In a Dark, Dark Wood

by Ruth Ware

  ‘James, talk to me,’ she said. ‘Nora, keep him talking. Keep him awake!’

  ‘James …’ I didn’t know what to say. We hadn’t spoken for ten years and now – and now— ‘James, oh my God, James … Why, how?’

  ‘Te …’ he said, and he coughed, blood flecking his lips. ‘Leo?’

  It sounded like a question, but I didn’t know what he meant. Tell? Tell Leo? I only shook my head. There was so much blood.

  Nina had his hoodie unzipped and she had found scissors from somewhere and was ripping up his T-shirt. I almost shut my eyes at the sight of his body, that skin that I had kissed and touched, every inch, spattered with blood and shot wounds.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ Nina moaned, ‘we need an ambulance.’

  ‘Did …’ James was trying to speak, in spite of the blood bubbling at his lips. ‘Did she … tell you?’

  About the wedding?

  ‘He’s got a punctured lung. He’s probably bleeding internally. Press on this.’ Nina guided my hand to a pad of torn-up T-shirt pressed against James’s thigh, from where blood was pumping frighteningly fast.

  ‘What can we do?’ I was trying not to cry.

  ‘For the moment? Try to stop him bleeding out. If that artery keeps going like that, he’s dead no matter what. Press harder, it’s still bleeding. I’ll try a tourniquet but …’

  ‘Oh my God.’ It was Flo. She looked like a ghost standing there, her hands over her face. ‘Oh my God. I’m … I’m so sorry – I can’t … I can’t deal with b … blood …’ She gave a little gasping sigh, and collapsed, and I heard Nina swear under her breath, long and low.

  ‘Tom!’ she bellowed. ‘Get Flo away from here! She’s fainted. Get her to her room.’ She pushed the hair back from her face. There was blood on her cheekbone and on her brow.

  ‘Clare …’ James said. He licked his lips. His eyes were fixed on mine, like there was something he was trying to tell me. I squeezed his hand, trying to hold it together.

  ‘She’s coming.’ Where the hell was she? ‘Clare!’ I shouted. No answer.

  ‘No …’ James managed. ‘Clare … text … Did she say?’ His voice was so faint it was hard to work out what he was trying to say.

  ‘What?’

  He had closed his eyes. His hand in mine was relaxing.

  ‘He’s dying,’ I said to Nina, hearing the hysteria rising in my own voice. ‘Nina, do something.’

  ‘What the fuck do you think I am doing? Playing tea-parties? Get me a towel. No, wait – don’t let go of that pad on his thigh. I’ll get it. Where the fuck is Clare?’

  She got up and ran for the kitchen, and I heard her banging through drawers.

  James lay very still.

  ‘James?’ I said, suddenly panicked. ‘James, stay with me!’

  He opened his eyes, painfully, and lay looking up at me, his eyes bright and dark in the soft light from the hall. His T-shirt was split open like a peeled fruit, and his blood-stained chest and belly were bare to the cold air. I wanted to touch him, to kiss him, to tell him everything was OK. But I could not. Because it was a lie.

  I gritted my teeth and pressed harder on the pad on his thigh, willing the blood to stop pooling and pooling.

  ‘I’m … sorry …’ he said, very faint, so faint that I thought I had misheard.

  ‘What?’ I put my head closer, trying to hear.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ His hand squeezed mine, and then, to my astonishment, he reached up, his arm trembling with the effort, and touched my cheek. His breath rattled in his throat, and a thin trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to cry. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I managed. ‘It was a long time ago. It’s all over now.’

  ‘Clare …’

  Oh fuck, where was she?

  A tear dripped off my nose onto his chest, and he reached up again and tried to wipe my cheek, but his arm was too weak and he let it fall back.

  ‘Don’t … cry …’

  ‘Oh James,’ it was all I could manage, a gulping exhortation that tried to say everything I couldn’t. James, don’t die, please don’t die.

  ‘Leo …’ he said softly, and he closed his eyes. Only James ever called me that. Only him. Always him.

  I am still crying when the knock on the door comes, and I struggle up against the pillows, before remembering the electric button that raises the bedhead automatically.

  The bed grinds me into a sitting position, and I take a deep, shuddering breath and swipe at my eyes.

  ‘Come in.’

  The door opens, and it is Lamarr. I know my eyes must be red and wet, and my throat croaky, but I can’t find it in myself to care.

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ I say, before she can say anything else – before she’s sat down, even. ‘Please. I’ll tell you everything I can remember, but I have to know. Is he dead?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and I know. I try to speak, but I can’t. I sit, shaking my head, and trying to make the words come, but they don’t.

  Lamarr sits in silence while I struggle for control, and then at last, when my breathing eases, she holds out the paper tray she’s carrying.

  ‘Coffee?’ she asks, gently.

  I shouldn’t care. James is dead. What does coffee matter?

  I nod, half-reluctantly, and when she hands it to me, I take a long sip. It’s hot and strong. It is as unlike the watery hospital gravy as chalk from Gorgonzola and I feel it running into every cell of my body and waking me up. It is impossible to believe that I can be alive and James can be dead.

  When I put the cup down, my face feels stiff and my head aches. ‘Thank you,’ I manage, my voice rough. Lamarr leans across the gap between us and squeezes my hand.

  ‘It was the least I could do. I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out like that, but I was asked—’ She stops and rephrases. ‘It was thought advisable not to tell you more than you knew already. We wanted to get your version. Uninfluenced.’

  I don’t say anything. I just bow my head. I have written about this kind of thing, this kind of interview, all my adult life, and I never imagined for one moment I would be here.

  ‘I know this will be painful,’ she says at last, as the silence stretches, ‘but please, can you think back to last night? What do you remember?’

  ‘I remember up to the – the shooting,’ I say. ‘I remember running down the stairs, and seeing him … seeing him, lying there …’ I grit my teeth and pause for a moment, the breath hissing between my teeth. I will not cry again. Instead I gulp at the coffee, not caring that it scalds as I swallow. ‘You must know about the shooting?’ I say at last. ‘Did they tell you, the others? Nina and Clare and everyone?’

  ‘We have several different accounts,’ she says, a hint of evasiveness in her voice. ‘But we need to get all the perspectives.’

  ‘We were scared,’ I say, trying to think back. It seems like a hundred years ago, swathed in a fog of adrenaline as we all crept round the house, half-hysterical with a mixture of drunken excitement and genuine fear. ‘There was a message on the ouija board – about a murderer.’ The irony, as I say it, is almost unbearable. ‘We didn’t believe it – most of us, anyway – but I suppose it made us edgy. And there were footprints, in the snow outside. And when we woke up, the first time I mean, the kitchen door had come open.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know. Someone had locked it – or said they had. Flo I think. Or was it Clare? Someone had checked, anyway. But it blew open, and it just made us all more crazed and frightened. And so when we heard the footsteps …’

  ‘Whose idea was it to get the gun?’

  ‘I don’t know. Flo had it from earlier, I think. From when the door blew open. But it wasn’t supposed to be loaded. It was supposed to have blanks.’

  ‘And you were holding it, is that right?’

  ‘Me?’ I look up at her with genuine shock. ‘No! It was Flo, I think. It was definitely her.’

  ‘But yo
ur fingerprints are on the barrel.’

  They have fingerprinted the gun? I stare at her. Then I realise she’s waiting for an answer. ‘On the b-barrel, yes.’ Fuck, do not stammer. ‘But not the – the other bit. The handle bit. The stock, I mean. Look, she was waving it around like a crazy thing. I was trying to keep it away from us.’

  ‘Why, if you thought it wasn’t loaded?’

  The question takes me aback. Suddenly, in spite of the sun, the room feels cold. I want to ask again if I’m a suspect, but she has said I’m not, and won’t it look strange to keep asking?

  ‘B-because I don’t like having a gun pointed at me, no matter what it’s loaded with. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ she says mildly, and makes a note on her pad. She flips over a sheet and then turns back. ‘Let’s go back a bit. James – how did you know him?’

  I shut my eyes. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. There are so many options open to me: we went to school together. We were friends. He is Clare’s fiancé. Was, I correct myself silently. It is impossible to believe he is gone. And I realise, suddenly, the selfishness of my grief. I have been thinking about James. But Clare— Clare has lost everything. Yesterday she was to be a bride. Today she is … what? There’s not even a word for what she is. Not a widow – just bereft.

  ‘He … we used to be together,’ I say at last. It’s better to be honest, surely? Or at least as honest as I can be.

  ‘When did you break up?’

  ‘A long time ago. We were … oh … sixteen or seventeen.’

  The ‘oh’ is a little dishonest. It makes it sound like a guesstimate. In fact, I know to the day when we broke up. I was sixteen and two months. James was just a few months away from his seventeenth birthday.

  ‘Amicably?’

  ‘Not at the time, no.’

  ‘But you’ve made up since? I mean, you were on Clare’s hen weekend …’ She trails off, inviting me to jump in with platitudes about how time heals everything, how betrayals at sixteen are the stuff you laugh about at twenty-six.

  Only I don’t. What should I say? The truth?

  Something cold is stealing around my heart, a chill in spite of the hospital heat and the warmth of the setting sun.

  I don’t like these questions.

  James’s death was an accident: a gun that should never have been loaded, going off by mistake. So why is this policewoman here, asking about long-dead break-ups?

  ‘What relevance does this have to James’s death?’ I say abruptly. Too abruptly. Her head comes up from her notepad, her plum-coloured lips forming a silent ‘oh’ of surprise. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

  ‘We’re just trying to form a complete picture,’ she says mildly.

  I feel cold all up and down my spine.

  James was shot by a gun that was supposed to be unloaded. So who loaded it?

  I feel the blood drain from my cheeks. I very, very much want to ask the question I asked before: am I a suspect?

  But I can’t. I can’t ask, because to ask would be suspicious. And suddenly I very much want to not be suspicious.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ I say, trying to recover. ‘It hurt a lot at the time, but you get over things, don’t you?’

  No you don’t. Not things like that. Or at least, I don’t.

  But she doesn’t hear the lie in my voice. Instead she smoothly changes tack. ‘What happened after James was shot?’ she asks. ‘Can you remember what you all did next?’

  I shut my eyes.

  ‘Try to walk me through it,’ she says. Her voice is soft, encouraging, almost hypnotic. ‘You were with him in the hallway …’

  I was with him in the hallway. There was blood on my hands, on my nightclothes. His blood. Masses of it.

  His eyes had drifted closed, and after a few minutes I put my face down to his, trying to hear if he was still breathing. He was. I could feel his halting breath on my cheek.

  How different he was to when we had been together – there were lines around his eyes, a five o’clock shadow on his jaw, and his face had become leaner and more defined. But he was still James. I knew the contours of his brow, the ridge of his nose, the hollow beneath his lip where the sweat beaded on summer nights.

  He was still my James. Except he was not. Where in God’s name was Clare?

  I heard footsteps behind me, but it was Nina, holding a length of white cloth which looked like a sheet. She knelt and began binding James’s leg very tight.

  ‘I think our best hope is to stabilise you until we get you to hospital,’ she said, very loud and clear, talking to James, but to me as well, I knew. ‘James, can you hear me?’

  He didn’t respond. His face had gone a strange waxen colour. Nina shook her head and then said to me, ‘Clare had better drive. You direct. I’ll go in the back with James and try to keep him going until we get there. Tom had better stay with Flo. I think she’s in shock.’

  ‘Where’s Clare?’

  ‘She was trying to get a signal up the far end of the garden – apparently you can sometimes get one there.’

  ‘But there’s nothing,’ a voice came from over my shoulder. It was Clare. Her face was the colour of skimmed milk, but she was dressed. ‘Can he talk?’

  ‘He was saying a few words,’ I said. My throat was cracked and hoarse with tears. ‘But I … I think he’s unconscious now.’

  ‘Oh fuck.’ Her face went even whiter, even her lips bloodless pale, and there were tears in her eyes. ‘I should have come down sooner. I just thought—’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Nina cut her off. ‘It was the right thing to do – getting an ambulance was the most important thing, if we could only have got a fucking signal. Right, I think that tourniquet is as good as I can make it – I’m not going to try to do anything else now, let’s get him out of here.’

  ‘I’ll drive,’ Clare said instantly.

  Nina nodded. ‘I’ll come in the back with James.’ She looked out of the window. ‘Clare, you go and bring the car as close to the front door as you can get it.’ Clare nodded and left to get her car keys. Nina carried on, talking to me this time, ‘We’ll need something to lift him on. It’ll hurt him too much if we just pick him up.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘Something flat ideally, like a stretcher.’ We both gazed around but there was nothing obvious.

  ‘We could take a door down.’ Tom’s voice came from behind us, making us both jump. He gazed down at James, now fully unconscious on the floor in a spreading pool of his own blood. There was a kind of horror in his expression. ‘Flo’s out cold in the bedroom. Is he going to be OK?’

  ‘Honestly?’ Nina said. She glanced at James and I saw her face was weary and, for the first time since she had taken over, showing traces of fear. ‘Honestly, I don’t know. It’s possible he’ll make it. Door’s a good idea. Can you find a screwdriver? I think there was a box of stuff under the stairs.’

  Tom gave a short nod and disappeared.

  Nina put her face in her hands. ‘Fuck,’ she said, into her cupped, muffling palms. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No. Yes.’ She looked up. ‘I’m fine. Just – oh my God. What a fucking stupid wasteful way to die. Who the hell fires a gun when they don’t know what it’s loaded with?’

  I thought of Tom, waving it around yesterday as a joke, and I felt suddenly sick.

  ‘Poor Flo,’ I said.

  ‘Did she pull the trigger?’ Nina asked.

  ‘I – I assume so. I don’t know. She was holding it.’

  ‘I thought you were.’

  ‘Me?’ I felt my jaw drop with surprise and horror. ‘God, no. But it could have been anyone who jolted her – we were all standing so close.’

  There was a growl from outside and I heard Clare’s tyres crunching through the snowy gravel outside the front door. At the same time there was a thud from the living room and Tom appeared, dragging a heavy oak door with the handles still attache
d.

  ‘It weighs a ton,’ he said, ‘but we’ve only got to get it as far as the car.’

  ‘OK.’ Nina took charge again, her authority effortless. ‘Tom, you take his shoulders. I’ll take his feet. Nora, you support his hips as we lift and shift them onto the door; try not to disturb that dressing on his thigh and be careful not to catch anything on the door handle. Ready? On my count of lift; three, two, one, lift.’

  We all heaved, there was a kind of groaning involuntary whimper from James that brought a fresh spatter of blood to his lips, and then he was onto the makeshift stretcher. I ran to open the huge steel front door – thanking God for the first time for the scale of this house, the internal door would fit through easily – and then back to help Nina with the foot end of the door. It was immensely heavy but we wrestled it down the hallway and out into the freezing night where Clare was waiting, the engine ticking over, the exhaust a white cloud in the cold air.

  ‘Is he OK?’ she asked over her shoulder, reaching to open the rear door. ‘Is he still breathing?’

  ‘He’s still breathing,’ Nina said, ‘but it’ll be touch and go. OK, let’s get him off this door.’

  Somehow, in a horrible, trembling, blood-spattered rush, we got him into the back seat, where he lay slumped, breathing in a shallow rasping way that frightened me. His leg was hanging out of the car, and, grotesquely, I saw that the seeping blood was steaming in the chilly air. The sight stopped me in my tracks, and I was just standing there, too shocked to think what to do next as Tom folded the leg gently into the footwell and then shut the door.

  ‘There’s not going to be enough room for both of us,’ Nina said. For a minute I didn’t know what she was talking about, and then I realised: James was taking up all the back seat by himself. There was no way Nina could fit in the back as she’d suggested.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ I said. ‘You should go with them.’

  Nina didn’t try to argue.

  ‘Nora?’ Lamarr’s voice is gentle but insistent. ‘Nora? Are you awake? Can you tell me what you remember?’

  I open my eyes.

  ‘We got James out to the car. We didn’t have anything to carry him so Tom took down a door. Clare was driving – Nina was supposed to go in the back seat with James, and I was going to direct.’