‘Dad thinks that woman is the one who hit Sophia, doesn’t he?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Callum reaches for his belt. ‘There could be an innocent explanation – but I’m struggling to make sense of it. If it was an accident and she drove away, she might be regretting it. I suppose she might want to know if Sophia is all right.’
‘This is giving me the creeps.’
Callum starts the ignition and then turns to her. Fear casts a pale shadow over her expression. ‘You didn’t recognise her at all?’
Maddie shakes her head, but he senses there’s something more she wants to say. He waits, leaving her the opening, but she doesn’t fill it. They stare at one another, until Callum decides he must have misread her, and gives in. ‘It’s okay, Maddie. Whoever she was, she’s gone now – and even if she did try to come back, the hospital security are on high alert. She won’t get past the front entrance.’
Maddie looks away, but not before Callum has seen her bite her lip. ‘Your mum and dad will protect Sophia,’ he reassures her. ‘You come and rest up with us for a while.’
She doesn’t reply, but as soon as they begin to move she takes out her phone. Callum is used to this – Georgia does the exact same thing – but nevertheless he finds it irritating. Mind you, it means he doesn’t have to struggle for conversation. He loves his daughter and his nieces, but tete-a-tetes with teenage girls are not easy. He knows he’s guilty of avoiding difficult topics with Georgia – not that she’s even had a serious boyfriend yet, as far as he’s aware. It might be better if he’s kept in the dark on that score: when he thinks of any bloke putting their sweaty palms on his beautiful daughter, he feels unsteady.
Danielle is someone’s child too. Worse, he has met her father through mutual friends – John Rawlins, congenial, with a moustache thick enough to need combing. The kind of man who would blank you rather than fight you if he discovered your lechery with his daughter.
Amid the stress of the day, the events of the previous night keep replaying in bursts of horror. How could he have done such a thing? He has not only betrayed Anya – what about his children, his niece here, his brother? None of them will look at him the same way if they discover what he’s done. Which is understandable, given that he’s having trouble meeting his own eyes in the mirror.
Whenever he retraces the steps that pulled him into this predicament with Danielle, he always ends up thinking about Mike McCallister. It had been about a month after Hugh’s accident when the man turned up at the rescue unit for the first time. When Callum saw him, he had come forward with a smile to shake his hand. ‘Mike, how are you? How’s Hugh?’ But to his surprise, Mike had ignored his outstretched palm. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he had said urgently.
‘Okay,’ Callum replied uncertainly, caught off-guard. ‘Come into the office.’
As soon as they were inside, Mike had laid out a map of the area as though Callum had never seen such a thing, even though the walls surrounding them were filled with detailed ordnance survey prints. On McCallister’s map uneven rings had been scrawled around the area Hugh had fallen. ‘I think someone could have got to Hugh this way,’ Mike had said to Callum. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t know that route down.’ He had looked Mike straight in the eye. ‘I thought you were an expert on the area. If we’d reached him sooner, with the right first aid his injuries might not have been so long-lasting.’
He had waited impassively for a response, his glasses perched on his nose as though he were merely asking for an explanation of the geography of the area and not – if Callum was reading this correctly – implying that there was negligence on Callum’s part resulting in the ongoing trauma of a young boy.
‘I’m so sorry, Mike,’ he had said, collecting up the map himself, and guiding Mike to the door. ‘We did everything we could at the time.’
‘That’s the thing,’ Mike had replied, as Callum showed him out, ‘in hindsight I’m not sure you did.’