All the Hidden Truths_Three Rivers

by Claire Askew

  The young man, Gibbie, had taken a step forward. He was, she could tell, preparing to take charge of her.

  ‘Okay?’ the senior officer was saying. ‘Is that okay, Moira? Will you help us?’

  It was true, then. What she’d suspected – what had begun to settle over her with increasing heaviness as she’d searched in the shed and failed to find what she was looking for – something happened, and Ryan made it happen.

  ‘Of course,’ she heard herself say.

  As the man walked away, she felt Gibbie step forward and slip his own hand into that same groove on her upper arm.

  ‘We’ll need to take a proper statement from you shortly,’ he said. Then, in a much lower voice, he added, ‘I’m sure it’ll all be all right.’

  Moira looked over at her neighbours, their faces equal parts curious and frightened.

  ‘I don’t think it will,’ she said.

  14 May, 9.25 a.m.

  Ishbel couldn’t find her car. She’d almost broken her neck on the stairs, almost lost a high-heeled shoe running out across the cobbles of the courtyard. She didn’t even know where she was going, but something told her she had to go there fast. A voice had started up in her head – later, when she thought about it, she’d realise that voice had sounded a lot like her own mother, dead nearly twelve years. Your child is in danger, it said. Go faster. Hurry up.

  Now she couldn’t find the car. Her body felt like a shaken bottle: full of sloshing, fizzy panic. Surely it hadn’t been stolen. Surely someone hadn’t done that to her.

  Hurry up, the voice said. You can still save her.

  Ishbel clattered through the car park, between rows of shiny estates and executive 4x4s. Skidding on her heels she disturbed a family of gulls, chattering around an overflowing bin. They took to the air and began circling, throwing down their weird laughter.

  Come on, what’s wrong with you? the voice said.

  The car was hidden behind a Transit van. The van’s owner had parked badly, angling his front wheels over the line. The voice that told her to swing open her driver’s door and damn his paintwork to hell was very much her own. She climbed in and jammed the car into reverse. As she swung out without looking, her driver’s-side corner made contact with the van’s flank and there was a shriek of metal on metal that oddly satisfied her. Even in her panic, she was able to think about Aidan’s irritated face, about the trouble she’d be in for the ding.

  But it’s evidence, said the voice. Later, when you get her home, you can show her. I stopped at nothing. I came for you.

  But the car wasn’t moving. Ishbel sat with her foot on the clutch, her mind like stew. She didn’t know where to go. To the college? Back to the house? Abigail might not even have made it in on time this morning. Ishbel could drive home, stagger into the kitchen, only to find her daughter sitting at the breakfast bar still in her pyjamas, eating cereal and flicking through Ishbel’s Hello! magazine.

  A thought hit her, obvious as a flung stone. She scrabbled in her handbag for her phone, and thumbed in Abigail’s number. It rang out.

  ‘Hey, you’ve reached Abi H,’ the voicemail said. ‘I can’t pick up right now, so text me.’ At the sound of her daughter’s voice, Ishbel’s vision began to falter again.

  Hurry, said the voice.

  But she’d barely hung up the call when the phone rang in her hands. It wasn’t a number she recognised, but it had an Edinburgh 0131 prefix.

  ‘Baby?’

  There was a pause on the line, and then a man’s voice.

  ‘I’m sorry – is that Ishbel Hodgekiss?’

  Shit. Was this a work call? Was someone actually calling her at this moment to talk to her about something other than her daughter?

  ‘Yes. Sorry, yes it is. But I can’t—’

  ‘Ishbel, it’s Greg Tomlinson here.’

  Hang up, the voice said. Hurry. But Ishbel’s heart kicked.

  Greg was one of her old school friends, a doctor. He came over for dinner occasionally and Ishbel and Aidan always argued afterwards. Aidan disagreed with almost all of Greg’s views, while Ishbel admired them.

  ‘Greg,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, but right now—’

  ‘It’s about Abigail,’ he said.

  Ishbel’s body flooded with heat: with a feeling she’d never felt before. Relief – she’s okay! She’s – somehow – with Greg! But also panic – she’s hurt. She’s hurt and he knew about it before I did.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Ishbel said. ‘Has she called you? Have you seen her? Greg – what’s happening? Do you know something?’

  ‘I’m at the hospital,’ he said. He paused, but she could make no reply. The two halves of herself were still fighting: the hospital, good. They’ll take care of her, versus if she’s at the hospital she must be hurt. The whole time, the other voice, the one that wasn’t quite her own, was saying hurry, hurry.

  But no, Abigail wasn’t there – Greg’s tone was wrong.

  ‘I thought you’d want to know,’ he said. ‘We’ve just had the call to say they’re bringing the casualties here. The injured. I mean the students who’ve been injured.’

  The correction came too late. Ishbel heard herself make a weird sound, like she’d been slapped.

  ‘They’ve called me down off the ward,’ he was saying. ‘We’re down here waiting for the ambulances and it’s going to be all hands on deck. We don’t know yet what’s coming, how many, how bad they’ll be. We don’t know who.’

  Ishbel swallowed hard, once, and then again. The fizzing in her system felt out of control – she thought she might throw up, or burst into tears, or faint again. The thought Should I even be driving right now? came to her – distantly, as though shouted from a long way away.

  ‘So,’ she heard herself saying, ‘you haven’t heard from her?’

  Another pause.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I just thought. I thought you’d want to know something. I don’t know where you are, but if you wanted to, you could come here and see if they bring her in. If she’s been hurt in any way, even if it’s just cuts and bruises, this is where they’ll put her. I shouldn’t be telling you this, mind. But if she’s hurt – and Christ knows I hope she isn’t, Ishbel – coming here would be the fastest way to find out.’

  Ishbel said nothing. She was beginning to calculate distances, think about routes. She glanced down at her petrol gauge.

  ‘I think your alternative is waiting for the police to tell you what’s what,’ Greg was saying. ‘And judging by the call we’ve just had, they’re struggling. It’s going to be a hell of a day at sea, no matter what the scale of this thing.’

  Ishbel shoved the car into first gear.

  ‘The scale,’ she said. ‘Have they given you any sense of it?’

  ‘No. Like I say, we don’t know what’s coming. The whole thing’s what? Half an hour old? I mean, we’re all hoping against hope that all we get is some bumps and flesh wounds. That this gunman was a bad shot, or the police got to him quick. But we don’t know. We’ve got surgeons on stand-by, too. We just don’t know.’

  Go, the voice was saying. Go get her.

  ‘Okay,’ Ishbel said. ‘I’m coming. But that place is like a maze. When I get there, where do I go to?’

  Greg was moving now – she could hear his footsteps, his breath slightly faster.

  ‘Your main problem will be parking,’ he said, ‘as bloody ever. Just go in the paying section. They’ll hand you a bill like you’ve been at the Ritz, but I’ll do what I can about that when this is all over. From there, if you look over at the buildings you’ll see a big red sign that says Emergency Department. It’s a lit sign; you can’t miss it. Head there. There’s a waiting room. As they bring people in, we’ll start a list of the injured and it’ll get put up in that waiting room, and we’ll update it. There might be a lot of ambulances, a lot of commotion. But if you go there and you stay there, you’ll know as soon as anyone will if Abigail comes in. Okay? I’ll try and get down at some point to see you, if I can.
’

  Ishbel was already steering through the car park.

  ‘Greg,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘No problem. I hope to Christ she doesn’t come in and this has all been a big waste of your time.’

  Behind his voice, she realised she could hear a siren.

  ‘Okay,’ he was saying, ‘this is it, they’re playing my song. I’ll see you, Ishbel.’

  ‘Good luck.’ She was saying it for herself as much as anything, because Greg had already gone.

  She threw the phone onto the passenger seat, and gave her head a little shake. The panic was still sloshing in her chest, but she’d calmed it, just slightly. She had a plan.

  You were wrong last night, that voice was saying, but you can make it up to her now. But you have to hurry. You have to go.

  The car peeled out into traffic. She went.

  It was difficult for Ishbel to discern the extent to which the A&E waiting room was chaotic. As she walked towards the large, imposing reception desk, she thought, It might always be like this. Indeed, a lot of the people milling around, or sitting in the rows of hard plastic chairs, appeared to be walk-ins – people whose condition suggested they’d been nowhere near the scene of a shooting. There were parents with small children in buggies; a woman with a makeshift and blood-spattered bandage tied around one foot; older people in couples, or sitting alone with newspapers. Above the plastic chairs a flat-screen TV was bolted to the wall, showing 24-hour news. Ishbel felt a moth-like pull towards it, but she forced herself to stay on course. The woman behind the desk seemed to brace for impact as she approached, and Ishbel realised she must look quite imposing. She was wearing a dark suit and, she realised, her work face: the ‘game face’, Abigail called it. I must look like an inspector, Ishbel thought to herself – and then, probably because I am one.

  She reached the desk.

  ‘My name is Ishbel Hodgekiss. I received a call from . . .’ Ishbel stopped herself, just, from giving Greg away. His voice drifted through her head: I shouldn’t be telling you this, mind.

  The woman behind the desk blinked at her.

  ‘From a doctor here.’ Her voice thickened. Ishbel swallowed hard. ‘It’s about my daughter. Her name is Abigail. She – attends Three Rivers College.’

  The woman studied Ishbel’s face. Her eyes narrowed, just slightly.

  ‘You had a call?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ishbel said. Her throat felt swollen. Please be kind to me right now, she thought. She wondered if Greg had also called Aidan. Somewhere outside, another siren – still far off, but approaching.

  ‘He told me to come here. I was told I could wait. He said . . .’ Her voice cracked. Hold it together, said the voice. ‘He said there’d be a list.’

  The woman said nothing for a moment, still studying Ishbel’s face. Then she seemed to have a thought that satisfied her, and she waved one hand in the direction of a biro that was sitting on the lip of the desk.

  ‘There’s no list,’ she said. ‘Not yet. There might not be one at all. We don’t know yet what information we can release. But if you write your name and your daughter’s name down there for me, that’ll be a start.’

  The woman placed a piece of NHS-headed paper, upside down, in front of Ishbel.

  ‘If she’s here, I can update you on her condition as long as you have ID.’ The woman was looking at the middle of Ishbel’s chest – she realised she was still wearing her proximity card and lanyard from work. ‘But you’ll need to wait. We’re still dealing with people coming in. As you can imagine, this isn’t your average morning.’

  Ishbel nodded, already scribbling down Abigail’s full name – her middle name was Pauline, after Aidan’s mother. Tears rose in her eyes, making the words swim, but she pulled them back with a sharp inward breath. Stop it. She also wrote down Abigail’s date of birth, her own name, and, as an afterthought, her mobile phone number. She let the pen hover for a moment, then handed it back without writing down anything to do with Aidan. He could get his information from her, for once. She had the thought, then felt ashamed of it.

  ‘Do me a favour too, will you?’ The woman was looking down at the paper, and had lowered her voice. ‘Don’t tell the other patients why you’re here. We’ve already got a bit of disgruntlement going on, because we’re prioritising . . .’

  Ishbel was blinking hard, pushing the tears back, and now she could see that this woman was frazzled – and perhaps a little scared – herself.

  ‘I understand,’ she cut in. ‘You don’t need to explain. I won’t talk to anyone.’

  The woman smiled: a tired, thin-lipped smile, but grateful.

  ‘I don’t feel much like talking to anyone, anyway,’ Ishbel added, half to herself.

  As she returned the biro to the desk, the woman reached over and put one small, dry hand over Ishbel’s own.

  ‘If she’s here,’ the woman said, ‘then she’s in the best possible place.’

  Those tears again. Ishbel closed her eyes against them, and nodded. When she opened them to speak, her voice was a hoarse whisper.

  ‘You’ll let me know . . .?’

  The woman squeezed her hand, and then let go.

  ‘Soon as I can,’ she said.

  Ishbel walked over to the nearest seat: next to the woman with the bloodied bandage on her foot. Before she sat down, she found herself casting around for a glimpse of Aidan – surely Greg must have called him, too? She felt a spike of annoyance at him: unlike her, Aidan worked in Edinburgh, and should really have got here first. But no – stay focused, she told herself.

  The siren was close now. Its persistent, strobing cry touched something primal in Ishbel, like the cry of an anguished baby. She wished there were something she could do to make it stop. She sat down on the hard orange plastic and tried not to make eye contact with anyone. The sound on the TV was damped down, but just audible.

  ‘What’re you in for?’

  The foot-bandage woman was leaning over, trying to get Ishbel to turn and face her. Politeness took over and she did, wincing.

  ‘It’s not me,’ she said. ‘I’m – I’m just waiting for someone.’

  The woman’s face made no secret of her disappointment.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ she said. Then she waggled her bandaged foot. ‘No prizes for guessing what’s up with me.’

  Ishbel smiled again, but the smile was smaller, tighter.

  ‘Bloody typical,’ the woman was saying. ‘I get up early, think, I’ll get out in the garden today, make the most of this weather. I’ve got all sorts to do – old shed to dismantle, seedlings to get out, you name it. Anyway, what do I go and do? Only shove the bloody garden fork through my foot in the first five minutes. I ask you.’

  Ishbel flinched.

  ‘Yeah, it’s not pretty,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve had something for the pain, but goodness only knows how long I’ll be sitting here. Bleed to death most likely.’ She made a kind of snorting sound in her throat. ‘Bloody NHS.’

  Ishbel froze. The siren had stopped, and now there were sounds of shouting, doors banging, rushing feet, coming from outside the door she’d walked through a moment ago. The woman with the bandaged foot turned her whole body, and leaned out of her seat to ogle.

  There were suddenly a lot of people in the waiting room. Paramedics in their green uniforms. Other uniformed people – doctors, nurses? In their midst, a stretcher, bearing a young man with a ventilator mask over his face. His torso, the mask and most of his face were daubed and smeared with red-brown blood. The smell of it hit Ishbel like running into a wall.

  ‘All right.’ A male paramedic manoeuvred the stretcher through the space at a clip, the other uniforms gathering alongside, seemingly trying to shield the boy from view.

  ‘This is Jack,’ he was saying. ‘Bullet entered below the right collarbone, clean exit wound below the shoulder blade, but we’ve got a perforated right lung, blood loss is . . .’

  Jack, Ishbel thought. Why is that name important? She scr
abbled to remember.

  Time seemed to slow down. A movement – a blur of dark clothing – caught Ishbel’s eye, and she managed to somehow pull her gaze away from the spluttering, blood-soaked body of the boy. A man in a dark grey coat had stepped, as if out of thin air, into the circle of people clustered around the stretcher. In one fluid, practised movement, he pulled out a mobile phone, pushed it into the throng so it hovered over the beleaguered boy, and took a photograph. Ishbel felt herself jump – physically – as the flash went off, and she realised for sure what he was doing.

  One of the paramedics, a woman, spun to face the man.

  ‘Get the hell out of here,’ she said evenly, and planted the flat of her hand against his chest. Her push was enough to expel him, arms splayed, from the circle, and then the gaggle moved, disappearing the stretcher and the boy through a pair of double doors. Ishbel coughed, and tasted acid.

  ‘Holy fucking Jesus Mary and Joseph.’ The woman with the bandaged foot sank back into her seat. ‘I guess it really is as bad as they’re saying.’

  Ishbel followed the woman’s nod and found herself looking at the TV – she’d forgotten about it. It showed aerial footage of the college campus, with a red ticker scrolling white text along the bottom. Ishbel’s head swam – the text was too fast for her to read more than the odd word, but she caught fatalities, emergency services and bloodshed. She tried to see the college buildings as she knew them, tried to pick them out from the shaky helicopter footage, but she couldn’t get her bearings. She realised how long it had been since she’d visited the place, since she’d shown any real interest in Abigail’s course. On the screen, the footage cut to grainy, long-lens images of ambulances, standing in a line in the college’s car park. Cut to a close-up of two female students hugging, one of them crying uncontrollably. Cut to a close-up of a girl’s slip-on shoe, pale green with cut-outs, discarded on tarmac. Stepped out of, maybe, in the rush to get away – or had it dangled and then dropped from the foot of a lifted, broken body? Ishbel swallowed, trying to tamp down her panic. Where the hell is Aidan? She tried to tell herself that maybe he was with Abigail, maybe everything was okay . . . but she didn’t believe it. He’d have phoned. He would have, she thought. He wouldn’t leave me sitting here in an abject panic. Right?