‘Is she hurt?’ I asked. Laura gave me a withering look. ‘You know, is she hurt in a first-aid sort of way?’
I don’t know why I asked. Neither of us knew first aid.
Of the woman, whose body was folded into a caravan doorway, I saw nothing but a bent and bloodied white knee. The poor, poor girl. It was appalling that anyone would assault a woman at any time, but baffling that it could happen during a total eclipse. It was like some throwback to the dark ages where people ranted and raved at the shadow. What weird timing, what a waste.
I think – and maybe this is hindsight again, because from this point on things happened so quickly that I only had time to react in retrospect – that I disliked Jamie instantly. When he told Laura to calm down, she looked to me for protection; she had never done that before.
‘If you haven’t done anything wrong, you haven’t got anything to worry about,’ I said. It was supposed to ease the rising tension but Jamie must have interpreted it as a threat. ‘Would you fucking say something so we can all get on with our lives?’ he snarled over Laura’s shoulder. He looked at me as if for solidarity. I only stared. I had a camera across my shoulder but it didn’t occur to me to use it; instead, I found myself trying to memorise him for the photofit, but he looked all wrong. The patchwork mugshots you saw on TV were always of square-jawed, broken-nosed thugs. It seemed inconceivable to me that the files would even contain the components of such a boyish jaw, such a smooth brow, which lowered when he realised he had no ally in me. ‘Fuck this,’ he said, and walked off, his pace slow but his gait far from casual. While his face was boyish, his build was not. His shoulders were twice the width of mine. I recognised the deceptively lean rower’s physique; you met them all the time in Oxford. Bodies slightly overdeveloped at the expense of their brains. Already out of my depth, I sank a little farther.
‘Kit, don’t let him get away!’ said Laura. Her hands waved wildly in the air. ‘Go after him!’
It was almost funny. What was I supposed to do? Get him in a headlock? Fight him? As I stalked him through the maze of vans and trailers, I tried not to think about the consequences of someone like me taking on some nutcase surging with testosterone. He would pulverise me. Then I pictured Laura, remembered the trembling bloodstained knee and the two images seemed to blend together. I found that imagining Laura as the victim lit a dark fire inside me, and that I could, after all, summon the strength I needed to give chase.
When I lost sight of Jamie in the camping area I was almost relieved, but then my peripheral vision was snagged by a lone figure dancing through the tents, picking his way almost comically over the interlocking guy ropes. My heart in my boots, I followed him. Naturally I went flying at the first attempt, a slapstick pratfall over a tripwire. By the time I was on my feet, Jamie was on the far side of the field, approaching the fence of trees. There was a small but dense crowd surging past the trees and it absorbed him instantly.
Failure suspended me in the moment. In the background was the ever-present bass and a chattering crowd. The Ferris wheel creaked in rotation. Close by, birds sang their second dawn chorus, gently shushed by the leaves. Over all this my blood roared in my ears. This time, I felt no relief; only a crushing sense of failure for the girl I had let down. If I’d had a tail, it would have been tucked between my legs as I picked my way back through the tents to Laura.
I used the abandoned dodgem as a marker and eventually found Laura with her back to me, frowning into her mobile phone. The girl was still crouched in her doorway, the same pale leg extended now to display a battered silver trainer, the dip of an ankle and curve of a calf that had been hooked around my thigh days before.
My first thought was that it was a terrible coincidence but scientists know there is no such thing. Using the evidence in front of me, I came up with the only plausible hypothesis. Beth had been following me – us – and someone had either followed her, or seen her on her own, and . . . it was too horrific. That dark flame flared again, burning through the surface of my guilt. I had a suicidal urge to hold her; it passed. For a few selfless seconds, my instinct was for Beth’s comfort rather than my own survival. It might not have triumphed, but it was there for a while. I cling to that knowledge.
In front of me, Laura swore at her phone, then took a few paces forward.
I did the same, dislodging a pile of tent poles someone had dumped on the ground, and Beth whipped around to see what the noise was. Our eyes met in mutual, awful comprehension. Her face was smeared with mucus, although her eyes were dry. She came here because of me, I thought. Laura would have been furious enough at my infidelity, but that it had led to this: any chance I’d had of being able to tell her vanished, a pinprick of light dwindling to blackness. I dropped to my knees and whispered, ‘Oh, Beth.’ She stared through me. ‘Oh, you poor girl. What’s he done to you?’
‘Like you care.’ Her voice cracked on the word.
‘Of course I care, it’s just . . .’ I nodded at Laura’s back.
She had finally found a signal on her phone, and her voice, high on the breeze, the wind in her favour, made it clear that things had escalated while I was away. ‘She’s traumatised, she’s not really talking properly. I’d say she needs an ambulance. Can it be a WPC? Can it be a female paramedic?’