‘Better, thank you.’ Better? Better than what? I’m in hospital, in a gown with no back and two black eyes. I’m not sure how much worse it could get.

Then I correct myself: I’ve been unhooked from the machine and they’ve removed the nappy. Apparently I can be trusted to pee by myself. This is, indeed, better.

‘I’ve spoken to your doctors, they tell me you may be up to a few questions, but if it’s too much we can stop, just say. Is that all right?’

I nod and she says, ‘Last night … Can you tell me what you remember?’

‘Nothing. I remember nothing.’ It comes out harder and terser than I meant. To my horror I feel a lump in my throat and I swallow fiercely. I will not cry! I’m a grown woman, for fuck’s sake, not some child who’s scraped her knee in the playground, wailing for her daddy.

‘Now, that’s not true,’ she says, but not accusingly. Her voice is the gently encouraging tone of a teacher, or an older sibling. ‘Dr Miller tells me that you’re pretty clear about events leading up to the accident. Why don’t you start at the beginning?’

‘At the beginning? You don’t want my childhood traumas and stuff, do you?’

‘Maybe.’ She sits on the foot of the bed, in defiance of hospital regulations. ‘If they’re relevant to what happened. I tell you what, why don’t we start with some easy questions, just to warm up? What’s your name, how about that?’

I manage a laugh, but not for the reasons she thinks. What is my name? I thought I knew who I was, who I had become. Now, after this weekend, I’m no longer sure.

‘Leonora Shaw,’ I say. ‘But I go by Nora.’

‘Very well then, Nora. And you’re how old?’

I know she must know all this already. Perhaps it’s some sort of test, to see how bad my memory really is.

‘Twenty-six.’

‘Now tell me, how did you end up here?’

‘What, in the hospital?’

‘In the hospital, here in Northumberland, generally, really.’

‘You haven’t got a northern accent,’ I say, irrelevantly.

‘I was born in Surrey,’ she says. She gives me a little complicit smile to acknowledge that this is not quite procedure, that she should be asking questions, not answering them. But this is a little token of something, I can’t quite work out what. An exchange: a piece of her for a piece of me.

Except that makes me sound broken.

‘So,’ she resumes, ‘how did you end up here then?’

‘It was …’ I put my hand to my forehead. I want to rub it, but the dressing is in the way and I’m afraid to dislodge it. The skin beneath is hot and itchy. ‘We were on a hen weekend, and she went to university here. Clare did, I mean. The hen. Listen, can I ask you something – am I a suspect?’

‘A suspect?’ Her beautiful, rich voice makes music of the word, turning the chilly, spiky noun into a sol-fa exercise. Then she shakes her head. ‘Not at this stage of the investigation. We’re still gathering information, but we aren’t ruling anything out.’

Translation: not a suspect – yet.

‘Now, tell me, what do you remember of last night?’ She returns to the subject like a very beautiful, well-brought-up cat circling a mousehole. I want to go home.

The scab beneath the dressing tingles and tickles. I can’t concentrate. Suddenly out of the corner of my eye I see the uneaten clementine sitting on the locker, and I have to look away.

‘I remember …’ I blink and, to my horror, I feel my eyes fill with tears. ‘I remember …’ I swallow fiercely, and I dig my nails into my torn and bloody palms, letting the pain drive out the memory of him lying on the honey-coloured parquet, bleeding into my arms. ‘Please, please tell me – who—’ I stop. I can’t say it. I can’t.

I try again. ‘Is—’? The word chokes in my throat. I shut my eyes, count to ten, dig my nails into the cuts on my palm until my whole arm is shaky with pain.

I hear an exhalation from DC Lamarr, and when I open my eyes she looks, for the first time, worried.

‘We would like to get your side of the story before we muddy the waters,’ she says at last, but her face is troubled, and I know, I know what it is she is not allowed to say.

‘It’s all right,’ I manage. Something is coming apart inside me, breaking up. ‘You don’t need to tell me. Oh G-god—’

And then I cannot speak. The tears come and come and come. It’s what I feared. It’s what I knew.

‘Nora—’ I hear from Lamarr, and I shake my head. My eyes are shut tight but I feel the tears running down my nose and stinging the cuts on my face. She gives a small, wordless sound of sympathy, and then she stands.

‘I’ll give you a moment,’ she says. And I hear the door of the room creak open, and then flap shut, swinging on its double hinges. I am alone. And I cry and cry until there are no tears left.

21

I RAN DOWN the stairs as quickly as I could, trying not to cut my feet on the glass, holding onto the bannister so as not to slip in the wetness of the man’s blood, and there he was, curled in a small pathetic heap at the bottom of the stairs.

He was alive. I could hear his soft whimpers as he struggled to breathe.

‘Nina!’ I bellowed. ‘Nina, get down here! He’s alive! Someone dial 999!’

‘There’s no fucking signal,’ Nina shouted back as she scrambled down the stairs.

‘Leo,’ the man whispered, and my heart froze. And then he raised his face from his painful hunch, and I knew. I knew. I knew.

I remember that moment with complete, heart-stopping clarity.

‘James?’ It was Nina who spoke first, not me. She slipped rather than walked down the last few stairs, landing in a heap beside us on the floor, and her voice cracked as she gently felt for his pulse. ‘James? What the fuck are you doing here? Oh my God!’ She was almost crying, but her hands were doing their automatic work, checking where the blood was coming from, checking his pulse.

‘James, talk to me,’ she said. ‘Nora, keep him talking. Keep him awake!’

‘James …’ I didn’t know what to say. We hadn’t spoken for ten years and now – and now— ‘James, oh my God, James … Why, how?’

‘Te …’ he said, and he coughed, blood flecking his lips. ‘Leo?’

It sounded like a question, but I didn’t know what he meant. Tell? Tell Leo? I only shook my head. There was so much blood.

Nina had his hoodie unzipped and she had found scissors from somewhere and was ripping up his T-shirt. I almost shut my eyes at the sight of his body, that skin that I had kissed and touched, every inch, spattered with blood and shot wounds.

‘Oh fuck,’ Nina moaned, ‘we need an ambulance.’

‘Did …’ James was trying to speak, in spite of the blood bubbling at his lips. ‘Did she … tell you?’

About the wedding?

‘He’s got a punctured lung. He’s probably bleeding internally. Press on this.’ Nina guided my hand to a pad of torn-up T-shirt pressed against James’s thigh, from where blood was pumping frighteningly fast.

‘What can we do?’ I was trying not to cry.

‘For the moment? Try to stop him bleeding out. If that artery keeps going like that, he’s dead no matter what. Press harder, it’s still bleeding. I’ll try a tournique but …’

‘Oh my God.’ It was Flo. She looked like a ghost standing there, her hands over her face. ‘Oh my God. I’m … I’m so sorry – I can’t … I can’t deal with b … blood …’ She gave a little gasping sigh, and collapsed, and I heard Nina swear under her breath, long and low.

‘Tom!’ she bellowed. ‘Get Flo away from here! She’s fainted. Get her to her room.’ She pushed the hair back from her face. There was blood on her cheekbone and on her brow.

‘Clare …’ James said. He licked his lips. His eyes were fixed on mine, like there was something he was trying to tell me. I squeezed his hand, trying to hold it together.