500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(78)
There was a pause.
“Okay,” she said, then took a deep breath. “If you don’t go over this right now, out loud, whether to me or somebody else, this is your last chance. You’ll be in the witness-box. And the perpetrator is going to be staring straight at you. Possibly his mates will be there. Staring at you. Threatening you. I’m not trying to scare you, Lissa. But what if you freeze? Clam up?”
“Oh, actually this is quite harsh,” said Lissa.
The honking grew louder. Anita paused.
“I won’t freeze,” said Lissa suddenly.
“You might.”
Lissa blinked back tears. All at once, the gray day outside the window didn’t look soft and welcoming: it looked ominous and oppressive.
“And I have to warn you. You could cause a mistrial or let the offender go free, if you can’t explain clearly what you saw.”
Lissa could barely speak; the lump in her throat was huge.
Upstairs, Anita’s children were yelling their heads off. Anita leaned forward.
“Lissa, I have black sons. One day you might too. The streets of the city have to be safe for them. You know that. You know that, right?”
And her voice was intense and serious and not at all distracted. All Lissa could do was back away from her gaze, nodding slowly. The taxi honked for the last time, and Anita straightened up.
“And now I have to go,” she said, and Lissa simply nodded.
THERE WAS ANOTHER honking sound, and Lissa belatedly realized it was her own cab. Her heart was racing. She knew Anita was right. She knew. But suddenly it seemed harder than ever.
Chapter 60
I won’t know what you look like, Lissa had typed as she set off for London, after she’d been driven through a bright and golden dawn.
They hadn’t been communicating beyond the professional in the last week, mostly because both of them, without mentioning it, were extremely nervous. Lissa nearly wrote “it’s a blind date” but managed to delete it just in time because it wasn’t a date, it was a meeting with someone she had been doing a job share with—professional, if anything. They had already discussed dates they’d had with other people. So. The fact that she hadn’t mentioned it to Kim-Ange had . . . nothing to do with anything.
Cormac also hadn’t mentioned their meeting to Kim-Ange. She would just make a big deal out of it. Plus, she and Piotr were madly in love and snogging up a storm at breakfast time every day and frankly making everyone a tiny bit sick, and nothing would make her happier than to think of the two of them . . . going for lunch, no more, no less, he told himself, nonetheless ironing his best shirt, a yellow check.
He glanced at her message and typed, I’ll recognize YOU. You’ll be the one loudly complaining about diabetic prescribing.
It just makes everything else MORE DIFFICULT, started Lissa, a bugbear that always made him smile.
ROISIN HAD TOLD Lissa to look sensible in court, so she pulled her hair back into a tight bun that made her look more professional than the curls everywhere and put on a sleek houndstooth check skirt suit that she never really got a chance to wear. Paired with a blouse and some smart earrings her mother had sent her (as well as the suit), she looked surprisingly professional, particularly after having spent the last two months either in uniform or wrapped up in woolly jumpers and thick tights, even through the Highlands spring.
She had brought her overnight bag; she was coming back on the night train, which she was rather excited about; it stopped just up the road from Kirrinfief and was patently the best way to get there, even if it was expensive.
All she had to get through was the trial.
Her heart was beating hard all the way to the airport. Being in Scotland had felt safe, protected, away from everyone else. Not having to face what had happened. There weren’t any teen gangs in Kirrinfief, at least not that she’d heard of. Children ran around practically free range, something that had surprised her when she’d first noticed it, but then realized that everyone knew everyone in their small corner of the world; their children were everyone’s children. It was nice, to see children playing in the streets and down on the little shore and not have to worry about them.
As the little twin prop plane burred its way down the length of the country, Lissa looked at the patchwork fields through the window, unable to concentrate on the book Nina had pressed on her, worrying more and more about coming face-to-face with Kai’s family again. Would they be mad at her? Would questions be asked about that dreadful night at the hospital? No complaints had ever been filed; nothing had happened to her except the secondment, and that hadn’t ended up feeling like a punishment, not at all.
Maybe, she thought, it would be straightforward, would take two minutes. And there would be . . . the Loch Ness monster. She bit her lip. It was nice of him, that was all. And no doubt he wanted to cast an eye over the person who’d been sleeping in his spare room, would be trying to work out whether she’d killed all his plants or broken his fridge. At least he probably knew she hadn’t exactly been having wild parties.
Then another two weeks to pack up and then . . .
Well, she’d think about the future when she had to. She had had a little fantasy, it was true, of possibly renting the guest room, if he was keen—imagine living somewhere where you could afford to have a spare room on an NHS salary! It still beggared belief. A fantasy of finding a job nearby. Maybe not what she was doing, but there must be something. Of, dare she say it, escaping once and for all. The pressure and the racing and the craziness of the city. Just turning her back on it. Leaving the new restaurants and the high heels and the hot new thing to other people. People who got more out of it than she did. People who wouldn’t be constantly worried every time they heard an ambulance whoop, sirens go off, or a helicopter pass overhead.