Lance Proudfoot had arrived at the scene of Janet Monroe’s dramatic non-suicide later than the other attending press vultures – he was under no illusion as to how they were thought of in the collective – after the story online sent multiple alerts pinging to his phone. In truth, he hadn’t wanted to go. The prospect of potentially seeing a body fall from so great a height was grisly, but it was news and that was what he did.
The most impressive aspect of it would inevitably prove to be how the woman in question got access to the roof space in the first place. In an area that no tourist was ever going to visit, not willingly anyway, where poverty was the norm, and where it was easier to get drugs than an appointment with a doctor, the roof of one of Edinburgh’s tallest buildings had long since been carefully secured.
Careful to keep his distance from the remaining press pack, Lance took up position further away from the base of the building between two rows of parked cars, assessing the scene from a distance. Much as he hated the thought of taking photos under such distressing circumstances, the professional in him inevitably won over. He focused on the tiny people at the top of the tower block, his high-powered lens offering a view of a distressed woman he very much hoped he wouldn’t see descending at speed past the faces peering at the crowd through the windows.
That was enough. He put his camera away and took out his mobile. Speaking quietly into his phone’s dictation app, he’d described the scene: the pack mentality of the crowd, reacting to one another as much as to the tragedy of the human condition taking place above them. The apparent calm of the emergency services as they constructed perimeters and prepared for the worst while maintaining an impressive air of assuming that nothing bad was actually going to happen. And the occasional chilling wail from the poor woman suffering so terribly above.
Then a man had pushed through the crowd, laughing. Lance didn’t catch his face, but the body language was all arrogance and youth. In his twenties, swaggering with the lack of realisation that he, too, would die someday. And that before that – if he was lucky – he’d live through the steady decline of his body, the weakening bladder, clicking knees and eyes that only focused on the small print with your arms held out straight in front of you, as if you were driving some imaginary cartoon car.
The laughing male pulled his hoodie up as Lance turned round to share some advice about common decency with him that would inevitably fall on deaf ears, but sometimes in life the attempt to do the right thing was worth more than the realistic prospects of success. Laughing Boy was a little over six foot but thin and his clothes were a brand currently worn by every social media-obsessed youth. In his hand he clutched his mobile, the picture on the screen changing as he walked, and Lance realised the man’s camera was on.
So that was the game. Attend at a possible suicide. Make sure you’re ready to catch all the action. Then presumably post it on some site with no responsible policing at all and wait to see the hits roll in. Other Internet stars had sought to get followers under similar dubious circumstances and ended up in trouble for it, but not before their fame had reached what for them must have seemed dizzying heights. Not too difficult to comprehend how you could be tempted to the dark side by the thought of all that adulation. The problem was natural justice. At some point, you had to grow up, and the idea of spending the remainder of your days knowing you’d livestreamed a suicide would get more painful with each passing year.
As the male disappeared and Lance also decided he’d had enough – some stories you paid too high a price to report on – a woman thrust her way through the sea of bodies, staring after the would-be Internet star. It was her body language that caught Lance’s attention first, a coiled spring, all tension and energy. Then he’d seen her face. Ava Turner, dressed to blend in, not a hint of police officer about her, was in pursuit. Not overtly, though. She didn’t want to be recognised.
Lance slipped his phone into his pocket and followed his instinct that the real story was slipping away behind him. He knew better than to call out to her. If a detective chief inspector was on the ground and working a scene in person, it was serious. Making contact with her now would inevitably blow her cover and, given what he knew about the amount of work stress she was under – not to mention her personal life – that would end badly.
He wondered where Callanach was as he trailed Ava at a distance. They’d had dinner together two nights earlier and Luc had opened up more than ever before. He’d explained about the disastrous evening with the woman ahead of him in the crowd and the traumatic events that had led him to make the mistake that might well cost him the woman he so obviously loved.
Lance had been able to see both sides and privately thought there might be something at work on more of a subconscious level. He’d been there himself. Whenever he’d stood at the threshold of something he’d really wanted in life, he’d been struck with a certainty that it was never destined to work out. A sort of pre-emptive destruction that avoided no end of disappointment.
Callanach, for all the damage he’d taken, had hit his all time low a couple of years ago and had been ready for his happily ever after. Ava Turner was more of an enigma. Finding the prayer slate Callanach had taken from her was, in the grand scheme of things and after a cooling-off period, a transgression that might have been forgiven, but only if you weren’t already waiting for things to go wrong. Or thinking you didn’t deserve happiness. Or that perhaps it was easier to deny yourself happiness at the outset than to have it for a while, only to lose it later on. That revelation was what Lance had taken away from Callanach’s disaster story. A woman who was protecting herself, by denying herself anything that might hurt her. She would be neither the first nor the last.
At the edge of the crowd, Ava Turner had halted, studying the various people who were walking away. He considered approaching her gently to see if he could help, then decided against it. Ava knew what she was doing and she wouldn’t be there without backup. He left her alone, returning to his car within view of the building’s main exit, from where the roof was only partially visible and was thus crowd-free.
Sitting in his car, on the street, he took the time to contemplate life. He’d be lying if he denied having moments when life had seemed to be made almost entirely of pain. When his son had a concussion that left him unconscious for long enough to be concerned about the state he’d be in when he woke up. When his wife had left him. Having to watch his mother – the least complaining, most jovial woman he’d ever met – die slowly of a cancer that had no purpose, nothing to gain from her, but which took her just because it could. But he’d never been close to suicide. The thought of it left him bereft. Unless you’d been there, it was inconceivable.
He hadn’t really thought about the scale of the problem until he’d helped Callanach to find Fenella Hawksmith’s daughter. That poor woman had a history of suicide attempts, too. Then there was the lad who’d tried to jump from the Queensferry Crossing only a month earlier.
Lance’s head began to ache. He opened the car window to let in some fresh air. Luc had said that Fenella Hawksmith’s body had been in her flat for about three weeks. Then Stephen Berry had died out at Tantallon Castle. Not long after that the poor Japanese lad had been murdered. Only hadn’t his wife, that piece of work with the boyfriend affectionately named after a form of protein, said something about him being suicidal, too? Osaki Shozo, that was it. The old grey matter was still just about functioning.
A man wearing jeans made smarter by the addition of a striped shirt and an official-looking lanyard walked out of the building, accompanied by paramedics, police officers, and a dark-haired woman in leggings and a tatty coat. The latter looked absolutely exhausted. No doubt he was seeing the thankfully uninjured person whose pain had been so publicly aired. The more professionally attired male gave the potential jumper a brief hug, then paramedics walked her slowly to the back of a waiting ambulance.
Berry, Hawksmith, Shozo, he thought. All with a history of suicidal thoughts if not actual attempts. All now dead. Now Ava Turner was roaming the crowd at another potential suicide, watching not the actual events but the onlookers themselves. Waiting for someone to reveal themselves? Lance wanted to be wrong. To go home, write up his story – one with a happy ending – for his news blog. But he knew he wasn’t. Coincidences happened when you were holidaying on a different continent and you bumped into your best friend from junior school on an otherwise deserted beach. Coincidences and dead bodies, though, rarely – if ever – had anything to do with one another.
He started his engine and followed the ambulance at a respectful distance, making sure he wasn’t spotted. The police would no doubt be doing the same. He’d have to be careful not to make himself a suspect, but it was pretty obvious that the police thought they might catch a serial killer in the crowd. It was a story he couldn’t have walked away from if he’d wanted to.
Toying with the idea of calling Callanach for confirmation, he decided against it. His friend was supposed to be removing himself from active duty and the last thing Callanach needed was to have someone take advantage of his insider knowledge when he couldn’t be a part of the action. That was all right. Lance could wait and watch. A lifetime of journalism had made him patient.
The ambulance failed to head for the nearest hospital as Lance had expected, instead, after taking a circuitous route, opening its doors in Kimmerghame Drive. Janet Vargas – the name had popped up online in spite of the fact that Lance would have considered it improper to give identifying information – was escorted indoors by the two paramedics.
They must have made sure someone was at home to look after her, Lance thought. No psych evaluation. No prescription. Of course, it was possible Janet had all the medication she needed waiting for her in her flat, but that just begged the question: why hadn’t she taken it, or why it hadn’t worked? The seed of the story, already firmly planted in Lance’s mind, sprouted and did its best to reach for a light source. Too soon for that.
He identified a sufficiently inconspicuous parking space, checked his emergency car stash of drinks and packs of crisps – bugger the low-fat diet – and settled down to watch Janet Vargas’ building for no other reason than because that’s what his gut was telling him to do. In an hour or so, he’d wander in, grab one of the pieces of junk mail that would have been dropped on the floor somewhere and stick it under a door on the top floor. Give himself what looked like a reason for being inside while he got the lay of the land.
If the police were watching and they got suspicious of him, he’d use Callanach’s name to clarify who he was. At least it would be confirmation of the bigger picture: that those attempting suicide in the city were prey to a ruthless murderer who saw them as bait. And that Janet Vargas, so recently saved from taking her own life, might soon be wishing she’d gone through with it, compared to the horrors that Hawksmith and Shozo had been subjected to.
Lance waited an hour, considered going home but didn’t. Some habits you just couldn’t break. He had no idea at all what, or who, he was looking for, but the journalist – and perhaps, he acknowledged, the egotist in him – assured him he’d know it when he saw it.