In a Dark, Dark Wood(57)

‘Whose idea was it to get the gun?’

‘I don’t know. Flo had it from earlier, I think. From when the door blew open. But it wasn’t supposed to be loaded. It was supposed to have blanks.’

‘And you were holding it, is that right?’

‘Me?’ I look up at her with genuine shock. ‘No! It was Flo, I think. It was definitely her.’

‘But your fingerprints are on the barrel.’

They have fingerprinted the gun? I stare at her. Then I realise she’s waiting for an answer. ‘On the b-barrel, yes.’ Fuck, do not stammer. ‘But not the – the other bit. The handle bit. The stock, I mean. Look, she was waving it around like a crazy thing. I was trying to keep it away from us.’

‘Why, if you thought it wasn’t loaded?’

The question takes me aback. Suddenly, in spite of the sun, the room feels cold. I want to ask again if I’m a suspect, but she has said I’m not, and won’t it look strange to keep asking?

‘B-because I don’t like having a gun pointed at me, no matter what it’s loaded with. All right?’

‘All right,’ she says mildly, and makes a note on her pad. She flips over a sheet and then turns back. ‘Let’s go back a bit. James – how did you know him?’

I shut my eyes. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. There are so many options open to me: we went to school together. We were friends. He is Clare’s fiancé. Was, I correct myself silently. It is impossible to believe he is gone. And I realise, suddenly, the selfishness of my grief. I have been thinking about James. But Clare— Clare has lost everything. Yesterday she was to be a bride. Today she is … what? There’s not even a word for what she is. Not a widow – just bereft.

‘He … we used to be together,’ I say at last. It’s better to be honest, surely? Or at least as honest as I can be.

‘When did you break up?’

‘A long time ago. We were … oh … sixteen or seventeen.’

The ‘oh’ is a little dishonest. It makes it sound like a guesstimate. In fact, I know to the day when we broke up. I was sixteen and two months. James was just a few months away from his seventeenth birthday.

‘Amicably?’

‘Not at the time, no.’

‘But you’ve made up since? I mean, you were on Clare’s hen weekend …’ She trails off, inviting me to jump in with platitudes about how time heals everything, how betrayals at sixteen are the stuff you laugh about at twenty-six.

Only I don’t. What should I say? The truth?

Something cold is stealing around my heart, a chill in spite of the hospital heat and the warmth of the setting sun.

I don’t like these questions.

James’s death was an accident: a gun that should never have been loaded, going off by mistake. So why is this policewoman here, asking about long-dead break-ups?

‘What relevance does this have to James’s death?’ I say abruptly. Too abruptly. Her head comes up from her notepad, her plum-coloured lips forming a silent ‘oh’ of surprise. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

‘We’re just trying to form a complete picture,’ she says mildly.

I feel cold all up and down my spine.

James was shot by a gun that was supposed to be unloaded. So who loaded it?

I feel the blood drain from my cheeks. I very, very much want to ask the question I asked before: am I a suspect?

But I can’t. I can’t ask, because to ask would be suspicious. And suddenly I very much want to not be suspicious.

‘It was a long time ago,’ I say, trying to recover. ‘It hurt a lot at the time, but you get over things, don’t you?’

No you don’t. Not things like that. Or at least, I don’t.

But she doesn’t hear the lie in my voice. Instead she smoothly changes tack. ‘What happened after James was shot?’ she asks. ‘Can you remember what you all did next?’

I shut my eyes.

‘Try to walk me through it,’ she says. Her voice is soft, encouraging, almost hypnotic. ‘You were with him in the hallway …’

I was with him in the hallway. There was blood on my hands, on my nightclothes. His blood. Masses of it.

His eyes had drifted closed, and after a few minutes I put my face down to his, trying to hear if he was still breathing. He was. I could feel his halting breath on my cheek.

How different he was to when we had been together – there were lines around his eyes, a five o’clock shadow on his jaw, and his face had become leaner and more defined. But he was still James. I knew the contours of his brow, the ridge of his nose, the hollow beneath his lip where the sweat beaded on summer nights.

He was still my James. Except he was not. Where in God’s name was Clare?

I heard footsteps behind me, but it was Nina, holding a length of white cloth which looked like a sheet. She knelt and began binding James’s leg very tight.

‘I think our best hope is to stabilise you until we get you to hospital,’ she said, very loud and clear, talking to James, but to me as well, I knew. ‘James, can you hear me?’

He didn’t respond. His face had gone a strange waxen colour. Nina shook her head and then said to me, ‘Clare had better drive. You direct. I’ll go in the back with James and try to keep him going until we get there. Tom had better stay with Flo. I think she’s in shock.’