“That tutor who lived on your stairwell?”
“Yes.” Hannah’s heart has started pounding, sickeningly hard. She feels unutterably stupid. She cannot believe this never occurred to her before. “Yes. Oh my God, he’s the one person who could have accessed April’s room between Neville leaving and me and Hugh arriving. He wouldn’t have needed to enter the building, he was already there.”
“But are you saying—” Geraint frowns, and then starts again. “He couldn’t have got April pregnant, surely? He wasn’t even her tutor.”
“No, he was mine—but April knew him. She went to a party he threw. He had this reputation.” Hannah feels sick. There is a buzzing in her ears. “He used to invite students—female students—out for drinks. They were all April’s type, very beautiful, very—”
Suddenly she cannot go on. The ringing in her ears is growing louder. The room is taking on a strange, distant quality.
“Are you saying he could have been sleeping with her?” Geraint asks. He looks skeptical but also strangely hopeful. Hannah feels anything but.
“I don’t know—” Hannah manages. Her tongue feels strange and thick in her mouth. Her fingers are freezing. She feels numb all over. “Did I get it wrong all along? I don’t—I don’t—”
The words are not coming. Suddenly her body feels as if it doesn’t belong to her, like her limbs are made of Plasticine.
“I don’t—” she says. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from very far away.
“Hannah?” she hears. “Hannah, are you okay?”
“I—”
Everything disintegrates, and she slides into the dark.
AFTER
When Hannah wakes it’s to a confusion of noise, people crowding around, Geraint saying “Give her some air!” over and over, and November kneeling beside her, concern all over her face. There is a coat under her head and someone has removed her glasses. It makes her feel strangely vulnerable, even more than she already did.
“Someone call an ambulance,” she hears, and she struggles up onto her elbows.
“No, no, please, I don’t need an ambulance.” Her voice is shaky, but she tries to put conviction into it. “I’m pregnant—that’s all.”
“You’re pregnant?” The words don’t seem to calm Geraint down. If anything he looks more alarmed, like she is a ticking bomb that might explode at any moment.
“We need to get you checked over. Is there a doctor here?” November calls over her shoulder to one of the hovering hotel staff. She stands up. “Anyone? Do you guys have a house doctor for the hotel?”
“I’m a doctor.” The voice comes from the far side of the foyer, a man’s voice, his accent English, not Scottish, getting louder as the footsteps approach. “Can I help?”
Hannah tries to sit up. Without her glasses all she can see is a blur of faces.
“This lady—she’s fainted,” Geraint is saying in a worried voice. “She’s pregnant. Should we be calling an ambulance?”
“I really don’t think I need an ambulance,” Hannah says. She feels on the verge of tears. This can’t be happening. She looks at the doctor, pleading with him to say it’s nothing serious. “People do faint when they’re pregnant, don’t they? I didn’t eat breakfast.”
The doctor is opening his bag. Inside is a stethoscope and a blood pressure monitor. He smiles kindly.
“Well, it’s not uncommon for low blood pressure to cause faintness in early pregnancy, but getting as far as actually passing out, that’s a bit less standard… Do you mind?”
He holds out the blood pressure cuff, and Hannah gives a shaky nod of assent. He straps the cuff around Hannah’s arm, inflates it, and puts the stethoscope to the curve of her elbow, listening as the cuff deflates. Then he sits back and smiles reassuringly.
“Probably nothing to worry about, but I think we should get you along to the maternity department for a spot of monitoring. How far gone are you?”
“Twenty-three—no, almost twenty-four weeks. Twenty-four tomorrow. Could someone call my husband?”
“I’ve got your phone,” November says, holding it up, and then turns to the doctor. “Thank you for checking her over. She should be in hospital, right?” She jerks her head at Hannah, her huge earrings swaying.
The doctor nods reluctantly.
“I’m afraid so. It’s a long time since I’ve done any obstetrics, but actually passing out does warrant a check. Your BP is a little bit up; they may want to take some bloods and do a trace.”
“I’ve got a driver round the corner,” November says. She picks up a leather jacket from the back of the chair. “Give me five minutes, I’ll get him to pull up at the front.”
“I can manage,” Hannah says. She feels almost tearful at the idea of being ushered out of the foyer into a waiting car like an invalid being carted off. “I don’t need a lift, I can call Will, get the bus.”
“By all means call your husband, but I’m not putting you on a bloody bus. It’s my car or an ambulance,” November says. She folds her arms, and her expression is pure April, at her most haughtily inarguable. “Which is it to be?”
Hannah shuts her eyes. She knows when she is beaten.
* * *
SOME FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER HANNAH is sitting in a padded chair in the maternity unit of the Royal Infirmary, a monitor strapped to her stomach, a blood pressure cuff around her arm, and November, slightly uncomfortable with all this, perched on the edge of a plastic stool beside her. She’s had a pee test and given what felt like about a pint of blood in little vials, and now part of her wants to be left alone with her thoughts, but a larger part of her wants anything but.
Mostly she wants Will, but his phone is ringing out. Where is he?
“Do you want me to try him again?” November asks, as if reading her mind. She has been allowed to stay as Hannah’s “companion,” which feels a little strange given Hannah has known her all of ninety minutes. But there is something about her, something so close to April that she feels as if it’s been much longer.
“No, I’ll do it,” Hannah says, knowing that Will shouldn’t hear this from November. She rubs her arm where the bruise from the needle is beginning to bloom, and then dials his number for what her phone says is the ninth time. It rings… and rings. She hangs up. Call me, she texts. It’s kind of urgent.
She puts the phone down in her lap, fighting the tears. It’s not just the fact that Will is unreachable—it’s everything. The idea that she has somehow caused this with her own actions, put her baby at risk by investigating April’s death. But the alternative feels equally unbearable—for how can she spend the next sixteen weeks in this state of agonizing uncertainty, obsessing over what she saw and thought and said? She just wants to know, to prove Geraint’s fears wrong and move on with her life. The baby flutters inside her stomach, and the monitor whooshes, speeding up with her heart.
“Is there anyone else?” November asks now. “Anyone else you can call, I mean?”
Hannah shakes her head. “Not really. My mum lives miles away. But if you need to go…”
“I’m not going,” November says firmly. “Not until you’re discharged. But I’m happy to wait in the car if you don’t want me here. I get that this is weird—I mean, we hardly know each other.”
“No, I’m happy for you to stay. It’s nice to—to talk.”
“Okay then,” November says. She folds her arms. “I’ll stay.”