23
I SLEEP THE sleep of the dead that night, in spite of the noise and the beep of machines down the corridor and the intrusive lights. The nurses have stopped coming in to check on me every two hours, and I sleep … and sleep … and sleep.
When I wake it’s with a sense of disorientation – where am I? What day is it? I look for my phone automatically.
It’s not there. There’s a plastic water jug instead.
And then the weight of the present comes crashing down on the back of my skull.
It is Monday.
I am in a hospital.
James is dead.
‘Wakey wakey,’ says a new nurse, coming briskly in and running a professional eye over my charts. ‘Breakfast will be coming round in a few minutes.’
I’m still in the hospital gown, and as she goes to leave, I find myself calling out, ‘Wait!’
She turns, one eyebrow raised, plainly mid-round and in no mood to stop.
‘I’m s-sorry,’ I stammer, ‘I was just wondering, c-could I, can I get any clothes? I’d like my own clothes. And my phone, if possible.’
‘We ask relatives to bring them in,’ she says briskly. ‘We’re not a courier service.’ And then she’s gone, the door flapping shut behind her.
She doesn’t know, then. About me. About what has happened. And it occurs to me, the house is probably a crime scene. There’s no way Nina and Clare and everyone can still be there, tiptoeing around James’s congealing blood. They must have gone home – or been shipped off to a B&B. I’ll have to ask Lamarr when she comes in. If she comes in.
For the first time I realise how very dependent on the police I am. They are my only line to the outside world.
It’s around 11 a.m. when there is a knock on the door. I am lying on my side listening to Radio 4. It’s the Woman’s Hour drama, and if I shut my eyes hard enough, and press my headphones to my ears, I can almost imagine myself back home, a cup of coffee – proper coffee – at my side, the traffic roaring softly outside my window.
When the knock comes it takes me a minute to adjust to Lamarr’s face in the wire-hatched pane. I pull off the headphones and struggle up against the pillows.
‘Come in.’
She holds up a paper cup as she enters. ‘Coffee?’
‘Oh, thank you.’ I try not to sound desperate, try not to snatch the cup from her hands, but it’s amazing how much these small things mean in the goldfish-bowl world of the hospital. I can tell by the feel of the cup that it’s too hot to drink and I nurse it while I think how to phrase what I want to say, and while Lamarr chats about the unseasonably beautiful winter weather, and how the roads are clearing up from the weekend’s snow. At last she grinds to a pause and I take my chance.
‘Sergeant—’
‘Constable.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I’m annoyed with myself for the mistake and try not to get flustered. ‘Listen, I was wondering, how is Clare?’
‘Clare?’ She leans forward. ‘Have you remembered something?’
‘What?’
‘Have you started to remember what happened after you left the house?’
‘What?’
We stare at each other and then she shakes her head, ruefully.
‘I’m sorry. I thought from what you said …’
‘What do you mean? Has something happened to Clare?’
‘Tell me what you remember,’ she says, but for a minute I say nothing, trying to read her beautiful, closed face. Her eyes meet mine, but I can’t tell anything. There is something she’s not telling me.
‘I remember …’ I speak slowly. ‘I remember running through the woods … and I remember car headlights and glass … and then after the accident, I remember stumbling along, I’d lost a shoe, and there were chunks of glass on the road.’ It’s coming back to me as I speak, the lowering tunnel of bare branches, pale in the headlights, and my limping run as I tried to flag down someone – anyone – to help. There was a van swinging along the road, headlights raking the dark. I stood, waving frantically, the tears streaming down my face, and I thought he wouldn’t stop, I thought for a moment he’d run me down. But he didn’t – he skidded to a halt, his face pale as he wound down the window. What the fuck? he said, and then, Have you been …? The rest of the sentence hovered unspoken.
‘But that’s it. Between that, it’s so jumbled … it’s like the images get more and more shaken up and then there’s just a blank spot. Listen, has something happened to Clare? She’s not …’
Oh my God.
Oh my God. It cannot be.
I feel my fingers close on the bedsheet, my bitten nails digging in so hard that my fingers hurt.
Is she dead?
‘She’s OK,’ Lamarr says slowly, carefully. ‘But she was in the accident, the same accident as you.’
‘Is she all right? Can I see her?’
‘No, I’m sorry. We’ve not been able to interview her yet. We need to get her version before …’
She trails off. I know what she is saying. She wants my truth, and Clare’s truth – separate, so they can compare our stories.
Yet again I have that cold, writhing feeling in the pit of my stomach. Am I a suspect? How can I find out without looking like one?
‘She’s still not really up to being interviewed,’ Lamarr says at last.
‘Does she know about James?’
‘I don’t believe so, no.’ There is compassion in Lamarr’s face. ‘She’s not been well enough to be told yet.’
I don’t know why, but it is this that rattles me more than anything else she has said so far today. I can’t bear the idea that Clare is lying somewhere in this very hospital and doesn’t know that James is gone.
Is she wondering why he hasn’t come? Or is she too ill even for that?
‘Is she going to be OK?’ My voice cracks and breaks on the last word, and I take a long, aching gulp of coffee to try to hide my distress.
‘The doctors say yes, but we’re waiting for her family to come, and then they’ll take a view about whether she’s stable enough to be told. I’m sorry – I wish I could tell you more, but it’s not really my place to be discussing her medical details.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I say dully. There are tears trapped at the back of my throat, making my head ache and my eyes swim as I blink angrily, trying to clear them. ‘What about Nina?’ I manage at last. ‘Can I see her?’
‘We’re still taking statements from everyone else at the house. But as soon as that’s concluded, I imagine she’ll be allowed to visit.’
‘Today?’
‘Hopefully today, yes. But it would be very, very helpful if you could remember what happened after you left the house. We want to get your version, not anyone else’s, and we’re worried that speaking to other people might … confuse things.’
I cannot tell what she means by this. Is she worried that I am waiting, pretending memory loss so I can get my story straight with someone else’s? Or is it simply that she’s concerned that in the vacuum of my own memories, I might implant someone else’s account unconsciously?
I know how easy that is to do – for years I ‘remembered’ a childhood holiday where I rode on a donkey. There was a photo of me doing it on the mantelpiece, I was about three or four, and I was silhouetted against the setting sun, just a dark blur with a halo of sun-lit hair. But I could remember the salt wind in my face, and the glint of the sun off the waves, and the feel of the scratchy blanket between my thighs. It was only when I was fifteen that my mum mentioned that it wasn’t me at all, but my cousin Rachel. I was never even there.
So what are they saying? Cough up the memories and we’ll let you speak to your friend?
‘I’m trying to remember,’ I say bitterly. ‘Believe me, I want to remember what happened even more than you want me to. You don’t have to hold Nina out like a carrot.’
‘That’s not it,’ Lamarr says. ‘We just want to get your account – I promise this isn’t some kind of penalty.’
‘If I can’t see Nina, can I at least get some of my own clothes? And my phone?’ I must be getting better if I have started to worry about my phone. The thought of all those emails and messages building up, and no way of answering them. It’s Monday now, a working day. My editor will have been in touch about the new draft. And my mum – has she been trying to call? ‘I really need my phone,’ I say. ‘I could promise not to contact anyone from the house if you’re worried about that.’
‘Ah,’ she says, and there is something in her face, a kind of reserve. ‘Well, actually that’s one of the things we’d like to ask you. We’d like to take a look at your phone, if you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind. But can I have it back afterwards?’
‘Yes, but we can’t locate it.’
That checks me. If they don’t have it, where is it?
‘Did you take it with you when you left the house?’ Lamarr is saying.
I try to think back. I am sure I didn’t. In fact, I can’t remember having my phone for most of the day.
‘I think it was in Clare’s car,’ I say at last. ‘I think I left it there when we went clay-pigeon shooting.’
Lamarr shakes her head. ‘The car has been completely stripped. It’s definitely not there. And we’ve made quite a thorough search of the house.’
‘Maybe the clay-pigeon range?’
‘We’ll try there,’ she makes a note on her pad, ‘but we’ve been calling it and no one’s picking up. I imagine if it had been left there someone might have heard it ringing.’
‘It’s ringing?’ I’m surprised the battery is still working. I can’t remember when I last charged it. ‘What, you mean you’ve been calling my number? How did you know what it was?’
‘We got it off Dr da Souza,’ she says briefly. It takes me a second to click that she means Nina.
‘And it’s definitely ringing?’ I say slowly. ‘Not just going through to voicemail?’
‘I …’ She pauses, and I can see her trying to remember. ‘I’ll have to check, but yes, I’m fairly sure it was ringing.’
‘Well, if it’s ringing it can’t be at the house. There’s no reception.’
Lamarr frowns, a line between her slender, perfect brows. Then she shakes her head. ‘Well, we’ve put the tech guys on it now, so no doubt they’ll get us an approximate location. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s picked up.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. But I don’t add the question that’s buzzing in my head: why do they want my phone?
Here is how I know I’m getting better: I’m bloody hungry – I looked at the lunch that came in a couple of hours ago and thought, That’s it? It’s like when you get those toy-sized meals on aeroplanes and you think, who eats a tablespoon of mash and a sausage the size of my little finger? That’s not a meal. That’s a canapé in a pretentiously upmarket bar.
I am bored. Christ, I’m bored. Now I’m no longer sleeping as much I have nothing to do. No phone. No laptop. I could be writing, but without access to my laptop and my current manuscript there’s nothing I can do. I’m even getting angry with the radio. At home, where it’s just a background to my routine, I love the constant repetition, the reassuring cycle of the day, the fact that Start the Week follows Today, and Woman’s Hour follows Start the Week, as surely as Monday gives way to Tuesday and Wednesday. Here, it is starting to drive me a little mad. How many times can I hear the endless loop of news headlines before I go crazy?
But most of all, I’m frightened.
There’s a kind of focusing effect that happens when you’re very ill. I saw it with my grandad, when he was slipping away. You stop caring about the big stuff. Your world shrinks down to very small concerns: the way your dressing-gown cord presses uncomfortably against your ribs; the pain in your spine; the feel of a hand in yours.
It’s that narrowing that enables you to cope, I suppose. The wider world stops mattering. And as you grow more and more ill, your world shrinks further, until the only thing that matters is just to keep on breathing.
But I am going the other way. When I was brought in, all I cared about was not dying. Then yesterday I just wanted to be left alone to sleep and lick my wounds.
Now, today, I am starting to worry.
I am not an official suspect; I know enough from writing crime to know that Lamarr would have had to interview me under caution if that was the case, offer me a solicitor, read me my rights.
But they are groping around, searching for something. They don’t think James’s death was an accident.
I remember the words floating through the thick glass that first night, Oh Jesus, so now we’re looking at murder? At the time they seemed shocking but fantastical – all part of the drugged-up dream state I was caught in. Now they seem all too real.