Excerpt of Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Marty Wingate

Prologue

Three boys in school uniforms, their ties askew now at the end of the day, edged their way over the imaginary line drawn on the pavement by the police constable. “Stay there,” the PC had said only minutes before as he pointed to an invisible spot on the ground. “Don’t come any closer to the bridge.” The boys, none of them more than ten years old, did as they were told.

It was a stone bridge only ten feet above the Water of Leith— not the Forth Road Bridge that connected Edinburgh to the north of Scotland—but it wasn’t the bridge that concerned the PC, it was the soaked corpse that the boys had pulled out of the shallow water.

The PC watched as Detective Sergeant Tamsin Duncan climbed the steps up from the bank below, all the while furiously chewing on her piece of nicotine gum. The gray stones of the bridge matched the bleak sky—a dreich day, he had said to his sergeant when they arrived on the scene, and she had nodded in return.

The boys had stumbled upon the man’s body lying facedown in the water. The ambulance workers, first on the scene, had given way to police forensic specialists. The boys now jostled for a closer look and hoped to claim credit for the discovery. They’d not stopped asking questions since the police arrived.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I knew he was dead, I saw him first.”

“Is there blood? Can we see?”

“Wheesht!” the PC hissed at them.

The boys did as they were told and fell silent, except for the littlest one who was bold enough to complain, “You sound like my granny.”

“It’s your granny we’re waiting for,” Duncan said, “so that she can take you all home.”

Across the road, an older woman sat stiffly upright on a stone bench, cup of tea in hand. “That isn’t their granny, is it?” Duncan asked the PC.

“No, that woman is the one who came across the body first, actually, but the boys were just after her. Someone helped her ring us, and a neighbor gave her tea, and she’s been waiting for us since. She was quite shaken at first, kept saying she was looking for something she lost. As soon as we arrived, we diverted the rest of the schoolchildren, made them walk up to Saxe Coburg and down Hamilton Place.” His eyes shifted back to the body. “How does it look?”

“Head trauma—we’ll take a close look at the steps—could be he slipped. That’s all we have at the moment—so, we’d better get to it.”

The boys had started to squirm again. “Right now, lads,” the PC said, “it’s ice creams for you if you can hold still until your granny arrives.”