Free Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson

and aggressive.
    “Spare change?”
    Fraser walked quickly by, but the look of the woman, her predicament . . . Not only to be poor but to be a middle-aged woman and poor—Jesus!
    He felt the wad of cash heavy in his wallet, which he had stuck in the arse pocket of his suit trousers. His Ladyfingers stash.
    He only made it ten steps before he turned around and went back to the woman. He removed all the money from his wallet and handed it to her. Two hundred pounds.
    “What’s this?”
    “It’s money. For you.”
    The woman looked at him with utter contempt.
    “Fack orf. Kint!”
    This was not the tearful outpouring of gratitude that Fraser had expected.
    “Don’t you want money?”
    “Fack orf. Kint!” explained the woman.
    Fraser was mystified. What had he done? He had made a genuine attempt to be charitable, even though he’d just had an unpleasant experience.
    “What is your problem?” he barked at her, a little more forcefully than he meant. He saw the tiniest glimmer of fear in the woman’s eyes and he knew that that look would haunt him till his dying day. He took a breath and tried again.
    “I’m just trying to help you. Why won’t you take my money?”
    She looked at him warily, then grumbled.
    “Snot reel.”
    “Snot reel?” Fraser repeated, trying to make sense of the ludicrous exchange. Then it dawned on him. They were Scottish banknotes. The woman thought it wasn’t real money. (Scottish notes, although legaltender in England, are sometimes not recognized by the uneducated or recent immigrants.)
    “Oh no, it’s real money. It’s Scottish. If you take these notes to a bank, they’ll give you English ones, if that’s what you want.”
    “Leave me alone,” she said.
    “But—”
    The woman started screaming, “Elp! Roip! Roip! Ee’s gorris cack aht!”
    Fraser judged it was time to go. He stuffed the money into his pocket and walked smartly away, not looking back as the woman kept up her yelling.
    “Ee troid t’ roip me! Ee troid t’ roip me!”
    She started crying, her heart breaking on every exhale.
    Fraser elected to keep the money for a lucky employee of Lady-fingers in Preston. He assumed whoever she was, she would be more grateful for his largesse.
    He was right. Sandra was another, different middle-aged woman, who worked in Ladyfingers on some evenings while Derek, her severely handicapped son, was at the community center Reach Out to the Disabled program. She was delighted when Fraser left her a hundred-pound tip after a truly breathtaking one-hour massage and French.
    “That’s for you,” he said as he kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you.”
    “Bloody ’eckers, if I’d known you were so generous, I’d have put my finger up your bum, love,” she purred.
    “Another time,” said Fraser as he left her in the semen-smelling cubicle and sauntered out of Ladyfingers and across the street, satisfy-ingly spent, to the assassinmobile.
    It was late as he drove from Preston, and it was nearly ten p.m. by the time he got to the Scottish border. He ran into traffic. Not slow traffic, stopped traffic. No movement. A snake of stationary red taillights winding off into the distance as far as he could see. He sighed and ejected the cassette tape he was listening to, the BBC radio comedy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
.
    He flipped around for a radio station and finally found Borders Radio, where a shocked announcer who was more used to giving livestock reports told him that a plane, Pan Am 103, en route from London to New York, had crashed into the Scottish border town of Lockerbie and that a lot of people had just died.
    The A74 is the main road between Scotland and England; it passes just east of Lockerbie. The town is clearly visible from the highway. Fraser guessed the traffic was stopped because of the crash. He didn’t mind, though, because when he heard about it he didn’t feel like going on.
    He listened to the radio overnight. He slept fitfully in his car. He