In a Dark, Dark Wood(54)

The huge dressing at my hairline doesn’t help – it looks as if my brains are being barely held in place – and nor do the smaller cuts and scratches dappled across my cheekbones and forehead, but they’re not the worst. The worst is my eyes – two dark, bronze-coloured shiners that blossom out from the bridge of my nose, leaching in blackened circles beneath my lower lids, before they fade to yellow across my cheekbones. The right one is spectacular, the left one less so. I look like I’ve been punched in the face, repeatedly. But I am alive, and someone is not.

It is that thought that makes me pull on the hospital gown, lace up the ties, and shuffle out to face the world.

‘Admiring your shiners?’ The nurse gives a comfortable laugh. ‘Don’t worry, they’ve done all the scans, you’ve no basilar fracture. You just got a bang to the face. Or two.’

‘B-basilar?’

‘Type of skull fracture. It can be very nasty. But they’ve ruled it out, so don’t fret. Black eyes aren’t uncommon following a car crash but they’ll clear up in a few days.’

‘I’m ready,’ I say. ‘For the police.’

‘Are you sure you’re up to it, hen? You don’t have to.’

‘I’m up to it,’ I say firmly.

I’m back in bed, sitting up with a cup of what the nurse claimed was coffee but – unless the head trauma has damaged my taste perception – is not, when there is a knock on the door.

I look up sharply, my heart thudding. Outside, smiling through the wire-hatched glass pane in the door, there is a policewoman. She’s in her forties, maybe, and she is incredibly striking, with the kind of sculpted looks you might see on a catwalk. It feels shockingly incongruous, but I don’t know why. Why shouldn’t police officers have the face of David Bowie’s wife?

‘C-come in,’ I say. Don’t stammer. Fuck.

‘Hello.’ She opens the door and comes into the room, still smiling. She has the slender, greyhound frame of a long-distance runner. ‘I’m Detective Constable Lamarr.’ Her voice is warm and her vowels are plum-coloured. ‘How are you feeling today?’

‘Better, thank you.’ Better? Better than what? I’m in hospital, in a gown with no back and two black eyes. I’m not sure how much worse it could get.

Then I correct myself: I’ve been unhooked from the machine and they’ve removed the nappy. Apparently I can be trusted to pee by myself. This is, indeed, better.

‘I’ve spoken to your doctors, they tell me you may be up to a few questions, but if it’s too much we can stop, just say. Is that all right?’

I nod and she says, ‘Last night … Can you tell me what you remember?’

‘Nothing. I remember nothing.’ It comes out harder and terser than I meant. To my horror I feel a lump in my throat and I swallow fiercely. I will not cry! I’m a grown woman, for f*ck’s sake, not some child who’s scraped her knee in the playground, wailing for her daddy.

‘Now, that’s not true,’ she says, but not accusingly. Her voice is the gently encouraging tone of a teacher, or an older sibling. ‘Dr Miller tells me that you’re pretty clear about events leading up to the accident. Why don’t you start at the beginning?’

‘At the beginning? You don’t want my childhood traumas and stuff, do you?’

‘Maybe.’ She sits on the foot of the bed, in defiance of hospital regulations. ‘If they’re relevant to what happened. I tell you what, why don’t we start with some easy questions, just to warm up? What’s your name, how about that?’

I manage a laugh, but not for the reasons she thinks. What is my name? I thought I knew who I was, who I had become. Now, after this weekend, I’m no longer sure.

‘Leonora Shaw,’ I say. ‘But I go by Nora.’

‘Very well then, Nora. And you’re how old?’

I know she must know all this already. Perhaps it’s some sort of test, to see how bad my memory really is.

‘Twenty-six.’

‘Now tell me, how did you end up here?’

‘What, in the hospital?’

‘In the hospital, here in Northumberland, generally, really.’

‘You haven’t got a northern accent,’ I say, irrelevantly.

‘I was born in Surrey,’ she says. She gives me a little complicit smile to acknowledge that this is not quite procedure, that she should be asking questions, not answering them. But this is a little token of something, I can’t quite work out what. An exchange: a piece of her for a piece of me.

Except that makes me sound broken.

‘So,’ she resumes, ‘how did you end up here then?’

‘It was …’ I put my hand to my forehead. I want to rub it, but the dressing is in the way and I’m afraid to dislodge it. The skin beneath is hot and itchy. ‘We were on a hen weekend, and she went to university here. Clare did, I mean. The hen. Listen, can I ask you something – am I a suspect?’

‘A suspect?’ Her beautiful, rich voice makes music of the word, turning the chilly, spiky noun into a sol-fa exercise. Then she shakes her head. ‘Not at this stage of the investigation. We’re still gathering information, but we aren’t ruling anything out.’

Translation: not a suspect – yet.