had the day before had torn something deeper than she’d realised?

  Yesterday she’d been due to meet Rob for lunch but he’d cancelled while she was en route, something to do with his dodgy cousin Cole. With nowhere else to go, she’d swung around and headed back, only stopping to grab a sandwich from the supermarket on the way. Anne’s Mercedes had been outside Wilderwood Antiques, and a big sleek BMW was next to it. Most trade came by appointment but people did drop in to browse from time to time so it hadn’t struck her as odd. She’d only hoped Anne, with no formal training, wasn’t out of her depth.

  She’d been surprised to find the door locked. She’d rattled it a couple of times and then pulled out her key, but Anne had suddenly opened the door. ‘Charlotte,’ she’d said. ‘I thought you were meeting Rob?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Charlotte had replied, frowning as she’d stepped inside to see a slick and suited man, dark-haired and expensive-looking, seated at the Rosewood dining table they’d been hoping to shift by now. ‘Is he interested in the table?’ she’d whispered, then smiled in his direction.

  ‘Are you going to introduce us, Miss Wilkins?’ the man had asked, standing to full height as Charlotte had walked towards him, hand cautiously outstretched. Anne had taken a quick breath and then, as Charlotte’s skin had connected with his in a firm handshake, she’d told Charlotte he was a potential investor. In response, he’d held out a business card. Charlotte’s mouth had puckered into what her mum used to call her vinegar face but she’d managed to hold her outrage in until the man had left, asking Anne to call him later with her answer.

  ‘I know it was an overstep,’ Anne had said, hands up in surrender. ‘I just wanted to hear him out.’

  ‘We don’t need investors,’ Charlotte had argued. ‘We just need to carry on sorting the website and clearing this old stock to make way for some fresh stuff.’

  Anne had nodded, blushing.

  But despite these tiny paper cuts, these atomic-level ripples, when Anne had asked to speak to Charlotte in private earlier today, after their assistant Dorian had gone home, she would have said, hand on heart, that she hadn’t seen it coming.

  Anne locked the door and closed the shutters, plunging them into soupy gloom until the lights flicked on. They both blinked as the grey outlines of bureaux and armchairs, mirrors and vases were coloured in by the electric bulb. It was a harsh light, highlighting both of them as faded facsimiles of the girls they once were. Crinkled at the eyes, a dusting of grey at the roots.

  ‘What’s this about?’ Charlotte said. She was still sitting at her desk in the back of the room and Anne stalked towards her.

  Wilderwood Antiques is Charlotte’s family business, her late father’s first love, and should be her domain, but she sat cowed and confused while she waited for an explanation. ‘Is this about yesterday?’ she said. ‘That investor?’ But Anne shook her head.

  As Anne opened a small folder of papers, Charlotte noticed her shellaced fingers were trembling. And as her old friend lay the pages out carefully like Tarot cards on the rich surface of the mahogany, Charlotte noticed Anne bite her lip just for a moment. An echo of the Anne she used to be, all those years ago.

  ‘I’ve noticed some irregularities,’ today’s Anne said, her glossy hair falling in front of her face like a curtain. ‘And I think you need to leave.’

  Now

  She should turn back but instead Charlotte scores through the countryside like a knife. She doesn’t feel entirely safe here, imagining urban myths gathering force in the dark. A silent army of mad men and black-eyed children and
killer clowns. The stories she and Anne used to tell each other, faces lit by torches, heads close under a shared blanket.

  She doesn’t dare squint into the dark to make out the shapes. The man at the side of the road, ready to leap onto her car with a head on his spike. The tap tap tap that will soon come from above. Maybe a Victorian child floating, forlorn, just a few centimetres from the ground.

  Heart thumping, she looks behind her just once. No mad men there. No one at all. Not in the backseat. Nor on the passenger seat, no one waiting at home, no one warming the bed or calling her phone. No one.

  But anything out there is less risk to her than inside the car where her anger sits still panting like a beast, willing her to surge faster, to fling her car around corners, to do some damage.

  The lane ahead is lit up silver by the moon and she grits her teeth and presses harder, faster, the speed reading fifty, sixty, seventy … why not? Her hands grip the leather like claws, shoulders locked. Maybe she should just slam into one of these trees and be done with it. How would you like that, Anne? Fuck you all, mic drop.

  A viscous rain is pelting her car. What was a thin-lipped dribble a few minutes ago has become a great mouth, spitting salty gobs down from all angles. The wheels shudder sideways as she turns sharply again. And then a town slides onto the map up ahead: Usk.

  She can just make out the lights on the horizon, softening the night back from black to navy blue. A velvet sky. As she surges closer, distant buildings come into view. She can make out the industrial fringe now, warehouses and factories, grey shapes scattered like abandoned cardboard boxes along the horizon.

  She whips through a knotty chicane of gravelly Tarmac and shouts again, animal and incoherent, into the grey of the night. She dares herself to speed up – there’s no one out here but her – using up the last little bit of control she has. Fuck it. She presses her foot down and curses the silent Tesla. This should sound like a roar.

  A bridge suddenly looms into view, looking obscene and dangerous. With huge balustrades like military shoulders, the great metal monster squats over the swollen river. She makes out its sharp edges, the solid steel arcing twenty, thirty metres above the water. If she were to rattle off the road and drive straight for one of those legs, what instant and total damage would it do? How would Anne feel when she got the news? And so begins a silent negotiation. Charlotte is both hostage and hostage taker. She dares herself, taunts herself.

  Just drive.

  Just point the nose, shut your eyes and drive.

  Hard.

  She takes a long blink, a trial run, but as her lids flick back up with their doll-eye reflex, Charlotte suddenly sees the figure. Up there on the bridge, white dress dancing in the wind, is a woman. And she’s about to fall.

  Charlotte

  Now

  The car stops dead. An ancient bit of brain controlling Charlotte’s foot before she can think about it. Now she’s staring at the bridge, the engine whooshing politely as it waits.

  In the background, the lights of Usk twinkle knowingly, but between that life and her car, there is this: an empty road, a big old bridge over a furious black river and a woman standing on the handrail. What looks like a wedding gown clings to her. In her hand, a small bouquet hangs tattered and wet. She is motionless and tiny, like the ballerina in a closed music box.

  Charlotte’s heart drums faster, her headlights barely illuminating the scene. Most of the light comes from the moon, which has slunk out from behind a cloud as if summoned by a finger click.

  The woman in white hasn’t noticed the car, which is still some fifty metres from the bridge. She remains fixated by the water below her, her arms hanging limply by her side and her neck bent. She could almost be a child, but she’s a scaled-down woman. Maybe five foot nothing, a wisp. Charlotte feels a pull in her chest; the woman is so little, so defenceless against the wind. The handrail is thick but surely slippery from the rain, and one giant gust – or one small leap – could send her small body tumbling down to its death. Unless she’s already dead.

  Charlotte feels cold sweat pouring down her back, her temples throb and her pulse rushes so fast the individual beats blend into chaos. She can’t stay here watching, she has to do something or her heart will explode. Charlotte rolls forward a metre, another half metre, then stops again. The woman does not look over. She remains deathly still.

  Maybe she can’t see me because she’s not really there.

  Charlotte could still reverse as silently as a snake, slither back around the corner and forget what she has seen. Unless that’s what this woman wants. Unless this is the start of some kind of folk tale where an idiot from the city reverses back around the corner and into the arms of …

  For fuck’s sake, stop; you’re thirty-five, not fifteen.

  Charlotte drives at a creeping pace to the bridge then pulls over next to the woman, wrestling out of her seatbelt and stumbling into the driving rain.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she says, treading slowly closer now, as if approaching a stray dog, aggression levels unknown. The wind swallows Charlotte’s words and for a moment she thinks the woman hasn’t heard, but then she looks, just briefly, over her shoulder. She is definitely wearing a wedding gown. Its train dances behind her, the beading catches what little light the moon has to spare and the bodice, its structure as rigid as this metal bridge, makes this little woman princess-shaped.

  ‘I said—’

  ‘I heard what you said,’ the woman replies without taking her eyes off the black river rushing below. She has a look of someone, or maybe of some time, that Charlotte can’t quite place. An anachronism, and incredibly alone. Like the Little Match Girl.

  The rain coats Charlotte’s face, blurring her vision. Her cardigan is already so soaked with rain that it feels like a concrete overcoat.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ Charlotte says, cautiously taking a step closer, hands still outstretched. She feels an urge to wrap the woman up, to warm her. The woman shrugs and keeps her eyes on the water. Through the balustrades, Charlotte can see that the black water is fringed with moonlit foam, the currents taking no rest for the night.

  ‘Please,’ Charlotte says, taking a careful step closer. ‘Let me help you down.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ The woman’s voice is barely audible. Her hair is filthy with rain but, when the moon catches it, a glimmer of red shines through. She is young, mid-twenties at the most.

  ‘Please,’ Charlotte insists. ‘You could fall.’

  The woman laughs just briefly, the sound stolen by the roar of the river. Her shoulders shake a moment longer as raindrops slide down them and soak into the beaded bodice of her dress. The joke, Charlotte realises, is that she wants to fall. Charlotte sighs, wrings some of the rain from her black curls and shrugs too. ‘Fuck it. If you’re not getting down, I’m coming up.’

  Earlier Today

  ‘But this is bullshit and you know it,’ Charlotte said, her voice more shrill than intended. ‘Anne, this is me you’re talking about.’ She thumped her chest. ‘Me!’

  Anne looked down, cheeks pink. ‘Charlotte, I know that business admin isn’t your strong suit and you’re not—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, I know you’re out of your depth, but this isn’t just one or two mistakes, this is months of … this is really bad, Charlotte. It’s really bad.’

  ‘What are you saying? You’re going to, what, tell on me? For mistakes that I’ve not even made!’ Charlotte waved at the paper in front of her. Where did all this come from?

  Anne stared at her, her eyes soft and sad. ‘It’s for the best if you go; your dad’s company is at stake here.’

  ‘Yes, my dad’s company,’ Charlotte snapped back. ‘My family business that I brought you into in good faith and now you’re trying to take it from me! How could you? I gave you a chance! A fresh start!’

  ‘A fresh start?’ Anne laughed. A sudden squawk, like skin on a balloon.

  The penny dropped. ‘Oh, OK,’ Charlotte said, nodding. ‘I get it now. This guy’s offered money to buy a stake and you think you can just push me out and cash in but that’s not the way it works. It’s my family name over the door and I’m damned if you’re going to—’

  ‘Charlotte, you’re playing with fire if you stay. I only realised how bad it was when I looked back through old stuff to …’ Anne looked down for a moment and cleared her throat, as if to compose herself. ‘When I looked at this stuff to prepare for my meeting with them. And it’s bad, Charlotte. There’s cash unaccounted for, fake invoices, customers that don’t exist, missing products. Your family name is going to land you in prison if you don’t—’