Fifty/Fifty and Other Stories by Matthew W. McFarland Read Free Book Online Page B

back onto the walkway and into a pair of handcuffs. The handcuffs are necessary for everyone’s safety. Page four of the manual.
     
    His name was Bernard, and he had driven from Stirling in his mother’s car. Over the course of an hour and a half he told me that his girlfriend of four years had left him six months previously. She hadn’t given him any reason at all, and so Bernard had followed her around the country for weeks until he saw her with someone else, sharing a kiss in the back of a Costa Coffee on Princes Street in Edinburgh. He wasn’t really suicidal; he just wanted the girl to know how much her betrayal had hurt him.
     
    When I arrived he was hysterical, demanding that she be found and brought there to listen to him or else he would jump. We contacted Bernard’s mother instead, and when she arrived she talked to him as softly as one would a baby, and the instant we had him on the ground she battered him around the ear with a closed fist and swore at him until she was purple with rage and Bernard was crying in lumps. There is no doubt in my mind that Bernard will not be making any more romantic gestures like that.
     
    On the rainy Tuesday night in July the call came in around half nine in the evening, dusk beginning to settle on the Firth of Forth. The rain clouds meant that it was a little darker than it would usually be at that time of year and the two bridges were already lit up, the road bridge with the lights of the traffic over its back and the rail bridge with spotlights from below. The driver of a southbound train had spotted someone walking along the other track and had raised the alarm.
     
    My partner and I parked the patrol car at Dalmeny Station and dropped down from the platform there onto the tracks and started towards the bridge. John and I have been teamed together for just over a year now, and we get on well. You have to be able to trust your partner completely in a job as unpredictable as ours. He is 42, with 2 children, the oldest just about to start university in the autumn. It is difficult to faze him after twenty years in the service, as he has seen it all before, several times. Like most policeman of his age, he is overweight, and just 5 minutes into our bridge walk he was breathing heavily. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead when my torch caught his face.
     
    At that end the bridge towers over Deep Sea World. There is an old quarry pit far below which is filled with sludge-coloured water, steep sided walls reaching up towards the burnt red-orange of the bridge. The car park at that time of night was almost deserted, and somewhere down below a seal barked up at us. There was a fishy smell in my nostrils as we walked along an access path with our torches swinging across the tracks.
     
    The call had gone to the rail network headquarters to stop all trains, but no sooner had we made it onto the superstructure of the bridge proper than I felt a building vibration through my feet as everything began to shudder, a train roaring and thundering down at us. The noise of its wheels and the rush of air as it went past was enough to turn my knuckles white as I clung to the railing around the service gangway. We had almost two metres to spare, but one slip on the wet metal underfoot amid the disorientation of the passing juggernaut could have spelt disaster.
     
    It took what felt like twenty minutes for the three-carriage train to pass us, and then it was gone, rumbling on down the tracks towards Edinburgh. John and I stood still for several minutes, with barely a word between us. It was the first time I had ever seen him look scared.
     
    “ You good, John?” I asked.
     
    “ Aye,” he said. “Hope there’s not too many more of those.” He got on his radio, berating the dispatcher for not having stopped traffic on the bridge. There was a swift apology, a crackle of static and then nothing but the rushing of the wind through the bridge.
     
    “ Keep an eye out,” I said,