The Things You Didn't See(20)

Inside lay Maya in her coma, and either side of the bed were Hector and Cassandra. Both looked up expectantly.

‘I hope you don’t mind? I just wanted to drop by, to see how Maya is.’

It wasn’t entirely the truth. Cassandra had filled Holly’s thoughts far more than the mother, with her desperate belief that her mother hadn’t shot herself, her need for Holly to believe her. She lifted her face and gave Holly a warmer smile than seemed fitting. ‘I knew you’d come back,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Hector Hawke sat stiffly on the opposite side of the bed. He was dishevelled and unshaven, his hair haywire. But he seemed determined to keep his composure, his solid jaw jutted and set, as if his teeth were gritted. He nursed his right hand with his left, as though protecting it from injury.

Holly’s senses reacted, sending a numb ache down her own right arm and a tingle into her fingers, his shock so profound she could tune in to nothing emotional except leaden confusion. She tried to find the appropriate words. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘Not unless you can wake up my missus!’ Hector still had the scent of outdoors on his weathered corduroy trousers and thick green jumper, worn at the elbows. Clothing meant for loading a tractor or carrying hay bales, not for hospitals.

Holly stood, awkward. ‘Well, I’ll be going then.’

She turned, feeling hot and wishing she hadn’t come, when Cassandra’s voice called out, ‘No, Holly, wait. Do you remember Mr Godwin from school?’

‘Of course, he was our head teacher.’ Holly wondered if Cass too had been thinking of the past. ‘I never liked him.’

‘I don’t think any of us did,’ Cassandra replied. ‘But I remember he picked on you kids from the base mercilessly, always banging on about your lazy accents.’

Hector looked up, his expression angry, and said irritably, ‘You’re rambling, Cass. The nurse isn’t here to talk about your schooldays.’

‘She’s not a nurse, she’s a paramedic. And her name’s Holly, we were friends at school.’

Holly was taken aback by Cassandra’s statement, which was wrong on both counts, given that she was not yet qualified and they had never been friends, but when the blonde woman smiled at her warmly it felt like the truth. Had they even spoken before yesterday? Holly doubted it: Cassandra was older, and more than that she was beautiful and rich. She had suddenly left the local school and Holly’s childish imagination had placed her in Europe, maybe at an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland or studying in Paris. Now she wondered what the truth had been – why a teenage girl would suddenly disappear. She remembered this as happening just after that Halloween, but it could be that her brain had worked these two acts together, and they had no link other than the location.

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.’