Jess hadn’t dreamed since she was a child, but images came and went nonetheless. She held her face – a tiny version of it – in her hands, and then parted her fingers to let it drop. Again and again. Sometimes when it dropped there was a rustle or a tinny clatter from far below her, sometimes no sound at all.
Then the fire came, rising up in front of her.
Climbing in at her mouth.
Nestling inside her.
She woke shivering in the warm hospital room, chilled by her own slick sweat. A breath was caught halfway up her throat like a solid thing, and she had to spit it out piecemeal, in quick, shallow gasps.
“What happened to me?” she croaked at the nurse who came to take her temperature and blood pressure in the morning (smell of breakfast heavy in the air, but Jess was nil by mouth so the smell was as close as she was going to get). “There was a fire, wasn’t there? Tell me. Please!”
“You should—”
“I know, I know. I should get some rest. But I can’t until I know. Please!”
The nurse stared at her for a long time, hanging on the cusp of saying something. But all she said finally was, “I’ll ask the doctor.” She tucked Jess in, folding the stiff cotton sheets with the brusque efficiency of an origami black belt.
“Please,” Jess whispered again, saving it for when the nurse’s face was bent down close to hers. She thought it might be harder to say no at that range.
And it seemed she was right. “Yes, there was a fire,” the nurse said reluctantly as she smoothed out the last creases from the sheet.
“Where… was…?” Jess asked, feeling only a few hot twinges in her throat this time. As long as she limited herself to monosyllables, she could ace this conversation.
“Your flat. Your flat caught fire when you were inside. When you were… not able to move.”
When I was high, Jess translated. I set my flat on fire when I was high. Who does that? Only someone intent on ruining themselves and everyone around them.
Her mind treated her to a slideshow. A resin statue of a Chinese dancer with a flute. A lampshade shaped like a hot-air balloon with two waving fairies in the gondola underneath. Her folk CDs. Her books. Her photo albums. All gone?
“How… bad?” she asked.
“Very bad. Really, you should try not to think about it. It’s not going to help you to get well.”
The nurse retreated quickly. It seemed to Jess that she wanted very much to get out of earshot before she was made to field any more questions.
And at that point another slide clicked into view.
John.
His face, his name and a sense of what the face and the name had meant. Oh Jesus, if John was dead! Panic flooded her system, only to be followed a moment later by a wild and slightly nauseating surge of hope. If John was dead…
She sat up before she even knew she’d decided to. She couldn’t sustain it though, and slumped right back down again, sick and dizzy.
She had to know. She husbanded her strength so she could ask, and tried to shore up her non-existent stamina with an exercise regime. She could only hold her weight on her elbows for a few seconds before falling back on to the sheets, but she worked on it at intervals through the morning, determined each time to beat the previous time’s total.
Consultants’ rounds were at eleven. The doctor walked past Jess’s door without slowing, followed by a bustling line of medical students who – each in turn – peered in with big round eyes as though Jess was a model in a porn shop peepshow before hurrying on to rejoin the crocodile.
Right then.
God helps those who help themselves. Jess hauled herself out of bed and slid her feet down on to the floor. She worked the cannula out of her wrist and let it fall. The loose end drew a ragged red line across the white sheet.
It wasn’t easy to get vertical, but once she did, she was able to translate her drunken sway into a forward march just by picking the right moment to raise a foot and put it down.
She headed for the door at action-replay velocity, taking about a minute and a half to cover twelve feet. Getting through the door was more of a challenge, because she accidentally knocked it with her elbow and it started to close on some kind of spring mechanism. She had to lean against it to keep it open as she negotiated the narrowing gap. Then she was through, the door swinging to behind her, and for a moment she thought she was free and clear. But that was because she was looking to the right and the swelling around her eyes left her with no peripheral vision.
From her blind side a hand came down on her arm, just below the shoulder – not heavily or tightly, but it stopped her dead all the same. A voice said, “Ms Moulson, I’m going to have to ask you to go back inside.”
Jess turned. It took a lot of small movements of her feet. The woman who was facing her now was not in white, but in midnight blue with a bright yellow tabard. She was a policewoman, no taller than Jess but a fair bit stockier and more solid, and presumably (unlike Jess) not so weak that a stray breeze would knock her over. Jess sagged, checkmated in a single move.
And appalled and confused all over again. Why was there a policewoman here? Was she under guard? And if she was, did that mean that she was under protection or under restraint?
That was such a big, yawning chasm of a question that it eclipsed, for a few moments, the question of what had happened to John.
“Why?” she croaked. That was a little vague, but it would have to do.
The policewoman frowned. She had dark, freckled skin that made Jess flash on the memory of her own face in the mirror – her unnatural pallor, like something that lived under a stone.
“You’re under arrest. Didn’t you know that?”
She did now. That had to count as progress. She managed another “Why?”
The other woman’s expression changed, but only for a moment – a cloud of doubt or concern drifting across it and then disappearing as quickly as it had come. “For murder, Ms Moulson,” she said. “The charge against you is murder.”
She closed in on Jess, as though she intended to herd her physically back into the room. Jess stood her ground, more out of bewilderment than belligerence. Murder? she thought. Whose murder? Who am I supposed to have…?
“You’ll have to go back inside,” the policewoman said. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you. I’m the one who’s meant to keep other people from talking to you.”
“Who…?” Jess panted. The corridor was yawing like a ship at sea. She couldn’t move, although she might make an exception for falling down.
The woman’s hand came out and took her arm again. She leaned past Jess and pushed the door open – effortlessly, one-handed. Jess could have thrown her full weight against it right then and that feeble little spring would have been too much for her. “Please, Ms Moulson,” the policewoman said. “Go back inside now. I’ll tell your lawyer you’re awake, the next time he calls.”
But Jess had come way too far to back down. “Who?” she whispered again. “Who… dead? John? Was… John?”
“Your lawyer will fill you in,” the policewoman promised. But when Jess didn’t move, she sighed heavily and shrugged. “It was a little boy,” she said. “A ten-year-old. It looks like it may have been an accident, but that’s not for me to say. You set the fire, and the charge as I understand it is murder.”
She had both hands on Jess’s arm, one above and one below the elbow, and was trying to turn her around. But no part of Jess was communicating with any other part now. Her upper body moved, her hips twisted, her legs stayed exactly where they were.
There was only one ten-year-old boy who she knew even vaguely. His name popped into her head from nowhere, and her lips shaped it although no sound came.
Alex.
Alex Beech.
She was aware of falling. But the floor, when she got to it, recoiled from her as though she was something unpleasant to the touch.
2
Alex Beech was the boy upstairs.
Upstairs where, exactly? It began to drift back into Jess’s mind in clotted, disconnected pieces.