Chapter 53: After

AFTER

“Hannah.” The voice is gentle, insistent… and not Will’s. “Haaa-nah. It’s time to wake up.”

“What?” She struggles to sit up, blinking, wondering where she is—and then she remembers. She is in Hugh’s flat. And she is—oh God, she is naked. And somehow it’s dark.

She pulls the covers up over her breasts, and the memories come back. The bath. The flight to Hugh’s flat. Will.

The pain is like a knife to her side. Unbearable.

Hugh is standing over her, looking worried. His fringe is in his eyes and he blows it off with that habitual gesture, and her heart aches.

“What time is it?” she croaks, putting a hand up to her throbbing head. She feels… the word comes to her like a surprise. She feels hungover. Like she spent a night on the tiles. It’s so far from the truth that for a second she wants to laugh. Is this what shock feels like?

Hugh looks at his watch.

“Nearly four. We’re due at the police station at four thirty. Are you feeling okay?”

“Nearly four?” Hannah sits up fully at that, shock running through her. “Are you kidding? I’ve been asleep all day?”

“You went out like a light. You still don’t look quite right.”

She puts her hand to her head. Not quite right is an understatement—she feels completely groggy and disoriented, and there is a vile taste in her mouth, bitter and chemical. Then what Hugh just said sinks in.

“Sorry, did you say the police?”

“Yes, but listen—” Hugh holds up a hand. “I didn’t tell them anything, I figured that wasn’t my place. I just said that I had a friend who had important information and could we come in and make a statement. And they said how was half four. You can still back out if you want.”

“No.” Her hands are cold, and her cheeks feel pale, but she knows she wants to do this. She knows she has to do this.

The bottom line is, someone could have been in April’s room that night. They could have killed her after Neville left. And that person—she can’t hide from the possibility any longer—could have been Will.

She has to tell them that.

“No, I’m—I’m ready.”

“Your clothes are on the end of the bed.” Hugh waves a hand at the foot of the bed where her clothes are draped, along with a jacket that’s clearly one of Hugh’s. On top of the pile are her glasses. On the floor is a pair of flip-flops. Hugh sees her looking at them and makes a face.

“Sorry. Best I could do, I didn’t want to leave you alone in the flat. We can pick up some trainers en route if you’re bothered.”

But she shakes her head. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters now.

Hugh leaves, tactfully, and Hannah gets slowly back into her clothes. Finally, she reaches for her phone, tapping the power button to check on the time—and then she remembers: it’s dead.

Still, she shoves it in the pocket of Hugh’s coat, and then leaves the room.

“Ready?” Hugh asks, and she nods, even though it’s very far from the truth. He’s holding car keys, and she frowns.

“Are we driving?”

“I thought so, they said they’d give us parking and I don’t really want you standing in the rain for a bus. You still don’t look great.”

She nods dully. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now—except the baby. She has to keep it together for the baby.

Oh God, is she really going to do this…

The faintness rises up inside her again and Hugh takes her arm, looking alarmed.

“Hannah? Hannah old bean?”

“I’m fine,” she says, her teeth gritted. It’s not true, but she will be, once she has spoken to the police. For whatever the truth, whatever happens now, November was right. This is the only way she can make herself safe, the only way she can protect herself.

---

IN THE CAR SHE LETSher head loll against the window. She is not just tired but exhausted, the exhaustion of grief and fear and shock. There’s a strange familiarity to it now—it’s the same sensation she remembers from last time, the same numb, sick horror as she sat, wired and sleepless, through interview after interview, surviving off bad tea and worse coffee, as the police prodded her for inconsistencies or anything she might have forgotten.

The thought of going through it all again leaves her with a kind of light-headed nausea. And perhaps that’s it—perhaps this is why it feels so much worse the second time around. Because she has done this all before—and for what? So that an innocent man could die in prison.

And now she is going to do the same thing again, but this time to incriminate the father of her unborn baby.

A picture comes into her head, of Will’s lips pressed against her hair, of his low, soft voice rumbling in his chest, I love you.

She thinks she may throw up.

“Are you okay?” Hugh asks, and she shakes her head. “Do you want some water? You’re probably dehydrated.”

He gestures to a bottle in the door, and Hannah nods. There is a horrible hungover taste in her mouth. Maybe the water will make her feel less sick. But it doesn’t. When she takes a long gulp, it has the same flat chemical taste as everything else, and she screws the lid back on and replaces it in the door.

Instead she shuts her eyes, hoping for darkness, for oblivion, and Hugh starts the engine. It purrs for a moment, and then he slips the car into gear, and they slide away into the darkness.

---

IT’S SOME TIME LATER THATHannah opens her eyes. She hasn’t been asleep exactly, just drowsing, trying to throw off this weird groggy feeling before they reach the police station. But the noise of the traffic has faded away, and they seem to have been driving for a long time, longer than she would have thought.

It takes a while for her to focus on the road ahead and make sense of what she is seeing—because they are not in Edinburgh anymore, but on a country road, quite a narrow one. There are no streetlamps, only the powerful beams of Hugh’s headlamps lighting up the low hedges on either side of the track. It’s not a route she recognizes, but from the dark shapes of the hills she thinks they may be heading west, towards Berwick.

“Hugh?” She sits up, pushes her glasses up her nose, looks around, trying to figure out where they are. The chemical taste is still in her mouth, and her throat feels dry, her voice croaky. “Hugh, what’s going on?”

Hugh makes a rueful face.

“Sorry, only just outside Edinburgh, but I must have put the postcode into the satnav wrong. It took me all round the houses before I realized what I’d done. We’re heading back now. Sorry, incredibly stupid of me. I’m just trying to find a route round, I don’t want to pull a U-turn in such a narrow road.”

Hannah sinks back in her seat and they drive for a while in the darkness. They pass a farm track, then another, and beneath the fog of tiredness she begins to feel uneasy.

“Hugh? Should you turn around? This road only seems to be leading us farther away. Look, there’s a house coming up.” She points, but Hugh doesn’t slow, and it flashes past.

“Don’t worry,” he says, his voice calm, “I’ve got another route planned out.”

But when Hannah glances across at the satnav on his dashboard, it’s turned off.

Her fingers close around the phone in her pocket, before she remembers, and a kind of sick shiver runs through her.

“How long until we get to the police station?” she says.

“Oh, not long,” Hugh says. “Twenty minutes maybe?”

Hannah flicks a look at the clock on the dashboard. For a moment her vision is too blurred to read it, but she blinks, concentrates. The screen says 4:41. They have been driving for more than half an hour.

“We’re late,” she says.

“They sounded quite relaxed about the time,” Hugh says, “but you could call them if you’re worried. Give them a heads-up.”

“I can’t,” Hannah says. She tries to keep her voice level. “My phone’s broken, remember?”

“Oh, of course,” Hugh says breezily. “Well, never mind. We won’t be long now.”

She falls silent and they sit in the darkness, Hannah listening to Hugh’s breathing and hearing her own pulse in her ears. The countryside is becoming more and more deserted. The clock on the dashboard ticks down the minutes: 4:47, 4:49, 4:50. A sick feeling is starting to roil in Hannah’s stomach. What is going on? Does Hugh not want her to go to the police?

“Hugh,” she says again, and this time she can hear the tension in her own voice. “Hugh, turn around.”

“Relax,” Hugh says. His voice is smooth, urbane, reassuring. She imagines it’s the voice he uses on his patients. “We’ll be there shortly.”

She looks at his profile in the dim light of the dashboard. She feels strange, sluggish, slow-witted, as if she has not properly woken up, as if this is all one long nightmare. Why, why is she so tired? Is it possible… She glances down at the water bottle in the door, remembering its strange chemical taste, the same taste that was in her mouth after that horrible sweet tea, and a prickle of fear runs through her.

Something is wrong.

Something is wrong.

The minutes tick on. 4:52. 4:57. 5:00.

And with a kind of slow, mounting sickness, Hannah realizes the truth. Hugh is not driving her to the police. Hugh hasn’t called the police.

Instead he drugged her, and he is driving her to an unknown destination, far from Edinburgh.

She just doesn’t know why.

Because Hugh cannot be April’s killer. He can’t be. He was with Hannah from the moment April left the bar until the moment they discovered her body. He is the one person she has always known she could trust, absolutely.

So what is he doing? And why?

She thinks of November’s words again. Of her urgent voice, Please, don’t do anything about this until you’ve spoken to the police.

But Hugh was safe, she wants to wail. Hugh was the one person I could rely on. Hugh was there.

And then suddenly, Hannah knows.

She sees the whole picture, clearly, spread out in front of her with an awful crystalline clarity, the picture she has struggled to see, to remember, for so many years.

She sees the open door.

She sees April, sprawled across the rug, her skin still blotched with terra-cotta makeup.

She hears her own screams, hears Hugh’s feet on the stairs, watches as he runs to April, presses his fingers to her pulse.

She sees him, crouched over April, desperately administering heart compressions. Go, she hears him gasp. Hannah, for God’s sake go and find someone.

She has been so, so stupid.

And now she is locked in a car with a killer, her unborn child in her belly, and a broken phone.

But she is not going to die.

Turning her head as if to look out the window, Hannah glances casually at the passenger-side lock. It’s down. She could try the handle anyway, but somehow she doubts Hugh will have overlooked that, and if she tries it, and it doesn’t work, Hugh will know. Her best bet, she thinks, is to play along. Lull Hugh into a false sense of security until…

But she can’t think about that. There has to be an opening, an opportunity, something she can take advantage of. She is not going to die here, and she is not going to let her child die with her. Think, Hannah, think.

What does she have on her that she could defend herself with, if it came to it? Not even her keys, she realizes with a kind of nausea at her own stupidity. Nothing. She has no bag, no purse. She’s not even wearing proper shoes to run for it—even if she, six months pregnant, could outrun Hugh’s long, lean cricketer’s legs.

She has nothing but a broken mobile phone.

The thought snags, catching at some memory at the back of her mind. It’s a memory of Hugh asking casually, And what about your phone—is there any way he could be tracking you?

She thought he was protecting her from Will, but now she realizes—he was protecting himself. Even then, he was thinking ahead, to this moment in the darkness as he drives her to an unknown destination, making sure that her phone could not be tracked. He has turned off his own, and the satnav.

She had shown him her broken phone, and Hugh—Hugh had nodded and accepted it. But it wasn’t quite true. Her phone screen is broken, but the phone itself is not—it functioned fine when she tried to pay the taxi driver. And Hugh doesn’t know this, which is a tiny, tiny advantage in her favor. It’s the one piece of information she has that Hugh does not. But how can she use it without a working screen, and more to the point, how can she do so without alerting Hugh?

Her hand goes into the pocket of the borrowed jacket, tracing the hard, familiar shape of it, running her fingers over the buttons, feeling the shattered glass.

Some phones have a way of calling the police from the lock screen, she knows that. She saw a video on Twitter once, a woman showing you how to activate it on an iPhone. You had to press the side button and one of the volume buttons. Or was it the power button? Whichever one it was, the phone autodialed the emergency services without the user having to do anything else. But in the video, the phone let out a loud siren as it called the police. Hannah could turn down the volume, but she has no way of knowing whether the siren overrides the volume setting. If it’s some kind of deliberate safety feature, a warning to the user that they’ve dialed 999, then it would make sense to have it sound no matter what.

Should she risk it?

She glances over at Hugh. He’s staring at the road ahead, not showing any uneasiness.

If she calls the police and her phone lets out a siren call, Hugh will know she has a working phone, and he will find some way to dispose of it, she’s sure of that now.

No, she can’t use that feature.

Oh God, if only Hugh had been right. If only Will were tracking her. She shuts her eyes, imagining Will roaring up behind the car on his motorbike, forcing Hugh to a stop, and a lump forms in her throat, almost choking her. But she cannot cry—if she does, she will never stop, and Will isn’t coming; she is going to have to rescue herself from this.

But Will… Will is the one person she could call.

A sudden shiver runs through her.

“Are you cold?” Hugh asks conversationally.

She shakes her head.

“No, it was nothing, just a goose on my grave.”

But it wasn’t nothing. It was hope.

She is going to have to be very, very careful now. This is going to take timing, and dexterity, and she is going to have to be very inventive about what she says to Hugh and how she phrases it.

The phone is hard and reassuring in her hand. She lets her finger rest on the side button.

“Hugh,” she says.

“Mm?” Hugh doesn’t look away from the road. They are a long way out of Edinburgh now. She can hear the sound of the sea, she thinks, and rain is beginning to spatter against the windscreen.

“When we get home, after I’ve spoken to the police, do you think I should”—her shaking finger presses the side button on the phone, the button that activates voice commands, and then she raises her voice as loud as she dares—“call Will?”

She hears the faintest, almost imperceptible chime of a ringtone starting up through the phone’s internal speaker, and she gives a loud yawn to cover it, her fingers diving for the volume button, pressing down, down, down as hard as she can. The ring dies away, her heart thumping in time with its fading rhythm. With the speaker muted, she has no way of knowing whether Will has answered. Please, please, she finds herself thinking. Hugh is speaking, but she can’t concentrate on his words, all she can think of is whether Will has picked up, or if he’s grunted furiously and sent her call to voicemail. Oh God, oh Will, please, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—if you ever loved me—

Maybe he’s not even there. Maybe the ringer is switched off. Maybe he’s drowning his sorrows in a pub, and can’t hear her call, and it’s already gone to voicemail.

Please, please, please. I’m sorry, Will, I’m sorry I doubted you.

“… what you’re going to say to him?” Hugh is asking. He’s frowning.

“I guess you’re right,” Hannah says. Her heart is thudding so hard her belly is shaking with it. It feels like a miracle that Hugh can’t hear it, can’t see how scared she is, but his eyes are on the road. “I just wish—oh God, I just wish we hadn’t left it that way. He must be frantic—wondering where I am, whether I’m safe.” Oh God, please don’t hang up, Will. Please hear what I’m trying to tell you, please stay on the line. She shifts in her seat, feeling the baby pressing against her pelvis.

“I know,” Hugh says, and his voice cracks with what sounds almost like realistic emotion. “I know, Hannah. God, I mean, I know it’s not the same, but—he’s my best friend, you know? Was.” There is a long silence.

Please don’t hang up.

“How long, do you think?” Hannah says at last. “Until we get to the police? We seem to have been driving for ages. I feel like we must be halfway to Berwick.” Are you listening, Will?

“Oh, nowhere near there,” Hugh says with a laugh, but he sounds a little uneasy. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. The wipers swish back and forth with hypnotic rhythm. “Why don’t you have a nap? I can wake you when we get to the station.”

Hannah nods. But if she hadn’t been sure before, those words would have made her so. Because no one could possibly think she was tired—she’s done nothing but sleep since she drank that tea. Another surge of fear runs through her. She rests her arm against the window and stares out into the night, looking, desperately, for something, anything to give Will a clue about her whereabouts.

And then it comes. A pub, looming out of the darkness.

She blinks, strains her eyes. She cannot afford to miss the sign, but the writing is small, the rain is so hard, and the sign isn’t illuminated… and then it flashes past and she has caught it.

“The Silver Star…” she says shakily, trying to make it sound as if she is just thinking aloud. “What a pretty name for a pub…”

She yawns, hoping it sounds convincing. The groggy stupor from earlier is wearing off, the adrenaline of fear pumping through her body, pulling her forcibly out of that pit of exhaustion, but she has to pretend to Hugh that she is more tired than she is. He cannot know.

Did you hear that, Will? Are you even there?

A sob rises inside her because after all, maybe this whole thing is hopeless. There’s every chance Will’s phone went to voicemail, her call timed out, and she’s talking to no one at all. And then she realizes something: The phone in her hand is growing warm, and not just from her touch. It is hot, the kind of heat that builds up when she’s on a long call.

Will is there. He is listening.

And maybe he is coming.