by Ruth Dugdall
Hector seemed to soften. ‘Well, I suppose you need your friends at a moment like this.’ He gazed at his unconscious wife, then his face crumpled. ‘Maya is the best of me. How can I carry on if she dies?’
He panted, and Holly thought for a moment he was going to cry. Instead, he yanked off his jumper and pushed the sleeves of his shirt beyond his elbow, as if to free himself of their constraint, revealing the muscled forearm of a labourer on his good arm and the narrow vulnerability of his other arm, which he nursed to his stomach. When he spoke, she wasn’t sure if it was to his daughter, his unconscious wife, or simply to himself.
‘I work the soil, that’s all. I was employed by her father to work the farm when I was just a lad, and I’ve loved Maya since I first seen her. She thought I was too young for her, too rough and uneducated. I promised her that if she’d marry me, I’d make sure she never regretted it. Now I’ve let her down.’
His face was wormed with broken veins, the complexion of someone who toiled in the wind and the rain. There were beads of sweat at the hairline.
Desperate to say something soothing, feeling his pain so keenly she had a physical ache in her core, Holly said, ‘I’m sure you didn’t let her down, Mr Hawke.’
No response.
Holly listened to the silence. Nothing in her paramedic training had prepared her for this. She’d been taught how to find a vein, stop a bleed, but Hector’s wound was much harder to staunch. ‘She’s alive, and the prognosis looks favourable.’
This, at least, she could give him. As part of the debrief, Jon had told her that Maya had been stabilised so rapidly that she had a good chance of surviving.
But Hector’s gaze remained narrow, as though what she said was a challenge. ‘Do you believe in God?’
Holly hesitated, thinking of the night she went ghost-hunting with Jamie. ‘I’m not religious, but I feel something is out there. Something bigger than us that we can’t fully know.’
‘New Ager, are you?’ he asked, dismissively.
‘I don’t know what I am exactly.’ This was true. Her childish fear of ghosts had largely gone but the world still felt a confusing place to her.
He softened. ‘Count yourself lucky to have any faith, because I know for sure now there ain’t no God. We’re just animals, just savages, no better than the pigs in my fields or the chickens in my barn. I just work the land, get on with my own business, and thank my lucky stars for what I got. But all that don’t mean squit, do it? Not if my Maya dies.’
Cassandra, who had been silent through this whole conversation, said, as if dazed, ‘If Mum dies, that would make her shooting a murder. Then the police would have to find the culprit.’
His response was immediate. ‘Stop that crazy talk, Cass. You know she done it herself. You’ll make yerself sick with thoughts like that.’
Cassandra said nothing to her father, but looked at Holly with such a pleading expression that Holly felt as if she were reaching across to her: Please believe me.
10
Cassandra
Mum? Can you hear me?
They’ve told me to talk to you. The nurse – Lauren – said that it might help, but maybe she’s just trying to be kind, and wants to give me something to do.
Mum? It’s me. Your daughter, Cassandra.
You’re in Ipswich Hospital. Dad’s just gone outside for a smoke. You fought so hard to get him to stop after his stroke, but what does any of that matter now? The intensive care unit is peaceful, not like the maternity ward in the main building where Victoria was born fourteen years ago, where I could hear women screaming and babies crying all night. Not that I minded, not when I had her in my arms. She was such a sweet thing, so small. I could hardly believe something so precious belonged to me.
Lauren is at the nurse’s station with two colleagues, discussing cases. They’ve all been kind, but she’s the one I like best. She’s jazzed up her white tunic with a rainbow of pens poking from the pocket, her lipstick is a cheerful pink and you’d say she’s wearing too much foundation but then not everyone’s as naturally blessed as you. You don’t even have any grey hair – amazing for a woman in her sixties. You always joked that marrying a younger man was the secret to keeping youthful. I wish I had a comb, to remove the dried blood from your hair.
My chair is pulled up as near as I can get to the side of your high hospital bed, so I can reach you to stroke your hand, bones slender as a bird’s, skin loose as silk, avoiding the place in the middle where a plaster covers a cannula that feeds you with saline. The other side, near the window, is where most of the wires lead to the machine, beeping its mechanical heart like a clock, hypnotising me, keeping you alive.
They don’t know if you’ll die, or if you’ll wake and be yourself, or if something inside has been broken forever. Dr Droste said they can’t measure the damage, not yet. Not until they release you from the induced coma and see if you can breathe on your own. He’s very direct, German I think, though his English is impeccable. I trust him, or I trust his white coat and expertise.
This ward is on the first floor, looking out onto the car park below. All I can see is darkening sky; it’s only just past six and already stars are appearing. No moon though.
Mum? Everyone is saying that you shot yourself. Dad won’t talk about any other possibility, and even Clive said that I was in shock, not thinking straight. As if believing that someone else did this to you means I must be crazy.
Only Holly seems to believe me. I felt it at the farm, just after the other paramedics took you away, that she had her suspicions. And today, when Dad tried to stop me from talking about it, I saw her expression: she knows it wasn’t attempted suicide. It’s true what I said to Daniel: you never handled those guns. It’s also true what I said to Clive: you think suicide is cowardly. And I have better reason than most to know that.
If I’m going to find out what really happened, I can’t do it alone, I need help. And Holly was there at the farm, she helped save you. I know she’s the one.
I lower my head so it rests on your lap and listen to the heartbeat of the machines. I close my eyes and fall. I can smell the starch of hospital sheets, the faded bloom of your jasmine perfume, the sour scent of old sweat which might be mine.
I stand, stretch, go to the window. Does it open? Probably not. There are cars down in the car park, their shiny roofs pocked with bird shit, staff arriving for shifts, visitors for patients, visible to me only as the tops of heads.
Turning, I can see the nurse’s station from here. Lauren looks up from her notes. Something she sees in my face makes her get up and come into the room.
‘How’re you bearing up, love?’
‘Okay,’ I say. I’m not though. Not by a long stretch.
‘Would you like a blanket?’ Without waiting for my answer, she opens the bedside locker and takes one out, handing it to me, and I’m so grateful I want to cry. She pats my hand.
‘You’re going to be seeing a lot of me. I practically live here.’ She rolls her eyes, and I’m glad of the chance to smile.
After she’s gone, I return my head to the dent in the sheet, the blanket around my shoulders, and begin to cry. I’m crying deep into the bedding when I feel an arm around my shoulders, holding me tight. I think it’s Lauren but when I look up, peering through swollen eyelids, it’s Holly. She came back, like I knew she would. She doesn’t take her arm away, she doesn’t tell me it’ll be okay and her deep brown eyes are full of concern.
‘I’ve just finished my shift,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d pop back and see how your mum is?’
I smile gratefully at her. It’s as though my silent prayers summoned her back. ‘The same. Lauren says talking to Mum will help. I’ve been doing that.’ My nose is running, and I reach for a tissue. ‘She says we should try and stimulate all of her senses, and that even though she’s unconscious she could still be responsive in other ways.’
‘Really?’ I can see this interests her and she takes a seat beside me. ‘What ha
s she suggested?’
‘She said we should play her favourite music, but Mum never listens to any. Then she said I should bring in her favourite perfume, but I can’t go to the farm. I’ve been holding her hand, for touch. I want to do more. I just can’t think of what else to do.’ I can feel tears rising inside again.
‘What about reading to her, from her favourite book?’ Holly suggests.
‘She always hated it when I read to her, even when I was a child and she was supposed to listen to me. Mum loses herself in a book, but she wouldn’t want someone else’s voice to ruin it for her.’
‘Okay, something else.’ Holly probes, ‘What does she love to do?’
I think about what gave you pleasure, and remember you seated at the kitchen table, enjoying your afternoon break before going back up to your study to resume work. ‘Janet’s cakes – she has one every day with a cup of tea. God, I can smell them now.’
‘Janet’s your housekeeper, isn’t she? Ash’s mother. Didn’t she make the 999 call?’
‘That’s right. She found Mum when she arrived that morning, ran home to make the call.’
‘And your mum loves her baking?’
I’m confused as to where this questioning is taking us. ‘Yes, but what good is that? She can’t eat anything. The only nutrition she’s getting is through that tube.’
I’m no longer crying, I’m watching Holly. I can practically hear her brain working.
‘Do you really think your mother was shot by someone?’
I look at her, certain there’s a bond of understanding between us. She was there that morning too, she saw you.
‘I’m sure she didn’t shoot herself. I don’t even think she could. But no one else believes me.’
‘I do,’ Holly says. ‘And I’ve got an idea.’
DAY 3
MONDAY 3 NOVEMBER
11
Holly
Holly’s Fiat was still splattered with mud from when she’d travelled this road on Saturday morning, but this time she didn’t turn into the farm, she continued further on down Innocence Lane to the house where Janet Cley lived with Ash.
Sooner than expected she saw it, a low-slung thatched cottage in Suffolk pink, the traditional shade resulting from stirring pigs’ blood into paint. It looked older than the building the Hawkes lived in, and might even have been the original farmhouse. Ash and Janet had lived here back when she was a girl living on the airbase nearby. He was the grubby boy who never had the right shoes, whose shirt was always frayed at the neck. Kids are cruel, and Holly remembered how Jamie and his mates, with their smarter uniforms and stylist-cut fringes, would push him around. He never seemed to mind though, as if he knew his place wasn’t to be with them. He belonged to the animals and the land, and when she saw him yesterday, she saw he was now settled in his skin.
He was ribbed by the boys from the base for having no dad, too. On the airbase, people lived singly or in families. If a marriage failed, the non-military spouse would return to America, so the idea of a parent and a child living alone together seemed unusual enough to attract bullying. Or maybe Ash, being as he was, was simply vulnerable to any taunts and this was just a convenient way to get a reaction. There must have been other kids at the school with an absent parent, but if so, she wasn’t aware that they got picked on because of it. Only Ash seemed to suffer. She felt ashamed for her bullying brother, and also for herself, because she had witnessed the bullying and said nothing. She remembered how Janet would sometimes come at lunch and wait by the red-brick wall to sit with her son as he ate his sandwich, since he wasn’t supposed to leave the school grounds and no one was playing with him.
Feeling desperately sad, she pulled up beside an old banger, its tyres deep in mud and as flat as the fields opposite, useless to all but the opportunistic magpie who had made a nest on the steering wheel. There was an abandoned tractor on the scrubland around the cottage, and some discarded Calor Gas cylinders.
She closed her car door and walked away without locking it, thinking There’s no one here, not for miles. That must have been what Maya thought, when she left her home unlocked last Friday night. If Cassandra was right, and someone else shot Maya, danger was close by.
The outside of the cottage was in better shape than the tractor, but only just. The thatch was spiky and dark in places, a bedraggled hat above its raddled face, its eyes unlit. The ground in the yard was uneven, stones and muck rolling freely with no defined border to stop them. There was no grass, just patches of white chalky earth and shingle.
Holly pressed the cracked plastic doorbell but no one came. Noticing a wire dangling loose beneath the casing, she rapped her knuckles on the glass panel and peered through. A small figure was curled in the corner of the sofa, knees drawn up to her chin like a child. When she stood up and came to open the door, Holly recognised Janet Cley, the woman who had sat outside the playground to comfort her son. That was twenty years ago, yet her mousey-brown hair was still pulled back into its usual braid, incongruously youthful against her lined, worried face. Thin legs stuck out from beneath her ugly beige housedress, and she wore tattered slippers.
‘Miss Cley?’
‘Yes, can I help you?’ She spoke in a small, nervous voice.
‘You probably don’t remember me, but I was at school with Ash and Cassandra. I’m a student paramedic, and I was part of the team that dealt with Mrs Hawke on Saturday morning.’
Janet Cley’s cheeks sunk even lower as her mouth turned downwards in sympathy. ‘Poor Maya. I just can’t get me head around it. I’m so glad the ambulance arrived in time. Thank you for savin’ her.’
Holly slid her hands into her jacket pocket. ‘I didn’t do much, I’m afraid. But I’ve been visiting her hospital room, and I did think of something that might help. May I come in?’
The woman hesitated. ‘Ash ain’t here right now. He’s workin’ with the pigs – allus gets up early, that boy.’
‘It’s actually you I came to see. I have a favour to ask.’
Her hand fluttered to her neck. ‘I wasn’t expectin’ visitors. The place is a mess.’
‘Just for a few minutes, Miss Cley. I promise, I’m not here to judge the state of your home.’
Holly entered the cottage and closed the door behind her.
The cottage stank of boiled meat and the room was so cold that Holly stiffened. Janet lowered herself onto the dusky-pink sofa, which registered her slight weight with a twang. Beside her was a low table on which lay a plate covered in foil, the source of the smell.
‘Pheasant, from Friday’s shoot,’ said Janet, tapping a finger on the foil. ‘Ash made my lunch afore he went to work, but I’ve hardly been able to touch a bite since Saturday mornin’. He says I need to get me strength up, but I’m tougher than I look. He’s a good boy. So, you were friends with him at school?’
He wasn’t a boy any more, he was in his thirties. School was a long time ago. ‘I was a few years younger, so no. He knew my brother Jamie.’
‘Jamie the Yank?’ she said, her face souring.
‘Yes, my dad was in the American Air Force, so we lived on the base.’
Janet Cley coughed into her hand and Holly felt a sharp stabbing pain within her own chest. Her synaesthesia often helped her intuit things, and this woman needed medical attention. The urge to wrap Janet in a blanket and get her to a doctor was almost overwhelming.
‘Are you okay, Miss Cley, or would you like me to call your GP?’
She shook her head quickly. ‘I don’t need no doctor.’
‘You must have had quite a shock, discovering Mrs Hawke on Saturday morning. I believe you’ve known her for many years?’
She waited as Janet caught her breath. She was obviously nervous at being interviewed.
‘I were just a girl when I started as their housekeeper, only seventeen. I used to live in, until Ash got older and we needed more space, so then they give us the cottage.’ She became suddenly defensive. ‘It’s not a freebie or anythin’, it�
�s part of me contract. I go to the farmhouse, all weathers. I’ve never had a day off in me life, except for when I had Ash, but soon as I was on me feet I was back workin’, seein’ to things around the place just like always.’
‘Sounds like hard work,’ observed Holly, thinking that Maya’s accident would have given Janet her first chance for a proper rest. But the woman nudged her chin slightly higher, with obvious pride.
‘It’s no bother, two babies in the house. S’no more work than one, and Maya had just had Cassandra when I moved in. I’m a workhorse, that’s what Hector allus says. We all are – him, me and Ash – the three of us together. We’re a good team and we look out for each other.’ She was looking tearful again.
Holly thought it was odd that Janet had barely mentioned Maya, and sensed her feelings ran deep but wouldn’t easily be revealed. ‘Cassandra was telling me how much her mother loves your baking. That’s why I’m here, actually. To ask if you’d mind cooking something for her?’
Janet screwed up her features in confusion. ‘She’s in a coma, ain’t she?’
‘Yes, but apparently her other senses may still be active. She may be able to smell your baking. The staff think it will help if her senses are stimulated by things she likes.’
‘She allus likes what I make.’ Janet gave a grim smile. ‘Shame if no one eats it, but there you go. I’d be happy to do anythin’ for her, just like always. I’ll set about it now.’
‘Thank you.’
Janet pushed her weak frame up from the sofa and Holly followed her to the small kitchen. As Janet began to crack eggs and measure flour, Holly watched as if hypnotised from a kitchen stool in the corner. Janet seemed lost in a world of her own, talking quietly as if ordering her thoughts.
‘I’ll make scones, she likes ’em best, and if I put candied cherries in, they’ll smell nice and fruity. She likes ’em of an afternoon, with a cup of green tea – though she’d prefer Earl Grey, but the green is healthier so she stomachs it. Maya really belongs to another time: she’s a proper lady. But she inherited the farm when she was young and it was failin’, so Hector was a godsend to her. He was workin’ there, you know, as a farm labourer?’