The sound of the door opening and Ruby fixed her gaze on the wall. A soft click and the nurse moved over to the bed on silent feet. The mattress tilted as she settled herself on its edge.
‘I’m so sorry, love,’ she said, sliding an arm around Ruby’s shoulders.
Ruby raised her hand to block the movement. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that. I’ll be OK, so long as no one tries to give me hugs or anything like that.’ She tried to smile, couldn’t muster one. ‘I’ll get over it. I’ve got no bloody choice, anyway, have I? Just give me another half hour to get my stuff together, then I’ll leave, get out of your hair.’
‘There’s no hurry, love. You stay as long as you need.’
Ruby nodded. She couldn’t meet the nurse’s eye, knew that if she did, her resolution not to cry, all that fake strength she had built up inside herself would fracture. Shatter into a gazillion pieces, each fragment so small that she would never ever rebuild herself.
‘Like I said, I’m fine. I’ll be gone before the hour’s out.’
‘You’ll find her,’ the nurse said gently. ‘You’ll find her again, or she’ll find you. When she’s old enough, eighteen, she’ll come and find you, find her mum.’
Staring hard at the wall as if her life depended on it, Ruby shook her head. ‘No,’ she managed.
She didn’t want to hear it. Couldn’t bear to hear it. Eighteen years. Two years longer than she had been on this planet and already her life felt interminable. She couldn’t bear another whole lifetime of misery before she had any prospect of seeing her daughter again.
And she couldn’t bear not knowing where her daughter was, if she was happy or sad, if the people who had her were kind or cruel, if she was playing in the park and riding her bike with friends, or crouching in a corner trying to make herself invisible, terrified of being shouted at, beaten or abused again. She just couldn’t bear it.
78
Jessie’s cottage looked, as she had expected, deserted. No lights on inside, no cars parked outside, not Callan’s or any others. She looked each way down the lane, staring hard into the soupy darkness. Nothing, no one, no signs of life at all.
And yet, she remained motionless in the middle of the lane, listening, feeling a tense tug in her stomach. A stiff breeze brushed clouds over a sliver of moon, intermittently stealing what faint light the moon cast and returning it, rustling the leaves on the hedges hemming the lane.
A sudden, louder rustle in the darkness and her heart rate rocketed. But it hadn’t been loud enough to be human, she realized a millisecond after. Just an animal then, a badger or fox, confirmed by eyes shining low to the ground in the lane a hundred yards away, a shine that subdued her pulse, but also brought to her mind the gelid eyes of that doll found in Carolynn’s loft.
The only person she trusts is you, Dr Flynn. So where do you live?
A table lamp shone from Ahmose’s sitting room, throwing a pale yellow rectangle on to his narrow garden. But when she shifted sideways, so that she could look in through his front window, she saw that he wasn’t sitting in his usual reading chair. Pushing his gate open, she walked slowly up the front path, glancing left and right, listening, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, hearing nothing jarring or unexpected. But as her fist connected with his front door to knock, it swung open. Though strangers rarely came down their narrow country lane, Ahmose was careful by nature and he never left his door unlocked unless it was to pop next door to her cottage. Odd.
‘Ahmose?’ Her voice echoed in what felt like a deserted house, but it couldn’t be. He was never out at this time in the evening, hadn’t been for years, unless it was to visit her, or Callan if she wasn’t there.
‘Ahmose?’ she called again, angling her face so that her voice carried up the stairs. Still no reply.
She stood in the hallway, recognizing the benign sounds that met her ears: the whispered creaks and groans of an old cottage amplified by the silence and her own apprehension; the hiss of water in the radiators, programmed to come on in the evening, even though it was summer, Ahmose, born and brought up in Egypt, hyper-sensitive to the cold; her low-heeled sandals tapping on the wooden floor as she made her way from the hallway into the sitting room – his reading lamp illuminated, a book on gardening spread open on the coffee table – to the kitchen; the creak of the kitchen door as she pushed it open to expose another empty room; the sound of her own breathing, rasping with suppressed tension.
Back in the hallway, she tiptoed up the stairs, flicked on the landing light and checked both bedrooms, empty, the bathroom, also empty. All three rooms upstairs, like those downstairs, deserted. So where was he? Where was Ahmose?
79
Roger Reynolds walked slowly upstairs to his and Carolynn’s bedroom and sat down on the end of the bed. The duvet was cold, the room cold and empty. The whole house felt cold and achingly empty, a reflection of what his life had become.
Glancing towards Carolynn’s cupboard, he thought of the doll that he had found buried behind her
