‘Look, we were sixteen – you leaving town and James falling apart was pretty dramatic. There was talk, all right?’
‘Jesus wept.’ I stared up at the ceiling. There was utter silence but for a strange soft patter outside, like rain, but softer. ‘Is that really what people thought?’
‘Yup,’ Nina said laconically. ‘I’d say that was the most popular of the theories. That or gave you an STD.’
God. Poor James. In spite of what he’d done, he didn’t deserve that.
‘No,’ I said at last. ‘No, James Cooper did not beat me up. Or give me an STD. And you’re very welcome to tell anyone that who “wonders” about it in your hearing. Now, good night, I’m going to sleep.’
‘What then? If it wasn’t that? What happened?’
‘Good night.’
I turned on my side, listening to the silence, the sound of Nina’s exasperated breathing, and the soft patter outside.
And then at last I slept.
10
VOICES. IN THE corridor outside. They filter into my dream, through the morphine haze, and for a moment I think I’m back at the Glass House, and Clare and Flo are whispering outside my door, their shaking hands holding the gun.
We should have checked the house …
Then I open my eyes, and I remember where I am.
The hospital. The people outside my door are nurses, night orderlies … maybe even the police officer I saw earlier.
I lie there blinking, and trying to make my tired, drug-addled brain work. What time is it? The hospital lights are dimmed for night, but I have no sense of whether it’s 9 p.m. or 4 a.m.
I twist my head to look for my phone. Always when I wake, I check the time on my phone. It’s the first thing I do. But the locker beside my bed is empty. My phone is not there.
There are no clothes hanging on the chair by the window, no pockets in the hospital gown I’m wearing. My phone is gone.
I lie there, looking around the small, dimly-lit room. It’s a private room, which seems odd – but maybe the main ward was full. Or perhaps that’s just how they do things up here. There are no other patients to ask, and no clock on the wall. If the softly blinking green monitor by my head has a time display, I can’t see it.
For a minute I think about calling out, asking the policewoman outside my door what the time is, where I am, what’s happened to me.
But then I realise; she’s talking to someone else, it was their low voices that woke me. I swallow, dry and sticky, and pull my head painfully off the pillow, ready to croak out an appeal. But before I can speak, one sentence filters through the thick glass of the door and glues my dry tongue to the roof of my mouth.
‘Oh Jesus,’ I hear, ‘so now we’re looking at murder?’
11
I WOKE TO a clear, bright silence, broken only by Nina’s soft snoring in the bed next to mine. But as I lay there, stretching my muscles and wishing I’d refilled my water glass, I began to disentangle the sounds of the forest: birdsong, a snap of twigs, and a soft ‘flump’ that I didn’t recognise, followed by a flurry of gentle sounds like sheets of paper falling to the floor.
I glanced at my phone – 6.48, still no reception – and then grabbed a cardigan and padded to the window. When I drew back the curtain I almost laughed. It had snowed in the night, not heavily, but enough to transform the landscape into a Victorian picture postcard. That was the strange pattering I’d heard the night before. If I’d got up and looked outside the window, I would have known.
The sky was a blaze of pinks and blues, the clouds peach-coloured and lit from beneath, the ground a soft speckled carpet of white, criss-crossed with bird prints and fallen pine needles.
The sight made my feet itch, and I knew immediately and piercingly that I had to go for a run.
My trainers on the radiator were crusted with mud from yesterday but they were dry, and so were my leggings. I pulled on a thermal top and a hat, but I didn’t think I’d need a coat. Even running on a frosty day, I give off enough heat to keep myself warm, provided the wind doesn’t get up. The morning outside was still. Not a tree branch waved in the wind, and the only snowfalls were caused by gravity, not wind; tree branches bending beneath the weight of their load.