Clare cannot afford to let me leave.
My heart is beating very, very hard in my chest, so hard that I feel strange and light-headed, as if I might fall. I stand up, unsteadily, holding my cup, and I stagger and drop it. Clare reaches for it, trying to grab it before it spills, but her gloved fingers fumble on the china, and the cup slips from between her fingers and skitters across the coffee table.
And as the dregs spill out across the glass top I see … I see the white residue at the bottom of the cup. Not sugar – that had all dissolved. But something else. Something that made the tea taste even worse than usual.
I understand now. I understand my light-headedness. I understand why Clare has said so much, has allowed me to get this far. And I understand, oh God, I understand the gloves.
She looks down at the cup, and then up at me.
‘Oops,’ she says. And then she smiles.
33
FOR A MOMENT I do nothing. I just stand there staring stupidly at the cup, feeling the lethargy in my arms and legs, and the swirling confusion in my head that prevented me from noticing the effects of the drug before. What are they? Painkillers? Sleeping pills?
I stand there, swaying, trying to get myself together. Trying to balance.
And then I stumble towards the door.
I am not quick. I am slow – nightmarishly slow.
But as Clare leaps towards me, her battered limbs don’t quite obey. Her foot catches in the rug and she comes crashing down, her hip smacking into the wickedly sharp edge of the coffee table. She gives a scream that sets the echoes in the hallway ringing, and makes my already spinning head feel even stranger – and I stagger into the hallway.
I am struggling with the lock of the front door – the lock that seemed so simple and straightforward just a couple of hours ago. My fingers are slipping – the lock won’t turn – and then I have done it, and I am out, snapping through the flimsy police tape into the blessedly cold, fresh air.
My limbs feel like rubber and my head is sick and dizzy.
But this is what I do. I run. I can do this.
I take a step. And then another. And another and another. And then the forest swallows me up.
It is incredibly, indescribably dark. But I cannot stop.
The air is cold in my face and the shapes of the trees are black against black. They rear out of the chilly dark and I dodge and weave, ducking under branches, my hands held out to protect my face.
Bracken and brambles catch at my shins, ripping at the skin, but my legs are numb and cold and I hardly feel the slashes, only the tearing thorns holding me back.
It is my nightmare. Only this time it’s not James I’m trying to save – it’s myself.
Behind me I hear the slam of a car door, and an engine revving. Full-beam headlights glimmer through the tree trunks, sweeping round in a great curve as the car does a slow U-turn and then begins to bump down the rutted drive.
The drive goes round in long curves, so as not to climb the hill too steeply. The woodland footpath is direct. If I run fast, I can do this. I can get to the road before Clare. And then what?
But I cannot think about that. My breath sobs between my gritted teeth and I force my shaking muscles to work harder, faster.
I just want to live.
I’m gaining speed. The path runs downhill more steeply here, and my muscles aren’t forcing me on now, but trying to check my headlong rush. I leap a fallen branch, and a badger’s sett, a dark hole in the pale scattered snow – and then, with a suddenness that punches the breath out of me, I smack into a tree.
I fall onto my hands and knees in the snow, my head ringing in agony. My nose is streaming blood – I can see it dripping into the snow as I pant and pant, and when I touch Nina’s cardigan, the front is dark and soaked with gore. I shake my head, trying to clear the shards and sparks shooting across my vision, and the blood spatters across the clearing.
I can’t stop. My only chance is to get to the road before Clare can cut me off. I steady myself, one hand on the tree trunk, trying to overcome the sick dizziness, and then I begin to run again.
As I run, pictures shoot through my head, sudden flashes, like a landscape illuminated by lightning.
Clare, in her wellies, slipping quietly out of the house in the early morning to send those texts from my phone, from the point in the forest where reception kicked in, leaving her footsteps in the snow for me to find.
Clare – waiting until Nina was safely gone, and then driving off into the dark – to what? To park quietly in a lay-by, and wait for James to bleed to death?
Clare – her face white in the moonlight, stiff with shock, as I burst out of the forest in front of the car, screaming at her to stop, let me in.