The Guilty Couple(64)
I’m going to move the package.
Dom’s phone rings, making him jump. He’s never had a call on his burner before, not once. They’re always very, very careful to avoid calls.
‘I have the evidence,’ says the voice in his ear.
‘But … you …’ Dom plucks at the collar of his shirt and fumbles with the button. It’s so tight he can’t breathe. ‘… You said …’
‘Your ex-wife stole it from your safe. I took it back.’
‘What …’ his throat dries ‘… what are you going to do with it?’
‘Look after it. Like you should have done.’
Dom rests the back of his head against the cool wall of the cubicle, too relieved to care about the cistern digging into his back.
‘You need to learn to trust me,’ says the voice. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that?’
Chapter 46
DANI
Dani walks through the labyrinthine corridors of the hospital, as though in a dream. An echo of the last conversation she had with her sister is the only thought in her brain:
If you keep this up, the money I’m saving for rehab will end up paying for your funeral. Do you understand?
Did she conjure this scenario just by mentioning it?
Logically she knows that this isn’t her fault, that she didn’t will it into being by forewarning her sister. But logic left her body the moment she heard her mother’s anguished wail in her ear:
‘Casey’s overdosed. She’s in the hospital. You need to get here now.’
Dani drove from Elephant and Castle to St Thomas’ Hospital Emergency Department – stopping at red lights, indicating, tapping the brake – but she can’t remember a single detail of the journey. There’s a ten-minute hole in her memory that will never be filled. All she can remember is the tinny, desperate sound of her mother’s voice as she explained what had happened. Not that she knew much. Paramedics had been dispatched to a flat in Bermondsey after a 999 call to report a drugs overdose. A young woman had led them to Casey who was slumped across the sofa with heroin paraphernalia strewn over the table beside her. Neither Dani nor her mother could think of anyone Casey knew who lived in Bermondsey, but then they knew so little about her life.
‘Her organs are failing,’ Brenda told Dani between sobs. ‘The doctors don’t think she’ll make it through the night.’
Somehow Dani finds herself standing inside the entrance to the critical care ward. She has a conversation with a nurse that she won’t remember later and follows the direction of the woman’s outstretched arm.
Brenda, hollow-eyed and hunched, glances up from Casey’s bedside as Dani pulls back the curtain that surrounds her sister’s bed. The last time Dani saw her mother she looked every one of her fifty-eight years. Now she looks twenty years older. Her sister appears almost childlike in comparison, her tiny frame swamped by the hospital bed. Her terrible hair is dark spikes on the pillow and her long eyelashes are closed, resting on the deep circles under her eyes.
Dani grips the curtain, the cool material woven through her fingers. This isn’t where Casey should be, in a white, metal bed in a ward that smells of cleaning fluid and death. She should be at home, tucked up beneath her duvet, watching a film. She should be sitting next to her on the sofa, crying with laughter at I’m a Celebrity. She should be out with her mates, throwing moves on the dancefloor. She should be walking and talking and pink-cheeked and healthy. She should be taking the piss and winding Dani up. She should be doing her head in and making her want to scream.
‘Am I too …’ The words fall away as Dani looks from her mother’s heartbroken face to her sister’s chest – so still beneath the starched, white sheet – to the heart monitor, plugged in but silent at the side of the bed.
Chapter 47
OLIVIA
The doctor who walks into the visiting room can’t be more than thirty, but the weariness in her eyes makes her appear much older. I can’t begin to imagine what she has to deal with, day in day out. If A&E is a hospital’s front line then intensive care must be its field hospital with the sickest patients treading the line between life and death. That’s where Smithy is now, having been poked and prodded, scanned and X-rayed. The nurse who ushered me here after Smithy was unloaded from the ambulance and rushed through the hospital told me she was still breathing but her pulse was weak and she remained unconscious. They needed to run a series of checks for head and spinal injuries, broken bones and internal bleeding and they’d come and get me when they’d run all their tests.
‘Olivia?’ the doctor says now.
I nod dumbly, too nervous to speak as she perches on the chair beside me. She presses her lips together in a manner that only ever suggests bad news and slides a box of tissues off the table and hands them to me as tears prick at my eyes.
‘I’m afraid your friend Kelly is very unwell. She’s suffering from an abdominal haemorrhage and she’s been rushed to surgery to try and stop the bleeding.’ She pauses to let it sink in. ‘She’s also suffered an edema – swelling – to her brain which will require another operation to drain the cerebrospinal fluid to help relieve the pressure. Depending on the outcome of the first operation …’