In a Dark, Dark Wood

15

‘LEONORA!’ THERE IS a hand shaking me, pulling me awake. ‘Leonora, I’m going to need you to wake up, duckie. Leonora.’

I feel fingers pulling at my eyelids and a light, blindingly bright, shining in.

‘Ow!’ I blink and pull back, and a hand lets go of my chin.

‘Sorry, ducks, are you awake now?’

The face is disconcertingly close, her eyes staring into mine. I blink again, and then nod.

‘Yes. Yes, I’m awake.’

I don’t know when I dozed off. It felt like I was awake half the night, watching the silhouettes of the police through the glass, running through things in my head, trying to remember. The clay-pigeon shoot. That was the recoil bruise. I must remember to tell the police … if only I can keep things straight in my head.

But the closer things get to – to whatever happened, the hazier they get. What did happen? Why am I here?

I must have spoken the last words aloud for the nurse gives a sympathetic smile.

‘You had a bit of a car accident my love.’

‘Am I OK?’

‘Yes, nothing broken.’ She has a pleasant Northumberland burr. ‘But you’ve knocked your poor face something awful. You’ve got a couple of beautiful black eyes – but no fractures. But that’s why I had to wake you. We have to do observations every few hours, just to make sure you’ve not had a funny turn in the night.’

‘I was asleep,’ I say stupidly, and then rub my face. It hurts as if I’ve headbutted a window.

‘Careful now,’ the nurse says. ‘You’ve got a few cuts and bruises.’

I rub my feet, feeling the grime and grit and blood. I feel disgusting. I need a pee.

‘Can I have a shower?’ I ask. My head feels bleary.

There is an ensuite in the corner of the room, I can see. The nurse looks down at the chart at the foot of the bed. ‘Let me ask the doctor. I’m not telling you no, but I’d like to just make sure.’

She turns to go, and I catch sight of the silhouette outside the door, and it comes back to me: the conversation I heard last night. It has a nightmarish quality. Was it really true? Did I really hear what I thought I heard, or did I dream it?

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Wait, last night I heard the people outside—’

But she’s gone already, the door flapping back behind her with a gust of food smells and sounds from the corridor. As she walks out the policewoman outside catches at her arm and I hear a burst of conversation, and see the nurse shaking her head emphatically. ‘Not yet,’ I hear, ‘… permission from the doctor … have to wait.’

‘I don’t think you appreciate,’ the policewoman’s voice is low but her tones are clipped and clear as a newsreader’s, and her words filter through the glass much more distinctly than the nurse’s northern burr. ‘That this is now a homicide investigation.’

‘Och, no!’ The nurse is shocked. ‘The poor love didn’t make it, then?’

‘No.’

So it’s true. I didn’t imagine it. It wasn’t some product of too much morphine and my battered head.

It’s true.

I struggle up against the pillows, my heart pounding in my throat, and on the monitor to my left I see the little green line leaping with panicked jerks against the flatline.

Someone is definitely dead.

Someone is dead.

But who?