In a Dark, Dark Wood

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 for a moment, 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 focussing 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.

23

WHEN THE KNOCK comes again I nearly don’t answer. I’m lying with my eyes shut listening to Radio 4 on the hospital headphones trying to block out the noise and bustle of the ward next door, imagine myself back home.

The nurses don’t knock – at least they do, but with a perfunctory tap and then they come in anyway. Only Lamarr knocks and waits for an answer. And I cannot face Lamarr, with her kind, calm, curiously dogged questions. I don’t remember. I don’t remember, all right? I’m not hiding anything, I just Don’t. Fucking. Remember.

I screw my eyes shut, listening over the sound of The Archers to see if she’s going away, and then I hear the door shush cautiously open, as if someone is putting a head round.

‘Lee?’ I hear, very quietly. ‘I mean, sorry, Nora?’

I sit bolt upright. It’s Nina.