The Bridge Inspector

The crack was no wider than a pencil line, and Sacha would have missed it had the afternoon sun not caught the underside of the footbridge at a low, unforgiving angle. She lay on her back on the plank scaffold with a torch between her teeth, following a thin brown stain of rust along the weld toward the north support. Nine days before the festival, the town's oldest bridge had started to complain, and she seemed to be the only person in the valley willing to listen.

She measured three times, because the numbers were not the ones she wanted. A coin's thickness of paint could have hidden the gap, and she suspected that was exactly what had been done, more than once, over the decades. The planks above had been replaced every spring by Oskar, a retired carpenter who kept them beautifully, and who had never been asked what lay underneath. Nobody had. What troubled her was less the crack than the dull, flaking colour around it, which suggested a fault that had been growing quietly while the whole town walked over it on the way to work.

The parade was due to cross at dusk: two hundred people, a brass band, and a flatbed carrying a paper whale as long as a bus. Sacha had seen the whale in a workshop that spring, and now she could not stop picturing it halfway across the span.

The mayor found her at the site next morning with two cups of coffee in his hands. Never before had a client brought her coffee first, and she took it, rightly, as a bad sign. He was a decent, tired man who had spent eleven years persuading a small town to love its own streets, and he began gently.

"I'm not asking you to write anything untrue," he said. "I'm asking whether it could be signed off with conditions. Smaller groups. A volunteer counting people at the gate."

"On a cracked primary weld."

"You told me yourself it's a hairline."

"I said it was visible. Visible isn't the same as stable." She wrapped both hands round the cup and did not drink. "If the festival were in October, nobody would be asking me to be flexible."

He looked down at the river, brown and slow, and she watched him do the arithmetic she had been doing all night. The stalls were already paid for, the band had been hired from two towns away, and the children had been sewing lanterns since August. What she could not tell him was how little she actually knew. The bridge might well hold for another fifty years. It might equally fail on Saturday, since two hundred people walking in time to a drum set up exactly the rhythm that a tired structure cannot forgive.

Had she signed, and had the weld let go beneath the band, she would never again have crossed a bridge without listening for it. That was the sum that settled the matter, and it had nothing to do with the mayor's figures.

"I'm closing it," she said. "Today. You'll have the report before lunch tomorrow."

Having wound the chain twice round the gate post, she filled in the tag, dated it, and hung it where nobody could claim not to have seen it. The mayor stood behind her, holding both cups, one of them still full.

"Could the band at least play from the bank?" he asked.

"They can play from either bank," Sacha said. "I'll help carry the drums."