Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

Glasgow

May 2024

CLEM

Strangers, so many of them, who are now on first-name terms, have become towering monoliths in Clem’s life almost instantly. Surgeons, nurses, therapists, detectives, ophthalmic specialists, a cohort of experts springing from every corner of the country to assist Erin, who is not yet conscious. One doctor tells Clem gravely that her daughter may not make it through the night.

She feels as though she is falling down an endless hole in the center of the universe, reaching depths of horror she could never have imagined existed.

The experience of a child in emergency care is like someone ripping a skin off reality and inviting Clem to step inside another, a realm with new language and faces and a hierarchy arranged entirely around bacteria and luck. In this realm she is helpless and desperate; she forgets her life, her bills, the state of the planet. The pinching in her chest disappears completely, buried beneath the clamor of existential, unsurpassable dread.

Names and faces blur into one another, though she registers three that stand out among the rest: Constable Byers, who stands guard at the foot of Erin’s bed; Bee, Erin’s designated nurse, a trained burns specialist and the one to whom all the doctors and surgeons consult about her care; and Stephanie, the detective assigned as their family liaison officer. Behind the scenes, and on the site where Erin received her injuries, are yet more people searching, analyzing, testing, deciphering, piecing together residual clues from the fire to help work out exactly what happened just after midnight on the night of Wednesday the first of May.

It is five o’clock in the evening, and the thought of going home is intolerable—Clem wants to be near Erin in case she wakes up, in case anything terrible happens.

She calls her workmate, Josie, breaks down in tears as she explains what has happened to Erin. Josie job-shares with Clem as a teaching assistant at the local primary school. Josie’s little boy, Samuel, is a similar age, and Freya has had a few playdates. Josie offers to pick her up from nursery and keep her overnight. Poor Freya—she’s too young to understand why she’s suddenly being passed from pillar to post, but she does love playing with Sam, and Josie has nappies, baby food, milk, clean clothes.

Clem loves her for that.

She hears Quinn before she sees him, the sound of heavy, assertive footsteps on the other side of the door to the ICU family room announcing his arrival from West Yorkshire.

She steps aside, surprised by the state of her ex-husband: usually he is immaculately turned out, but today he looks like he’s been dug up. Quinn is fifty-two, just shy of six foot tall, slender as the day she met him. He is ex-army, and although he has spent the last ten years working in IT, he still has the air of someone who is prepared to go on a weeklong trek across the desert at a moment’s notice. His black hair has grayed at the sides, and he is unshaven, his face strained. She wonders if he still carries a tent in the boot of his car, just in case.

He hesitates before leaning forward to exchange air kisses and a half hug, which the occasion calls for. She is, after all, the mother of his firstborn child, his only daughter, though that hasn’t stopped him from calling her a “callous bitch” in the past.

“How are you?” he asks, his eyes tracking across the hospital ward.

“Oh, fine,” she says, because her anger toward him is multifaceted and too sharp to contain. She reins it in and softens. “Is Heather here, too?”

“No.”

Clem almost says good , but stops herself. Heather is Quinn’s second wife, mother of their three boys, Toby, Daniel, and Elijah. Heather is ten years younger than Clem, prettier, wifely perfection, as far as a man like Quinn is concerned.

“Where’s Erin?” Quinn asks.

“Down here,” she says, leading him along to the small room that holds the plastic gowns.

“We have to wear protective clothing,” she tells him, ignoring the look of confusion on his face as she pulls the yellow sheet over her head. “It prevents us from infecting her.”

“Okay,” he says, copying her.

“Oh, hello,” a voice says in the doorway. It’s Bee.

“This is Erin’s father, Quinn,” Clem tells her. “Quinn, meet Bee, Erin’s nurse.”

Bee shakes his hand with the same warmth with which she greeted Clem.

“Lovely to meet you,” Bee says, bewildering Quinn further. He’s having to take everything in at a speed of knots, Clem thinks. “I’ll be leaving soon, but I wanted to let you know that I’ll be back in the morning. The night-shift nurse takes over at six o’clock so Erin won’t be left alone.”

“Can we stay overnight?” Clem asks.

“You can,” she says. “But my advice is to go home. You won’t sleep well here, and it’s better for everyone if you come back in the morning as refreshed as you can be. It can be draining, all of this.”

“I’ve got a hotel booked,” Quinn murmurs. “Just around the corner.”

“This way,” Clem tells Quinn, and he follows her toward Erin’s room. She opens the door, nodding at Constable Byers.

“I’ll step outside,” Constable Byers says. “Give you some time alone.”

“Police guard,” Clem tells Quinn, but he doesn’t answer. His gaze is drawn to Erin in the bed, his mouth falling open. She realizes he hadn’t expected it to be this bad. She hadn’t mentioned the shaven hair, or the bandages, or the eyelids sewn shut. His face looks like a shattered mirror as he moves toward her.

“What happened?” he asks.

“She and a couple of friends went to Orkney,” she says. “Erin, her boyfriend, Arlo, and Senna, one of her friends. They were exploring the islands. Beyond that, I’m not really sure.”

“Did they light a campfire or something? And it got out of control?”

“Nobody knows yet. They were on some tiny island that no one lives on.”

He scrunches up his face in puzzlement. “Why?”

“I don’t know , Quinn.”

She sounds angry now, all the relief at his arrival diminishing under the feelings of resentment she still harbors toward him. Erin hasn’t seen her father since Freya was a few weeks old, when he came for an hour to see his granddaughter and barely looked at her. Erin has referred to him solely as fuckwit for the last year, and Clem has allowed it, partly because she agreed with the term for Quinn and because she felt soothed that, at last, Erin seemed toughened to her father’s ineptitude. She dealt with being constantly let down by being sardonic and stoic, acting as though she didn’t care.

“Sorry,” he says then, and she starts, glancing up sharply. His expression is pained, apologetic, and he reaches out to place his hand on her upper arm. “We’ll figure it out. Okay?”

She nods, reeling from this version of him.

He lowers silently into the chair next to Erin, his eyes tracking across her bandages, to her hands. Clem realizes he doesn’t know about the amputations. He looks up at her in horror, and she holds his gaze. He is comprehending the extent of Erin’s injuries in real time, taking it all in. After a few moments, his face crumples, and he begins to cry. She has never, ever witnessed Quinn cry before. Not even at his mother’s funeral, though theirs was a complex relationship. But it is genuine, real tears rolling down his face and over his hand that stays clapped to his mouth, and she doesn’t know what to say.

She moves to him, not speaking, then rests a hand tentatively on his shoulder.

“Sorry,” he says in a crushed voice.

“It’s okay.”

···

“We’re able to stay overnight, yes?” Quinn asks as they’re taking off their plastic gowns.

“I thought you said you booked a hotel?”

He studies the floor. “I don’t think I can leave her.”

Clem draws another breath, surprised all over again by this new version of her ex-husband.

The nurses set up two camp beds in the family room. They take it in turns to sit with Erin in the still, small room, watching somberly as the night shift—Nurse Blair ( Please, call me Emma )—scrutinizes the notes on Erin’s chart, changes the catheter bag, attends to the IV. Clem finds her mind drifting to Arlo, exhaustion causing her to wonder why he hasn’t come to see Erin, surely he must be worried about her, only to remember all over again that he’s dead. And on the heel of that re-remembrance, a vision of the kind of flame that would kill someone, that would sheer flesh clean off the bone. She wonders how much Arlo suffered, how much Erin suffered. Does she already know he’s dead?

She weeps softly, then thinks of Arlo’s parents and mentally chides herself for crying when they have lost a child. Her mind turns to Elizabeth. She must be at her wits’ end.

It is three in the morning when she climbs onto the camp bed next to Quinn’s.

“How is Freya?” he asks. He’s staring at the ceiling, and she wonders if he’s slept at all.

“She’s great. She’s staying with a friend of mine. She has a little boy that Freya plays with.”

“How old is she now?”

She bites back a retort. She’s your granddaughter. You should know how old she is. “Fifteen months.”

“How is Erin managing? Being a mum.”

She almost gives in to the urge to ask him why he has been such a terrible, negligent father to Erin. Why has it taken a horrific accident for him to visit her? Why hasn’t he been more present in her life?

“She’s a brilliant mum,” she says, deciding that now is not the time for the conversation about Quinn’s parenting of Erin. “She makes me so proud.” She chokes up then, emotion stealing away her voice.

“How long was she with the boy?”

“About a year,” she says. “He is…was…a lovely kid.” It happens again, the mental lurch from one state to another, as though she’s hurtling through time. Re-remembering that Arlo is dead.

“And you thought it was a good idea letting three teenagers go off to Orkney, did you?” Quinn says.

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, yes, she has a baby,” Quinn continues. “But given her history I would have thought you’d have known that a three-week hike with two other teenagers was a recipe for disaster.”

His words land like a punch. Clem lies in the darkness, hearing the imagined echo of his words, searching them for anything that might alter their meaning. He is blaming her.

“I think you’re forgetting that she’s nineteen,” she says. “I can’t exactly prevent her from doing things.”

“In hindsight, maybe you should have. Don’t you think?”

At that, Clem gets up, her blood boiling. She folds up the camp bed and wheels it noisily toward the door. She’ll drag it into Erin’s room, sleep on the floor if she has to.

“What are you doing?” Quinn asks, but she bites her lip, forcing herself not to scream the words she longs to, a torrent of anger at the years of psychological manipulation he has meted upon Erin.

“I’m sleeping somewhere else,” she says.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

He sits up and stifles a yawn. “Oh, I see. I’ve touched a nerve, haven’t I?”

Clem straightens and takes a deep, steadying breath. Her disappointment is crushing. The realization all over again that Quinn is and always will be the kind of person who blames everyone else, who is entirely self-interested. From this angle she can see Erin through the glass doors of her side room across the corridor, the night-shift nurse changing her dressings. She imagines what she would do if she knew her father was here. How that soft part inside that loves and will always adore Quinn no matter how cruel he is would fill up with hope that, just perhaps, he has finally decided to be a good father.

“Quinn?” Clem whispers, careful not to disturb the quiet.

“Mmm?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

···

She moves her camp bed into the small kitchen next door, rage finally loosening enough for her to sink into a dark, dreamless slumber.

At dawn, she wakes. A few moments of wondering where she is before the disorienting, planet-colliding realization that she is in a hospital room, in an ICU, that her daughter is swaddled in bandages, intubated, unconscious. The knowledge of Arlo’s death crashing down from the ceiling.

Clem gowns up and rushes to see Erin. She is relieved by the consistent bleep of the heart monitor, by the sunlight, but Erin’s fresh bandages are already sticky, in need of being changed, and the bruising around her eyes has deepened, garish black fringed with red. For a moment Clem feels overwhelmed by the journey that lies ahead of Erin, a journey she can scarcely fathom: skin grafts, physiotherapy, counseling.

A knock on the glass of the door, the squeal of the hinge. “Morning,” a voice says, and Clem sees Bee there, smiling and bright-eyed. “And how is our lovely girl?”

“She’s in need of fresh dressings, I think,” Clem says, gathering herself.

“Let’s get those changed,” Bee says, closing the door behind her and checking the night shift’s notes. “Good morning, Erin darling. How are you today?”

Erin doesn’t answer. Of course she doesn’t, though Bee’s chatter doesn’t stop, musical and upbeat. She watches Erin closely for a moment for any sign of movement. The heart monitor bleeps steadily, the gasp of the ventilator.

“I think they’ll try to bring her out of the coma tomorrow,” Bee says, unwinding the gauze on Erin’s right arm. The smell is immediate—meaty, sweet. Clem winces, and Bee sees.

“That’s a good sign, the smell,” Bee tells her.

“It is?”

“It signals that her body’s responding to the silver creams. It’s healing the way it should. It’s when it smells like dead flowers that we get concerned.”

Bee unwinds the gauze carefully, then the layer of cling film, revealing the full, brutal extent of Erin’s burns. Clem winces at the sight of her daughter’s arm, livid pink and wet from a layer of silver cream.

“Dead flowers?” Clem asks.

“Bacteria loves dying tissue,” Bee says, unwinding a fresh roll of gauze and wrapping it gently. “It’s a biggie for us, something we’re always watching out for. Burn wounds leak and the bugs gobble it up. An infection smells like week-old cut flowers. Awful.”

“And what happens if she gets infected?” Clem asks, immediately wishing she hadn’t.

“We treat it with antibiotics. But she’s doing okay just now, aren’t you, my love?”

A figure appears at the door window: it’s Quinn, and he looks ashen, dark circles under his eyes and a fresh patch of silver bristle covering his jaw. He is already gowned up. Bee opens the door for him, and Clem turns away. She’s still annoyed about last night.

“Have you treated a lot of people like this?” he asks Bee. “Burns victims?”

“Burns survivors ,” Bee corrects. “Yes, I have. Hundreds of ’em.” She says it as though she’s talking about parties instead of patients, though Clem registers that it’s precisely Bee’s upbeat manner that sustains her in what is undoubtedly a tough job. “They stay in touch with me, too. I love seeing how they recover.”

···

Clem and Quinn have breakfast in the canteen, sharing a table in mutually troubled silence. Clem texts Josie to check on Freya and is relieved to receive pictures of her happy, bathed granddaughter playing in a ball pit with Sam.

The family liaison officer, Stephanie, arrives, with some updates: Fynhallow, the bay on the Isle of Gunn where the fire happened, has been swept extensively for forensic evidence, and items have been recovered for analysis.

“What items?” Quinn interjects.

“We won’t know for a few days,” Stephanie says. “Most likely they’ll have gathered the materials used for the fire and any fragments that can provide a sequence of events.”

“What about Senna?” Clem asks.

Stephanie shakes her head. “Nothing yet. The family are frantic.”

She doesn’t look hopeful, and Clem knows what she’s thinking—that Senna has drowned. Two deaths. She catches her breath, shaken by the thought of it.

“What about the boy’s family?” Quinn asks.

“Arlo’s parents would like a meeting with the two of you as well. I’m happy to be an intermediary.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Clem says.

“Okay. Well, I have a few requests, if that’s all right? It would be really helpful if we could get access to Erin’s devices. Her laptop, tablet, if she has those?”

“Is she a suspect?” Quinn asks.

“It would just be useful for the investigation,” Stephanie says. Then: “Of course she’s not a suspect.” Clem notices how her gaze lowers. “We’re doing the same with Arlo’s and Senna’s devices. The smallest thing can have a huge consequence.”

Quinn looks like he’s about to repeat the question, then makes a conscious choice not to.

“Of course,” Clem says. “Whatever we can do.”

···

Clem goes home to collect Erin’s devices for Stephanie.

The flat feels like a cave in the aftermath of Erin’s hospitalization, a museum holding objects of her life Before, when Erin was fine, absolutely fine. Erin’s clothes sit in the laundry basket, her keys hang on the hooks in the hallway, her cans of Diet Coke lie in the fridge. Clem finds she is more devastated at home than she is in the hospital, and perhaps it is on account of all the objects that call to her now, that remind her that Erin’s life has been altered forever.

She trawls through Erin’s belongings, not knowing what she’s looking for. Something, she thinks. Anything that might throw up a clue, that might shine a light on the fire, on why Senna is missing, and where she might be.

There, just poking out from under her bedside table, is a black notebook with a silver owl cadaver on the front. She removes it slowly, flipping through the pages. It’s Erin’s notebook, mostly a scribble of thoughts, the occasional statement with a date beside it. A note of the day Freya took her first steps two months ago. A spider diagram with the word SCHOLARSHIP written in heavy lettering in the center of a page, scribbles about a house of learning and continual progression . A note about how much she loved Arlo, tarot readings accompanied by sketches of minor and major arcana, train times and ferry sailings for their Orkney trip.

And then a sentence that makes Clem’s stomach turn.

Arlo’s hands need to be bound.

She stares at it for a moment, confused. Why would Erin write this? Did someone else write it? No—the sentence is undoubtedly in Erin’s handwriting, the looping e ’s and leaning consonants.

Perhaps it is nothing, Clem tells herself, some kind of in-joke that needs context to be appreciated, or a lyric she thought of. But her throat is turning dry and her chest feels as though gravity has ceased to exist, and she thinks over and over of what Detective Sanger told her when they found Erin’s boyfriend. Arlo’s hands were bound.

Her mind races through the reasons why Erin would have written this. She wonders, feeling nauseous, if it was a description of a sex act. No, at least not in Orkney—Senna was present, and she highly doubts that Erin’s closely guarded relationship with Arlo involved threesomes. An inner voice reminds her that she’s biased. She is Erin’s mother, is therefore unlikely to suspect her daughter of illicit sex acts. She studies the word need . Why did Arlo’s hands need to be bound? By whom, and for what purpose?

Before she can think further, she rips out the page and tears it in half. She picks up the fragments from the carpet and holds them in a cupped palm, heading quickly to the kitchen. There, she tips them carefully into the sink, takes a box of matches from the drawer, and sets the pieces on fire.

She watches the letters curl up and dissolve in the flame.

Then she runs to the bathroom and vomits in the sink, a flash in her mind connecting the sight of flame to the gut-wrenching sight of her daughter in the Burns Unit.