Free Across the Bridge by Morag Joss

bridge, then reconsidered and swerved round to go straight
ahead, to the outskirts of Inverness. The traffic grew heavier, and
it unnerved him. A couple of miles farther, cursing under his
breath, he made a complete circuit at another roundabout and headed
back the way we had come. At the bridge roundabout, he took us back
onto the Inverness road, where he picked up speed. Then he turned
back in the same place as before.
    “Car OK?” I asked, and he nodded.
    “I go back to service station now,” he said.
    But when he pulled in, he shook his head and inched past the
rows of parked cars. “Too many cars, too many people,” he said. “I
don’t stop here.”
    At the far end of the car park, just at the start of the slip
road back up to the road, a disused track jutted off to the left
towards the derelict ground near the bridge, the wrecked and
abandoned place I’d seen from the window of the café.
    “More quiet here,” he said, turning the wheel. The track crossed
an empty field and then opened out onto a vast stretch of cracked
concrete where factories or warehouses had once stood. He stopped
the car. We got out into a terrain of piled-up rubbish: lumps of
masonry, rusted metal spars and guttering and old window frames,
warped board sheeting, buckled machinery, shattered glass and heaps
of what looked like sodden old clothes. In the distance a man
shuffled out from a broken shed clasping a piece of carpet around
his shoulders like a cloak. Without seeing us, he wandered away in
the direction of three or four plumes of smoke rising from behind a
half-demolished wall.
    “Bad place. Junkies,” Stefan said, glancing in at Anna asleep on
the back seat. “Hurry up. Bad place.”
    “Do you want it or not? If you want the car, you have to pay me.
Now.”
    “First I need promise. I need favour,” he said. “No, not a
favour. For both of us.” His eyes were anxious. “I have to change
licence plates. It’s OK, I can do, there’s a guy I know. So you
don’t tell police the car is stolen straight away. You report the
car later, OK? Wait till I got new plates. Wait till six o’clock.”
He looked at his watch, then pointed back to the service station.
“Up there you can get the bus. You go in bus to Netherloch, you say
you left the car in Netherloch. The bus comes there soon, fifteen
minutes.”
    “It’s too cold to wait for a bus. I’m not feeling well. Can’t
you drive me to Netherloch?”
    “No,” he said, looking back to his daughter. “You can get bus
easy, plenty of time. Bus is warm. Listen, when you get to
Netherloch, there is car park behind the school.”
    I nodded.
    “So cars get taken from there. Stay in town a while, you can get
coffee, food. Wait till six, then I will have new plates. At six
o’clock you go to car park, you call police, you say you left the
car there all day. Tell them this morning you went to walk, you go
along by the water and in the forest and then you get back and car
is not there. OK? You got no car, you have to tell story, explain
them something. It’s for both of us. You understand?”
    “OK.”
    He pulled out the envelope from his jacket. “Two thousand,” he
said.
    “Three,” I insisted, numbly. I had no idea what the car was
worth, no idea what I was talking about.
    “Two thousand five hundred,” he said, counting it through his
fingertips, note by note, before I could argue.
    “All right,” I said.
    He handed it over, and pointed to the service station again.
“Just up there.”
    He smiled. He was anxious for me to go. But some natural
courtesy – maybe even a little gratitude because I liked his
daughter – prevented him from showing it.
    “All right. Goodbye.”
    In absolute misery, I zipped the money into an inside pocket of
my shoulder bag. Just as I was turning to go, I glanced in at the
child, lying aslant across the collapsed wad of bedding and
beginning to stir from sleep. Seeing her father outside, she pulled
herself up and patted on the window