Free The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin Page A

those statements,’ Pitkethly called after them.
    As Fox pushed open the door to the outside world, he saw Scholes hurrying in from the car park.
    ‘Looks like I missed the fun,’ he said with a grin. Fox ignored him, but Kaye gave him a shoulder-charge that almost felled him. Scholes didn’t react. His laughter followed them to the Mondeo.
    ‘Where to?’ Kaye asked.
    ‘Home,’ Fox stated.
    They didn’t say anything for the first few miles. It was Naysmith who broke the silence. ‘Poor woman.’
    Kaye just nodded.
    ‘Reckon we should have stayed?’
    Kaye looked to Fox, but saw he wasn’t going to answer. He was staring out of the passenger-side window, forehead almost touching it.
    ‘I can’t see that we did anything wrong,’ Kaye announced, trying for more certainty than he felt. ‘We were the ones making her frantic, so we left.’
    ‘But it was me, wasn’t it? Telling her Carter was out …’
    ‘Wasn’t our job to keep the facts from her, Joe.’
    ‘You sound,’ Fox interrupted, ‘as if you’ve already got your report off-pat.’
    ‘It was her way of crying out for help,’ Kaye persisted. ‘We’ve all seen them.’
    ‘I haven’t,’ Naysmith corrected him.
    ‘You know the type, though. If she’d really wanted to top herself, she wouldn’t have stood at the window like that, showing all and sundry what she’d done.’
    ‘What if nobody’d been passing, though?’
    ‘Then she’d have phoned herself an ambulance. Like I say, it happens.’
    ‘I can’t help thinking—’
    ‘Then don’t think!’ Kaye snapped at Naysmith. ‘Let’s just get back to civilisation and write up what happened.’ He looked towards Fox again. ‘Come on, Malcolm, back me up here. She could have snapped any time, just our bad luck it happened when it did.’
    ‘We could have tried calming her down.’
    ‘In case you’ve forgotten, she was screaming fit to burst. Two more minutes in there and every nut-job in the neighbourhood would have had us cornered.’ Kaye kneaded the steering wheel with both hands. ‘I can’t see that we did anything wrong,’ he repeated.
    Fox saw that they were on the M90 again and had already passed Inverkeithing.
    ‘I need you to do me a favour,’ he said quietly.
    ‘What?’
    ‘There’s a lay-by just before the bridge. Pull in and let me out.’
    ‘You going to be sick?’
    Fox shook his head.
    ‘What then?’
    ‘Just pull over.’
    Kaye signalled to move into the inside lane, saw the signpost for the lay-by and signalled again. It was an area for large loads to stop, preparatory to being escorted to the other side of the estuary. Fox got out of the car and felt the fast-moving stream of traffic attempting to suck him on to the carriageway. There was a pavement, though, and it led to a walkway that crossed the road bridge.
    ‘You’re kidding,’ Kaye called out to him.
    ‘I need some air, that’s all.’
    ‘What the hell are we supposed to do?’
    ‘Wait for me on the other side, as near to the old tollbooths as you can get.’
    ‘Want me to come with you?’ Naysmith asked, but Fox shook his head and slammed shut the door, turning his collar up. He had walked thirty or forty yards before a break in the traffic allowed the Mondeo to pass him with a single toot of its horn. Fox waved at it and kept walking. He had never crossed the Forth Road Bridge like this before. He knew people did it all the time: joggers and tourists. The noise from the carriageway was punishing, and the drop to the Firth of Forth seemed vertiginous, but Fox kept going, drawing in lungfuls of fumy air. There was a dog-walker coming from the opposite direction. She wore a scarf tied tightly over her hair, and offered him a nod and a smile, neither of which he returned with any degree of success. To his left he could see the rail bridge, much of it under wraps for maintenance. There were islands down there, too, and over to the right the port of Rosyth. The wind was ripping at his ears, but