‘It all happened so fast that we can’t be sure,’ she says confidently, as if she is reciting the truth.
We hear sirens in the distance, voices approaching, a crowd, lights bearing down on where Lauren sits with one arm fast around Carmen’s thin shoulders.
‘Carmen woke from some kind of drugged sleep,’ she says, ‘went crazy, hit out, threw bleach around …’ My senses are sharpening all the time. It could work. If you were stupid enough, and willing to believe anything you heard.
‘And the monster?’ I ask.
‘Still locked in his own cellar,’ Lauren says with grim celebration as the first of our torch-bearing rescue party spies us and lets out a shout. ‘Be brave and stick to the story,’ she adds as she stands up unsteadily and waves one thin arm in the air. ‘Over here!’ she cries.
She looks down at me and grins, and for a second I have to look away from her shattered mouth. ‘But I don’t need to tell you that. You’ve done a great job of protecting yourself so far.’
‘Oh my God!’ cries someone in the distance. Voices grow in volume as many people begin to run towards us.
‘ Who is that?’
‘Can you see who it is?’
‘I think it’s Lauren! Lauren Daley! She’s alive!’ And we are suddenly engulfed by a wave of people, a tidal wave of human emotion.
‘We’re free!’ Lauren whispers with elation as she is borne away from me. ‘Free at last!’ But not you, beats my borrowed heart, my traitor heart. Not you. For you, a different fate.
Now there are arms lifting me. Lights both red and blue, a stretcher waiting, sheets taut, crisp and white.
‘You’re safe,’ murmurs someone kindly as I am passed from hand to hand. ‘You’re safe.’ I am covered with a blanket, shielded from the advancing media, separated from the others so that our stories may be crosschecked and verified. But we will hold true, we will hold fast. And I think wearily, Let them come. Let them break against us as a wave.
So tired. I close my eyes, content to sleep the sleep of the untroubled for a while. For this time, I have earned it.
‘Mercy?’ His voice is familiar, pleading, and I frown.
There’s that weight upon my eyelids, snaking along my limbs. I have never felt so earthbound, so heavy.
‘Luc?’ I mutter. ‘Why can’t I see you?’ I feel him take one of my hands in his and the corners of my mouth lift involuntarily at his touch. I’d know it anywhere. The bass note of my messed-up existence.
‘So good to have you back,’ I murmur leadenly. ‘So good to be back.’ His grip tightens and I frown, beginning to feel a flowering of contact. Luc has never been an open book to me. It has always been part of his allure. What has changed?
‘They told me I had to let you rest, but I couldn’t wait,’ he says urgently. ‘I slipped past the security guards, the night nurse — they’ll kill me if they find me here.
But Lauren told me the most incredible story. Is it true?
Who’s Luke?’ His voice is both eager and sullen.
I withdraw my hands as if burnt and the feeling of something being laid open is abruptly cut off. The words are incomprehensible to me, as if they have been spoken out of order, or in Old English. Or French.
‘Why can’t I open my eyes?’ I say, struggling to sit up. ‘Who are you?’ But I am tethered to a bed by a battery of tubes and pipes, and the feeling of being chained again makes me roar and flail until the electronic beeping that stands for my heart becomes a wailing alarm.
‘Shit!’ he says. ‘It’s just me, Carmen, Mercy. Jesus!’ A door slams quickly. Another opens.
‘Code Blue!’ exclaims a voice. ‘She’s flatlining!’ There is a rush of fevered activity around me. The sound of hurrying feet in soft-soled shoes.
‘I am not flatlining,’ I say angrily. ‘There’s something wrong with your machine.’ And as I say the words, my heart rate falls and falls and falls until a steady, even beeping resumes. ‘You see?’ I say calmly, palms lying outward and open on the bed.
I cannot open my eyes, but I know the room is full of people standing over me. Their consternation is obvious to me, even without my sight. I feel it, like warm crosscurrents mingling in the air above my head.
‘Are you in pain, child?’ a woman asks worriedly, checking my pulse.
I have trouble moving my head from side to side, but I still do it. ‘No, but I can’t open my eyes,’ I growl.
The woman lets go of my wrist and the pain in my left hand subsides, the building pressure behind my eyes fading away before her inner life can be exposed to me.
Someone else laughs gently. ‘That would be because we gave you enough midazolam to knock out a horse. I can’t understand why she’s still awake and able to string a sentence together, Doris. It’s unprecedented.’
‘Well, she’s a tough one,’ a different man suggests gruffly. ‘So give her a little more. She needs to sleep.
She’s already done four hours of police interviews and they’ve got a press conference lined up for tomorrow morning. And replace that EKG! It has to be faulty. A heart rate like that couldn’t have been possible. I mean, look at her.’ Electrodes are swiftly disconnected then the machine is wheeled away, another connected in its place. The same even beeping resumes.
‘You see?’ says a new voice with satisfaction.
There is a small sting in my arm. From a change in the air, I know that several people have left the room.
‘Rest now,’ another woman says gently as she shuts the door behind her.
After several minutes, the other door opens.
‘Just don’t upset me,’ I warn raggedly.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ Ryan whispers, and it is Ryan, I realise it now. His hand seeks mine again on the bed covers, our fingers interlacing. ‘But I needed to hear it for myself, from you.’ In his touch, I discern a faint riot of feeling, of colour. Different this time; not burning, but soft, like the afterglow before nightfall. There’s curiosity, affection, relief. Love? It has a little of that nature to it. But love for whom? For Lauren? For me?
So tired. So tired, I don’t even react when he holds my small hand up to his cheekbone, runs it along his jawline, before placing it down again, gently. Our fingers still entwined. Every girl’s dream and I can’t lift my eyelids to focus on his heartbreaking face.
‘We don’t know how to thank you,’ he breathes reverently. ‘For giving her back to us. When you never came home, I knew I’d done that to you, placed you in his way somehow. That I’d got it all horribly wrong.
And when I thought you could be dead, too …’ For a moment he doesn’t speak, and on my hand I feel a warm, salt tear. And in it, all the horror.
‘For me?’ I sigh gustily, making little sense. For I am sinking like a stone, a cut anchor.
‘Is it true?’ he says, wonder in his voice. ‘What Lauren told me?’ I want to nod, but I can’t seem to move my head. It doesn’t feel as if it belongs to me any more, or is even on temporary loan. The bonds between Carmen and me are dissolving, and this time, for the first time, I can feel it.
The two of us no longer a unit, becoming two separate beings, even as Ryan watches over us, oblivious to the seismic shift.
‘The midazolam,’ I say with difficulty, though it is not only that. ‘No time.’ And I know he must bend close to hear my voice for I smell the faint, salt sweat of him for an instant, feel his sweet breath on her forehead.
He clasps my hand harder. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says brightly, ‘we’ll talk tomorrow. They’ll have to throw me out to get me to leave. I want to hear all of it. Everything.
It’s been torture, not knowing. My parents, they don’t know what to say, what to do. Neither do I. There aren’t any words, enough words.’ When I don’t answer, he murmurs, ‘We were right, you know, it was the place, the church. Only heard from the perspective of Stenborg’s place, not Barry’s.
Stenborg’s house backs onto part of the church grounds.’ His grip tightens on mine. ‘He had a prior conviction for stalking,’ he says darkly. ‘Something he conveniently whited out when he applied for the job at Port Marie. No one bothered to run a background police check because his CV was so extraordinary.
