The Weekend Escape, page 29
Chapter Thirty-Four
SATURDAY
8:15pm
Afterwards, Lyndsey would have no memory of how she hauled herself back up onto the stone steps. She would’ve sworn that she didn’t have the strength in her body to do even a single pull-up. But adrenaline and abject terror apparently worked wonders. She managed to pull herself up high enough to swing her legs onto the stone steps and, from there, claw her way to safety.
The first clear memory she had was of lying on the steps with her cheek pressed to the cold stone. She was shuddering and crying. Each breath hitched in her chest. There were deep pools of hurt in her stomach, in the side of her face, all the way up both her arms, and throughout her lungs. It was easier to catalogue the bits of her that didn’t hurt.
The noise of the storm outside seemed to match her heartbeat. A steady pulsing beat that made her head ache. She lay still, in the hope that it would fade, but if anything it seemed to be getting louder.
At length, she made herself move, just enough so she could peer down over the edge of the steps.
Far below her, just discernible in the last traces of daylight that edged through the open door down there, something lay on the floor. It might, with a little imagination, have been a person. The most visible part was the blonde hair, which was a smudge in the darkness. When Lyndsey saw that, she had to close her eyes until her dizziness passed.
She lay there for some time. The noise of the storm increased, still at that steady rhythm, until Lyndsey at last raised her head. The sound was too steady, too regular.
It wasn’t just her imagination, or the pulse of blood in her head. Something else was producing that noise.
She couldn’t find the strength to walk all the way down the steps, in the dark, knowing that she would have to step right past Amanda’s shattered body in order to get out. The idea made her chest tighten to the point of panic. Instead, she slowly crawled upwards, one stone step at a time, her hands clinging for purchase like she was drowning.
At the top, she made herself stand, even though it felt like the floor was pitching like the deck of a ship. She limped across to the doorway that led to the concrete balcony. She was aware she’d left trails of blood droplets all across the floor.
As she stepped outside, wind and rain lashed her face. It felt almost comforting. She was glad she was alive to feel it. The thrumming noise reverberated through her chest.
Off to her left, a bright light speared through the twilight. It was pointed away from her, illuminating a chunk of land near the bunkhouse, dancing over the wind-tossed bracken. It came from the powerful searchlight of a helicopter. As Lyndsey watched, the helicopter descended, to make a delicate landing in one of the fields. The downdraft of its rotors flattened the grass.
Lyndsey shielded her eyes against the glare. She couldn’t quite see the bunkhouse from that angle, but she saw the glow and flicker of the fire which was still burning fiercely. A figure ran across the grass towards the helicopter, stopping a safe distance from the rotors, waving their hands. It had to be Juliet.
Lyndsey sagged against the solid support of the doorframe. Juliet would tell them to pick up Sonia and Marne from the sea. That absolutely had to be their first priority. Lyndsey prayed that those two had been able to hang onto the rocks in the middle of the channel until now. The helicopter would airlift them out of the sea and take them to hospital. And Val as well, they’d get her to hospital. It was a flight of only a few minutes.
Within an hour, they’d all be back on the mainland.
‘We’re saved,’ Lyndsey said aloud, to see what the words sounded like. She could barely hear them over the steady thrumming of the helicopter engine. ‘We’re safe.’
She realised she couldn’t stay up there. After the helicopter rescued her friends, they would come looking for her. Since Juliet didn’t know where Lyndsey had gone, it could be ages before they thought to look at the top the lighthouse. Lyndsey would have to go meet them. Even if that meant tackling the stairs and walking past Amanda’s body.
She took one last look out over the storm-ruffled island, with the waves smashing themselves to pieces against its shore, then turned away to make the long, slow descent down the stairs to the exit.
Chapter Thirty-Five
SUNDAY 25TH AUGUST 2019
7:00pm
Furness General Hospital, Barrow-in-Furness
They had given Lyndsey a separate hospital room to herself, and all the blankets she wanted. She cocooned herself, wrapping them tightly around her body, until at last she managed to feel warm again. Even so, there was a chill right through to the marrow of her bones that she suspected would never leave. She would carry some of that coldness with her forever.
‘Are you cleared to have visitors?’ a voice asked from the doorway.
Lyndsey raised her head. ‘You’re alive,’ she said in amazement.
‘Of course I am. What made you think otherwise?’
Lyndsey didn’t answer that. ‘How come they’re letting you wander around?’ she asked instead. ‘I thought we were supposed to stay in our beds.’
‘Pfft,’ Val said. ‘If they wanted to enforce that, they should’ve kept the police officers here. Do you realise there are only two officers on the ward now? And they’ve got their hands full with Juliet.’
She came into Lyndsey’s room and closed the door behind her. Although the police had taken away their clothing – forensics, they’d said – Val had managed to source a slightly unflattering tracksuit from somewhere. The graze on her face had been cleaned, but there was some ugly bruising all the way up that side of her face, disappearing into her hairline. Lyndsey blinked twice, just in case her mind was playing tricks on her. But no, Val was there, in person, alive. It felt like a miracle.
‘What’s wrong with Juliet?’ Lyndsey asked.
‘Nothing. She’s just giving one hell of a statement. I could hear her shouting earlier. She’s very angry about a lot of things.’
Lyndsey found it hard to picture Juliet being angry enough to shout at a police officer. ‘So she’s okay, then?’
‘Sounds like it. Gary tried to get onto the ward earlier to see her, and when they said he wasn’t allowed, he kicked off as well. That relationship seems to be ninety per cent based on drama. Hopefully, when they finally get a chance to talk, they’ll do it without shouting. It sounds like they’ve got a few things to work through.’
‘Speaking of communicating,’ Lyndsey said, ‘I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to be talking to each other. The police said we shouldn’t.’
Val waved it away. ‘I’ve already given my statement. I assume you have as well, right? So it’s a little late for us to do any collaborating, if that’s what they’re worried about.’
‘Still.’ Lyndsey shifted in her bed. She was aware how ridiculous she must’ve looked, mummified in her blankets, with only her face poking out. However, she wasn’t going to unwrap herself, not for anyone. ‘We shouldn’t be talking.’
‘You’re no fun. Don’t you want to compare notes?’
Val’s voice was still scratchy and raw, deeper than usual, and she moved slowly as she pulled a chair up to Lyndsey’s beside and collapsed into it with a sigh of relief.
‘How’re you feeling?’ Lyndsey asked.
‘Sore. Unhappy. They put me on oxygen and a drip for almost four hours. Look.’ Val pushed up her sleeve to show off the crook of her elbow. A purplish bruise discoloured her skin. ‘I told them that I bruise like a peach, but they cannulated me anyway. Bunch of sods.’
‘They saved your life.’
Val’s expression turned uncharacteristically serious. ‘No, you did that. If you hadn’t dragged me out of the bunkhouse, I’d be dead. No question about it.’
Lyndsey gave a crooked smile. ‘Sorry I bashed up your face while doing it.’
‘Think nothing of it. Gave the police an excuse to photograph my best side. Besides—’ Val gestured at Lyndsey. ‘Your face didn’t escape unscathed either.’
The air gun pellet had torn a gouge right across Lyndsey’s cheek, less than an inch below her right eye, but it’d been deflected by the bone. If Lyndsey’s head hadn’t been slightly turned away when the rifle went off, it might’ve been a different story. She could easily have lost an eye. Or ended up with the pellet lodged deep in her sinuses.
A bulky package of gauze now covered the injury. It was a constant blur in the bottom of Lyndsey’s peripheral vision. One of the reasons she was keeping her hands inside her blanket-cocoon was so she didn’t fidget with the bandage.
‘You’re going to have a great scar,’ Val said. ‘A real war wound.’
‘Don’t. The doctors keep talking about plastic surgery. I don’t know how I feel about that.’
‘Problems for another day.’ Val settled down into the visitor’s chair. It was the same chair that the police officer had sat in earlier that day, when Lyndsey had given her statement. ‘Have you heard from any of the others?’
‘Nobody will tell me anything,’ Lyndsey said bitterly. ‘The nurses, the police … they’re all keeping quiet around me. I figure it must be because…’ She braced herself. ‘They’re dead, aren’t they? Sonia and Marne. They didn’t make it.’
Val’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘No, no. They made it. The helicopter plucked them both out of the sea.’
‘You know that for a fact, do you? You’ve seen them?’
‘Not for myself, no, but the people are saying—’
‘People are saying almost nothing. And when they do tell us something … I don’t know whether we can believe them.’
About the only thing the police had confirmed to her was that Amanda was dead. She’d died instantly from the fall. Lyndsey was not ready to start processing that just yet. The rescue helicopter had made a return trip to retrieve Amanda, and also pick up Bobbie from that ledge by the sea.
‘I didn’t trust them when they said you were fine either,’ Lyndsey admitted. ‘I thought maybe … I don’t know. I thought they were telling me what I wanted to hear. I was scared it wasn’t true.’
Part of her still wasn’t ready to accept that her friends had survived. It felt too impossible. Lyndsey tried to focus on Val, who was definitely there, at her bedside. Lyndsey considered poking her with a finger to make sure she was real.
‘This is why you should get up and wander the ward,’ Val said. ‘Make a nuisance of yourself. It’s amazing what you find out.’ She smiled. ‘Marne’s been discharged already. I don’t know the full story, but it sounds like she’s a bit battered and bruised, and had a touch of hypothermia, but that’s it. Walking wounded.’
It still sounded like a lie to Lyndsey. After what Marne had gone through, would she really have been discharged so quickly? What was a touch of hypothermia, anyway? Surely hypothermia was an all-or-nothing condition. Val sounded certain, but maybe the police and the doctors had lied to her too.
We’ve got no way of contacting Marne or her family, Lyndsey realised suddenly. We don’t even know her full name. There was a chance they would never run into each other again. If Marne didn’t want to speak to them – and it seemed likely that she wouldn’t, even if she was in fact alive and well – then Lyndsey would never get a chance to thank her for trying to save Sonia’s life.
The police had refused to tell Lyndsey whether the fire had destroyed the bunkhouse and the observatory, or whether anything could be salvaged from it. Lyndsey could only hope Marne hadn’t lost everything. Poor Marne, who had risked her life to save Sonia’s and, in return, had lost her job and her livelihood. If she was alive, there was no way she’d be able to return to Shell Island this season. Lyndsey had no idea how long it’d take National Heritage to repair or rebuild the observatory … or whether they might decide it wasn’t financially viable to do so.
The thought caused fresh tears to sting Lyndsey’s eyes. Ever since she’d arrived at the hospital, she’d been constantly emotional. Every little thing made her cry.
‘What about Sonia?’ she asked.
‘She’s not on this ward. As far as I could find out, she’s been transferred to Ward 4.’
‘Ward 4. That’s—?’
‘Gynae. I don’t know.’ Val lifted her hands; let them fall. ‘It could mean anything. I don’t know for sure. The staff are really cagey up on that ward. Don’t like answering questions at all.’
‘You went there? We’re not allowed to leave the ward. How—?’
‘I didn’t go anywhere. But I suppose I did use the phone at the nurses’ station while no one was looking. They told me Sonia’s still there, but I couldn’t blag any other answers out of them. And then a nurse came by and told me off.’
Lyndsey laughed. It hurt, but she didn’t care. She’d assumed she would never laugh again. ‘How did you talk your way out of that one?’
‘I told them I’d been trying to call my missus and couldn’t figure out how to get an outside line. I’ll try again after the shift changes.’ Val cleared her throat. ‘It, ah, it sounded to me like someone’s there with Sonia. She’s not on her own.’
Lyndsey’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t think it’s—?’
‘It’s not the guy that’s caused all her troubles, no. He’s in custody right now. Helping police with their enquiries.’
Lyndsey slumped back on her pillow. ‘God. What a mess.’
‘If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s Marne who’s sitting with Sonia on the ward.’
‘Marne? You think?’
‘Intuition. Or maybe just hope.’ Val folded her hands on her stomach. ‘So, do you want to talk about things?’
‘Not in the slightest.’ Lyndsey sighed. ‘But I’m betting that you do, yeah? Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.’
‘Correct.’ Val inched her chair closer to the bed. ‘I told the police everything I knew, and everything I suspected, but obviously there are some gaps in my knowledge.’
‘Wait, everything? Even about Sonia having an affair?’
‘Well, no, not that.’ Val wrinkled her nose. ‘If Sonia wants to come clean, that’s her business.’
Lyndsey smiled faintly. ‘I didn’t say anything either. Did you tell the police about Cherry?’
Val hesitated. ‘In respect of what?’
‘You were planning to write a story about her. You talked about it with Bobbie. Who promptly went and told everything to Amanda.’ Just speaking the names aloud made Lyndsey’s chest hurt.
‘Ah. Right. I wasn’t sure if you knew about that.’
‘Amanda told me. Val … do you realise how much this upset everyone? Amanda never knew the full story. Those details we kept from her… I guess we thought we were protecting her.’ Or protecting ourselves, Lyndsey thought with a guilty twinge. ‘When Bobbie decided to confess everything to Amanda this year … I think it tipped Amanda over the edge. She thought we’d all conspired to keep her in the dark. Worse, she thought we’d murdered Cherry, either deliberately or by our own dumb negligence, then lied to save ourselves. What were you thinking? Why did you have to drag everything up like that?’
Val’s eyebrows went up. ‘I only mentioned it to Bobbie as a hypothetical,’ she objected. ‘I’d been toying with the idea for a while, and I wanted to find out how closely her memories matched my own. At some point, I was going to speak to you all about it. I wanted to hold off putting anything in writing until I was sure everyone was comfortable with the idea. I get how that’s important.’
‘Except you didn’t hold off, did you? You’d started writing it. There was some of it on your laptop, right?’
‘Crap.’ Val winced as she realised. ‘Crap. You think she read it?’
‘I think you need to start password protecting your work. Or at least stop leaving it lying around where just anyone can read it.’ Lyndsey felt anger flare inside her. If Val had just left well enough alone… ‘Why on earth did you think it was a good idea to rake up the past like that? When you told Bobbie about possibly writing a book about Cherry, it stirred up all her memories and made her feel guilty all over again for something that was never her fault. She thought it’d make things better if she talked it out with Amanda.’ Lyndsey thinned her lips. ‘If you hadn’t dug it all up, none of this would’ve happened.’
Val knotted her fingers together. Distress was stamped on her face. ‘It was just an idea,’ she said. ‘I thought it’d make a good basis for a story. I was going to anonymise everyone’s details and change the circumstances around enough so that it would only be based on the truth. Like, a fictionalised account. I only spoke to Bobbie about it because I wasn’t sure how everyone would react. I never meant to upset anyone.’
Lyndsey closed her eyes. The anger still burned through her chest, but it was hard to direct it solely at Val. ‘We’re all to blame,’ she muttered. ‘We should never have kept anything from Amanda. She deserved to know the truth about her sister’s death.’
‘None of us deliberately lied to her,’ Val said, quietly. ‘We were all shocked by what happened to Cherry. None of us wanted to admit we’d played a part in it.’
‘We should’ve admitted it.’ Lyndsey sighed. ‘It was the anniversary of Cherry’s death this year, and we all forgot. Not one of us even checked in with Amanda to make sure she was okay.’
Val was quiet for a moment. ‘Ten years. That’s right. How could I forget? I’ve got all the dates written down. I can’t believe it didn’t click.’
They both fell silent. After a minute, Lyndsey said, ‘Do you think the police will believe us?’
‘Don’t see why they wouldn’t.’
‘Amanda pointed out it was just our word against hers. I know she’s not going to get a chance to tell whatever story she wanted to tell the police, but there’s still no real evidence to back us up.’ Lyndsey glanced moodily out of the window. From her angle in bed, all she could see were grey clouds and the raindrops on the glass. The storm still hadn’t let up. ‘Everything went up in smoke with the bunkhouse.’
Val slapped her thigh with the palm of her hand as if remembering something. ‘That’s what I forgot,’ she said. ‘You don’t know why I went back to the bunkhouse, do you?’
SATURDAY
8:15pm
Afterwards, Lyndsey would have no memory of how she hauled herself back up onto the stone steps. She would’ve sworn that she didn’t have the strength in her body to do even a single pull-up. But adrenaline and abject terror apparently worked wonders. She managed to pull herself up high enough to swing her legs onto the stone steps and, from there, claw her way to safety.
The first clear memory she had was of lying on the steps with her cheek pressed to the cold stone. She was shuddering and crying. Each breath hitched in her chest. There were deep pools of hurt in her stomach, in the side of her face, all the way up both her arms, and throughout her lungs. It was easier to catalogue the bits of her that didn’t hurt.
The noise of the storm outside seemed to match her heartbeat. A steady pulsing beat that made her head ache. She lay still, in the hope that it would fade, but if anything it seemed to be getting louder.
At length, she made herself move, just enough so she could peer down over the edge of the steps.
Far below her, just discernible in the last traces of daylight that edged through the open door down there, something lay on the floor. It might, with a little imagination, have been a person. The most visible part was the blonde hair, which was a smudge in the darkness. When Lyndsey saw that, she had to close her eyes until her dizziness passed.
She lay there for some time. The noise of the storm increased, still at that steady rhythm, until Lyndsey at last raised her head. The sound was too steady, too regular.
It wasn’t just her imagination, or the pulse of blood in her head. Something else was producing that noise.
She couldn’t find the strength to walk all the way down the steps, in the dark, knowing that she would have to step right past Amanda’s shattered body in order to get out. The idea made her chest tighten to the point of panic. Instead, she slowly crawled upwards, one stone step at a time, her hands clinging for purchase like she was drowning.
At the top, she made herself stand, even though it felt like the floor was pitching like the deck of a ship. She limped across to the doorway that led to the concrete balcony. She was aware she’d left trails of blood droplets all across the floor.
As she stepped outside, wind and rain lashed her face. It felt almost comforting. She was glad she was alive to feel it. The thrumming noise reverberated through her chest.
Off to her left, a bright light speared through the twilight. It was pointed away from her, illuminating a chunk of land near the bunkhouse, dancing over the wind-tossed bracken. It came from the powerful searchlight of a helicopter. As Lyndsey watched, the helicopter descended, to make a delicate landing in one of the fields. The downdraft of its rotors flattened the grass.
Lyndsey shielded her eyes against the glare. She couldn’t quite see the bunkhouse from that angle, but she saw the glow and flicker of the fire which was still burning fiercely. A figure ran across the grass towards the helicopter, stopping a safe distance from the rotors, waving their hands. It had to be Juliet.
Lyndsey sagged against the solid support of the doorframe. Juliet would tell them to pick up Sonia and Marne from the sea. That absolutely had to be their first priority. Lyndsey prayed that those two had been able to hang onto the rocks in the middle of the channel until now. The helicopter would airlift them out of the sea and take them to hospital. And Val as well, they’d get her to hospital. It was a flight of only a few minutes.
Within an hour, they’d all be back on the mainland.
‘We’re saved,’ Lyndsey said aloud, to see what the words sounded like. She could barely hear them over the steady thrumming of the helicopter engine. ‘We’re safe.’
She realised she couldn’t stay up there. After the helicopter rescued her friends, they would come looking for her. Since Juliet didn’t know where Lyndsey had gone, it could be ages before they thought to look at the top the lighthouse. Lyndsey would have to go meet them. Even if that meant tackling the stairs and walking past Amanda’s body.
She took one last look out over the storm-ruffled island, with the waves smashing themselves to pieces against its shore, then turned away to make the long, slow descent down the stairs to the exit.
Chapter Thirty-Five
SUNDAY 25TH AUGUST 2019
7:00pm
Furness General Hospital, Barrow-in-Furness
They had given Lyndsey a separate hospital room to herself, and all the blankets she wanted. She cocooned herself, wrapping them tightly around her body, until at last she managed to feel warm again. Even so, there was a chill right through to the marrow of her bones that she suspected would never leave. She would carry some of that coldness with her forever.
‘Are you cleared to have visitors?’ a voice asked from the doorway.
Lyndsey raised her head. ‘You’re alive,’ she said in amazement.
‘Of course I am. What made you think otherwise?’
Lyndsey didn’t answer that. ‘How come they’re letting you wander around?’ she asked instead. ‘I thought we were supposed to stay in our beds.’
‘Pfft,’ Val said. ‘If they wanted to enforce that, they should’ve kept the police officers here. Do you realise there are only two officers on the ward now? And they’ve got their hands full with Juliet.’
She came into Lyndsey’s room and closed the door behind her. Although the police had taken away their clothing – forensics, they’d said – Val had managed to source a slightly unflattering tracksuit from somewhere. The graze on her face had been cleaned, but there was some ugly bruising all the way up that side of her face, disappearing into her hairline. Lyndsey blinked twice, just in case her mind was playing tricks on her. But no, Val was there, in person, alive. It felt like a miracle.
‘What’s wrong with Juliet?’ Lyndsey asked.
‘Nothing. She’s just giving one hell of a statement. I could hear her shouting earlier. She’s very angry about a lot of things.’
Lyndsey found it hard to picture Juliet being angry enough to shout at a police officer. ‘So she’s okay, then?’
‘Sounds like it. Gary tried to get onto the ward earlier to see her, and when they said he wasn’t allowed, he kicked off as well. That relationship seems to be ninety per cent based on drama. Hopefully, when they finally get a chance to talk, they’ll do it without shouting. It sounds like they’ve got a few things to work through.’
‘Speaking of communicating,’ Lyndsey said, ‘I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to be talking to each other. The police said we shouldn’t.’
Val waved it away. ‘I’ve already given my statement. I assume you have as well, right? So it’s a little late for us to do any collaborating, if that’s what they’re worried about.’
‘Still.’ Lyndsey shifted in her bed. She was aware how ridiculous she must’ve looked, mummified in her blankets, with only her face poking out. However, she wasn’t going to unwrap herself, not for anyone. ‘We shouldn’t be talking.’
‘You’re no fun. Don’t you want to compare notes?’
Val’s voice was still scratchy and raw, deeper than usual, and she moved slowly as she pulled a chair up to Lyndsey’s beside and collapsed into it with a sigh of relief.
‘How’re you feeling?’ Lyndsey asked.
‘Sore. Unhappy. They put me on oxygen and a drip for almost four hours. Look.’ Val pushed up her sleeve to show off the crook of her elbow. A purplish bruise discoloured her skin. ‘I told them that I bruise like a peach, but they cannulated me anyway. Bunch of sods.’
‘They saved your life.’
Val’s expression turned uncharacteristically serious. ‘No, you did that. If you hadn’t dragged me out of the bunkhouse, I’d be dead. No question about it.’
Lyndsey gave a crooked smile. ‘Sorry I bashed up your face while doing it.’
‘Think nothing of it. Gave the police an excuse to photograph my best side. Besides—’ Val gestured at Lyndsey. ‘Your face didn’t escape unscathed either.’
The air gun pellet had torn a gouge right across Lyndsey’s cheek, less than an inch below her right eye, but it’d been deflected by the bone. If Lyndsey’s head hadn’t been slightly turned away when the rifle went off, it might’ve been a different story. She could easily have lost an eye. Or ended up with the pellet lodged deep in her sinuses.
A bulky package of gauze now covered the injury. It was a constant blur in the bottom of Lyndsey’s peripheral vision. One of the reasons she was keeping her hands inside her blanket-cocoon was so she didn’t fidget with the bandage.
‘You’re going to have a great scar,’ Val said. ‘A real war wound.’
‘Don’t. The doctors keep talking about plastic surgery. I don’t know how I feel about that.’
‘Problems for another day.’ Val settled down into the visitor’s chair. It was the same chair that the police officer had sat in earlier that day, when Lyndsey had given her statement. ‘Have you heard from any of the others?’
‘Nobody will tell me anything,’ Lyndsey said bitterly. ‘The nurses, the police … they’re all keeping quiet around me. I figure it must be because…’ She braced herself. ‘They’re dead, aren’t they? Sonia and Marne. They didn’t make it.’
Val’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘No, no. They made it. The helicopter plucked them both out of the sea.’
‘You know that for a fact, do you? You’ve seen them?’
‘Not for myself, no, but the people are saying—’
‘People are saying almost nothing. And when they do tell us something … I don’t know whether we can believe them.’
About the only thing the police had confirmed to her was that Amanda was dead. She’d died instantly from the fall. Lyndsey was not ready to start processing that just yet. The rescue helicopter had made a return trip to retrieve Amanda, and also pick up Bobbie from that ledge by the sea.
‘I didn’t trust them when they said you were fine either,’ Lyndsey admitted. ‘I thought maybe … I don’t know. I thought they were telling me what I wanted to hear. I was scared it wasn’t true.’
Part of her still wasn’t ready to accept that her friends had survived. It felt too impossible. Lyndsey tried to focus on Val, who was definitely there, at her bedside. Lyndsey considered poking her with a finger to make sure she was real.
‘This is why you should get up and wander the ward,’ Val said. ‘Make a nuisance of yourself. It’s amazing what you find out.’ She smiled. ‘Marne’s been discharged already. I don’t know the full story, but it sounds like she’s a bit battered and bruised, and had a touch of hypothermia, but that’s it. Walking wounded.’
It still sounded like a lie to Lyndsey. After what Marne had gone through, would she really have been discharged so quickly? What was a touch of hypothermia, anyway? Surely hypothermia was an all-or-nothing condition. Val sounded certain, but maybe the police and the doctors had lied to her too.
We’ve got no way of contacting Marne or her family, Lyndsey realised suddenly. We don’t even know her full name. There was a chance they would never run into each other again. If Marne didn’t want to speak to them – and it seemed likely that she wouldn’t, even if she was in fact alive and well – then Lyndsey would never get a chance to thank her for trying to save Sonia’s life.
The police had refused to tell Lyndsey whether the fire had destroyed the bunkhouse and the observatory, or whether anything could be salvaged from it. Lyndsey could only hope Marne hadn’t lost everything. Poor Marne, who had risked her life to save Sonia’s and, in return, had lost her job and her livelihood. If she was alive, there was no way she’d be able to return to Shell Island this season. Lyndsey had no idea how long it’d take National Heritage to repair or rebuild the observatory … or whether they might decide it wasn’t financially viable to do so.
The thought caused fresh tears to sting Lyndsey’s eyes. Ever since she’d arrived at the hospital, she’d been constantly emotional. Every little thing made her cry.
‘What about Sonia?’ she asked.
‘She’s not on this ward. As far as I could find out, she’s been transferred to Ward 4.’
‘Ward 4. That’s—?’
‘Gynae. I don’t know.’ Val lifted her hands; let them fall. ‘It could mean anything. I don’t know for sure. The staff are really cagey up on that ward. Don’t like answering questions at all.’
‘You went there? We’re not allowed to leave the ward. How—?’
‘I didn’t go anywhere. But I suppose I did use the phone at the nurses’ station while no one was looking. They told me Sonia’s still there, but I couldn’t blag any other answers out of them. And then a nurse came by and told me off.’
Lyndsey laughed. It hurt, but she didn’t care. She’d assumed she would never laugh again. ‘How did you talk your way out of that one?’
‘I told them I’d been trying to call my missus and couldn’t figure out how to get an outside line. I’ll try again after the shift changes.’ Val cleared her throat. ‘It, ah, it sounded to me like someone’s there with Sonia. She’s not on her own.’
Lyndsey’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t think it’s—?’
‘It’s not the guy that’s caused all her troubles, no. He’s in custody right now. Helping police with their enquiries.’
Lyndsey slumped back on her pillow. ‘God. What a mess.’
‘If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s Marne who’s sitting with Sonia on the ward.’
‘Marne? You think?’
‘Intuition. Or maybe just hope.’ Val folded her hands on her stomach. ‘So, do you want to talk about things?’
‘Not in the slightest.’ Lyndsey sighed. ‘But I’m betting that you do, yeah? Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.’
‘Correct.’ Val inched her chair closer to the bed. ‘I told the police everything I knew, and everything I suspected, but obviously there are some gaps in my knowledge.’
‘Wait, everything? Even about Sonia having an affair?’
‘Well, no, not that.’ Val wrinkled her nose. ‘If Sonia wants to come clean, that’s her business.’
Lyndsey smiled faintly. ‘I didn’t say anything either. Did you tell the police about Cherry?’
Val hesitated. ‘In respect of what?’
‘You were planning to write a story about her. You talked about it with Bobbie. Who promptly went and told everything to Amanda.’ Just speaking the names aloud made Lyndsey’s chest hurt.
‘Ah. Right. I wasn’t sure if you knew about that.’
‘Amanda told me. Val … do you realise how much this upset everyone? Amanda never knew the full story. Those details we kept from her… I guess we thought we were protecting her.’ Or protecting ourselves, Lyndsey thought with a guilty twinge. ‘When Bobbie decided to confess everything to Amanda this year … I think it tipped Amanda over the edge. She thought we’d all conspired to keep her in the dark. Worse, she thought we’d murdered Cherry, either deliberately or by our own dumb negligence, then lied to save ourselves. What were you thinking? Why did you have to drag everything up like that?’
Val’s eyebrows went up. ‘I only mentioned it to Bobbie as a hypothetical,’ she objected. ‘I’d been toying with the idea for a while, and I wanted to find out how closely her memories matched my own. At some point, I was going to speak to you all about it. I wanted to hold off putting anything in writing until I was sure everyone was comfortable with the idea. I get how that’s important.’
‘Except you didn’t hold off, did you? You’d started writing it. There was some of it on your laptop, right?’
‘Crap.’ Val winced as she realised. ‘Crap. You think she read it?’
‘I think you need to start password protecting your work. Or at least stop leaving it lying around where just anyone can read it.’ Lyndsey felt anger flare inside her. If Val had just left well enough alone… ‘Why on earth did you think it was a good idea to rake up the past like that? When you told Bobbie about possibly writing a book about Cherry, it stirred up all her memories and made her feel guilty all over again for something that was never her fault. She thought it’d make things better if she talked it out with Amanda.’ Lyndsey thinned her lips. ‘If you hadn’t dug it all up, none of this would’ve happened.’
Val knotted her fingers together. Distress was stamped on her face. ‘It was just an idea,’ she said. ‘I thought it’d make a good basis for a story. I was going to anonymise everyone’s details and change the circumstances around enough so that it would only be based on the truth. Like, a fictionalised account. I only spoke to Bobbie about it because I wasn’t sure how everyone would react. I never meant to upset anyone.’
Lyndsey closed her eyes. The anger still burned through her chest, but it was hard to direct it solely at Val. ‘We’re all to blame,’ she muttered. ‘We should never have kept anything from Amanda. She deserved to know the truth about her sister’s death.’
‘None of us deliberately lied to her,’ Val said, quietly. ‘We were all shocked by what happened to Cherry. None of us wanted to admit we’d played a part in it.’
‘We should’ve admitted it.’ Lyndsey sighed. ‘It was the anniversary of Cherry’s death this year, and we all forgot. Not one of us even checked in with Amanda to make sure she was okay.’
Val was quiet for a moment. ‘Ten years. That’s right. How could I forget? I’ve got all the dates written down. I can’t believe it didn’t click.’
They both fell silent. After a minute, Lyndsey said, ‘Do you think the police will believe us?’
‘Don’t see why they wouldn’t.’
‘Amanda pointed out it was just our word against hers. I know she’s not going to get a chance to tell whatever story she wanted to tell the police, but there’s still no real evidence to back us up.’ Lyndsey glanced moodily out of the window. From her angle in bed, all she could see were grey clouds and the raindrops on the glass. The storm still hadn’t let up. ‘Everything went up in smoke with the bunkhouse.’
Val slapped her thigh with the palm of her hand as if remembering something. ‘That’s what I forgot,’ she said. ‘You don’t know why I went back to the bunkhouse, do you?’
