“It’s fine. You’re fine. Don’t worry. Are you cold?”
She shakes her head. Her hands and feet still feel numb, but the trembling is subsiding, and she can feel the warmth from the hot water bottle seeping through her.
“Go to sleep,” Hugh says gently. “I’ll wake you in a few hours. Okay?”
“… kay,” she manages. And then she lets her eyes close, and slips into a merciful darkness.
AFTER
“Hannah.” The voice is gentle, insistent… and not Will’s. “Haaa-nah. It’s time to wake up.”
“What?” She struggles to sit up, blinking, wondering where she is—and then she remembers. She is in Hugh’s flat. And she is—oh God, she is naked. And somehow it’s dark.
She pulls the covers up over her breasts, and the memories come back. The bath. The flight to Hugh’s flat. Will.
The pain is like a knife to her side. Unbearable.
Hugh is standing over her, looking worried. His fringe is in his eyes and he blows it off with that habitual gesture, and her heart aches.
“What time is it?” she croaks, putting a hand up to her throbbing head. She feels… the word comes to her like a surprise. She feels hungover. Like she spent a night on the tiles. It’s so far from the truth that for a second she wants to laugh. Is this what shock feels like?
Hugh looks at his watch.
“Nearly four. We’re due at the police station at four thirty. Are you feeling okay?”
“Nearly four?” Hannah sits up fully at that, shock running through her. “Are you kidding? I’ve been asleep all day?”
“You went out like a light. You still don’t look quite right.”
She puts her hand to her head. Not quite right is an understatement—she feels completely groggy and disoriented, and there is a vile taste in her mouth, bitter and chemical. Then what Hugh just said sinks in.
“Sorry, did you say the police?”
“Yes, but listen—” Hugh holds up a hand. “I didn’t tell them anything, I figured that wasn’t my place. I just said that I had a friend who had important information and could we come in and make a statement. And they said how was half four. You can still back out if you want.”
“No.” Her hands are cold, and her cheeks feel pale, but she knows she wants to do this. She knows she has to do this.
The bottom line is, someone could have been in April’s room that night. They could have killed her after Neville left. And that person—she can’t hide from the possibility any longer—could have been Will.
She has to tell them that.
“No, I’m—I’m ready.”
“Your clothes are on the end of the bed.” Hugh waves a hand at the foot of the bed where her clothes are draped, along with a jacket that’s clearly one of Hugh’s. On top of the pile are her glasses. On the floor is a pair of flip-flops. Hugh sees her looking at them and makes a face.
“Sorry. Best I could do, I didn’t want to leave you alone in the flat. We can pick up some trainers en route if you’re bothered.”
But she shakes her head. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters now.
Hugh leaves, tactfully, and Hannah gets slowly back into her clothes. Finally, she reaches for her phone, tapping the power button to check on the time—and then she remembers: it’s dead.
Still, she shoves it in the pocket of Hugh’s coat, and then leaves the room.
“Ready?” Hugh asks, and she nods, even though it’s very far from the truth. He’s holding car keys, and she frowns.
“Are we driving?”
“I thought so, they said they’d give us parking and I don’t really want you standing in the rain for a bus. You still don’t look great.”
She nods dully. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now—except the baby. She has to keep it together for the baby.
Oh God, is she really going to do this…
The faintness rises up inside her again and Hugh takes her arm, looking alarmed.
“Hannah? Hannah old bean?”
“I’m fine,” she says, her teeth gritted. It’s not true, but she will be, once she has spoken to the police. For whatever the truth, whatever happens now, November was right. This is the only way she can make herself safe, the only way she can protect herself.
* * *
IN THE CAR SHE LETS her head loll against the window. She is not just tired but exhausted, the exhaustion of grief and fear and shock. There’s a strange familiarity to it now—it’s the same sensation she remembers from last time, the same numb, sick horror as she sat, wired and sleepless, through interview after interview, surviving off bad tea and worse coffee, as the police prodded her for inconsistencies or anything she might have forgotten.
The thought of going through it all again leaves her with a kind of light-headed nausea. And perhaps that’s it—perhaps this is why it feels so much worse the second time around. Because she has done this all before—and for what? So that an innocent man could die in prison.
And now she is going to do the same thing again, but this time to incriminate the father of her unborn baby.
A picture comes into her head, of Will’s lips pressed against her hair, of his low, soft voice rumbling in his chest, I love you.
She thinks she may throw up.
“Are you okay?” Hugh asks, and she shakes her head. “Do you want some water? You’re probably dehydrated.”
He gestures to a bottle in the door, and Hannah nods. There is a horrible hungover taste in her mouth. Maybe the water will make her feel less sick. But it doesn’t. When she takes a long gulp, it has the same flat chemical taste as everything else, and she screws the lid back on and replaces it in the door.
Instead she shuts her eyes, hoping for darkness, for oblivion, and Hugh starts the engine. It purrs for a moment, and then he slips the car into gear, and they slide away into the darkness.
* * *
IT’S SOME TIME LATER THAT Hannah opens her eyes. She hasn’t been asleep exactly, just drowsing, trying to throw off this weird groggy feeling before they reach the police station. But the noise of the traffic has faded away, and they seem to have been driving for a long time, longer than she would have thought.
It takes a while for her to focus on the road ahead and make sense of what she is seeing—because they are not in Edinburgh anymore, but on a country road, quite a narrow one. There are no streetlamps, only the powerful beams of Hugh’s headlamps lighting up the low hedges on either side of the track. It’s not a route she recognizes, but from the dark shapes of the hills she thinks they may be heading west, towards Berwick.
“Hugh?” She sits up, pushes her glasses up her nose, looks around, trying to figure out where they are. The chemical taste is still in her mouth, and her throat feels dry, her voice croaky. “Hugh, what’s going on?”
Hugh makes a rueful face.
“Sorry, only just outside Edinburgh, but I must have put the postcode into the satnav wrong. It took me all round the houses before I realized what I’d done. We’re heading back now. Sorry, incredibly stupid of me. I’m just trying to find a route round, I don’t want to pull a U-turn in such a narrow road.”
Hannah sinks back in her seat and they drive for a while in the darkness. They pass a farm track, then another, and beneath the fog of tiredness she begins to feel uneasy.
“Hugh? Should you turn around? This road only seems to be leading us farther away. Look, there’s a house coming up.” She points, but Hugh doesn’t slow, and it flashes past.
“Don’t worry,” he says, his voice calm, “I’ve got another route planned out.”
But when Hannah glances across at the satnav on his dashboard, it’s turned off.
Her fingers close around the phone in her pocket, before she remembers, and a kind of sick shiver runs through her.
“How long until we get to the police station?” she says.
“Oh, not long,” Hugh says. “Twenty minutes maybe?”
Hannah flicks a look at the clock on the dashboard. For a moment her vision is too blurred to read it, but she blinks, concentrates. The screen says 4:41. They have been driving for more than half an hour.