Cher looks as if she’s fallen asleep. Up here, with no shelter from the wind, the rain gusts horizontally, catches her in the face like birdshot. It’s hard to believe that yesterday they were still in a heatwave, for today they are a long way into autumn. Weird little fucked-up island on the edge of the Arctic circle, she thinks, one of the world’s largest economies, and we’re still prioritising bankers’ second houses over kids like this. If she had disappeared, no one apart from us would know, much less care. She’s been disappeared for years.
She reaches out and touches the girl’s good arm. Cher jumps, opens her eyes and lets out a moan. Now she’s close up, Collette can see the damage she’s done to herself. Her collarbone jags out beneath her skin, and shades of black and brown and khaki spread across her chest, vanish inside her top. Her hand has been ripped open by something sharp, the cut dirty and wide and still bleeding. She’s going to need a hospital, this time. If Collette can get her down off this roof before she dies of the shock, she’s going to have to be sucked back into the system. This is beyond any of their abilities.
‘Come on,’ she says. She’s glad that Cher is small and light, at least. If she were even Vesta’s size this would be impossible. ‘This is going to hurt. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to make it not.’
Cher laughs, weakly. ‘I’ll just have to kill you later.’ Still got her sarcasm, which has to be a good sign. She lets out a cough, freezes, tries to suppress another.
Collette takes her good hand and helps her inch her way along the flashing. She can hear Cher’s teeth grind together with each bump, makes encouraging small talk of courage and the future. A millennium passes as they move, and yet they hear only a single car. Collette is as wet as the girl, now. Her hands are slippery, and she’s afraid that she will be unable to keep a grip if she starts to teeter.
Over the window; a few feet that look like a million miles. I can’t do this, thinks Collette. We’ll start to slide and I won’t be able to hold her. A buffet of wind catches them, blows Cher’s dripping hair off her face. The green tinge has gone from her skin, but so has the brown. Cher has turned white.
‘Be brave, sweetheart,’ says Collette, and cups her face in her hands. ‘We’re going to go down now, okay?’
Cher nods, like an automaton. I don’t like how quiet she is, thinks Collette. She should be making noises. And as she thinks it, Cher starts to sway on the roof beam. Back, forth, back, forth. In front of them the open window, behind her, the long drop.
Collette doesn’t have time to make a decision. She grabs Cher’s legs and pulls. Drags her off the point of the roof just as she slumps and goes limp. Holds her tight in her arms as they slide.
Her jeans snag on the window frame. Cher is on top of her now, her weight carrying them inexorably forward. Her eyes are open, the pupils staring into Collette’s. I can’t hold her, she thinks. She’s going to carry us over. Whatever happens, I can’t protect her shoulder. The best I can do is -
They drop through the window and bounce on the bed, and Cher wakes up and starts to scream.
Chapter Fifty
They stand over the body, silent in the rain.
‘We don’t have a choice,’ says Vesta.
‘No,’ says Hossein.
Thomas has landed head first. Vesta imagines him, sliding down the roof like a thrill-seeker in a water park, his hands star-fished out before him in a hopeless bid to slow himself, his mouth wide in a silent scream. And then the long dive through sodden air; the drawn-out second as the crazy paving rushed up to meet him, and then the blackness. Do you feel these things? Her experience of fear has always been that it lasted for ever. That every microsecond drew itself out, each sensation, movement, sight, smell, and sound was etched on her consciousness in a way that she never experienced in any other state. Is there a moment when you feel your skull shatter? she wonders.
‘No,’ says Vesta. ‘I don’t know what made us think we’d get away with it the first time.’
‘Maybe they’ll think it was him who killed Preece,’ says Hossein. ‘Have you thought of that?’
‘They wouldn’t be that stupid. Surely?’
Hossein gives her a look that tells her all she needs to know of what he thinks of police intelligence. ‘There are three dead women upstairs,’ he says.
She nods, taking his point, then shakes her head, sorrowfully, and stares down at the broken head. Thomas’s skull hasn’t simply split; it’s shattered. The crazy paving is one vast bibimbap of brains and blood and bone and hair. ‘That’s one big mess,’ she says. ‘I don’t suppose it’ll ever come out. It looks like someone’s dropped an ostrich egg.’
Hossein looks at her, surprised. ‘You’re taking this very well,’ he says.
She puffs her cheeks and blows out through the sides of her mouth. ‘You know what? I think you run out of reactions, after a while. I don’t think you could let a bomb off behind me and make me jump.’
Hossein glances at her sideways.
‘Don’t do the Auntie Vesta needs a lie-down look,’ she says. ‘I’m old enough to have changed your nappies, and I’m certainly old enough to give you a clout round the ear. Besides. I’m not seeing you having the vapours.’
‘I don’t have anything left to throw up,’ says Hossein. ‘After what I found in that bathroom.’
‘How did he always seem so cheerful?’ she asks. ‘I mean. Wouldn’t you, you know, be gibbering if you had a flat full of dead people?’
‘I guess that’s why none of us do,’ says Hossein. ‘You have to be a particular sort of person, I guess.’
She turns and retreats into her flat, runs the hot water to wash her hands. ‘Check your shoes,’ she calls. ‘I don’t want you treading any of that stuff into the carpet.’
They go up to Cher’s room together. Music still pours out from behind Gerard Bright’s door. He’s not heard a thing, thinks Vesta. He probably avoids us because he thinks we’re common. Thinks we’ll bore him. Boy, is he going to hit a learning curve.
The door is open. They all know there will be no more locking of doors in this house. Cher lies on the bed, the green back in her face, Collette sitting beside her, mopping her brow with a damp flannel.
‘How is she?’ asks Hossein.
‘Thank God for tramadol,’ she says. ‘I gave her two. I don’t know if it’s killing the pain, but at least it’s making her care less.’
‘Do you think that was wise?’ asks Vesta.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, what if it… if they want to give her something else in the hospital?’
‘No!’ croaks Cher. ‘No fucking hospital.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ says Vesta, ‘look at you. Of course you’re going to hospital.’
‘Don’t fucking talk to me like I’m a kid!’ she says as snappishly as she can.
‘Well, don’t behave like one, then.’
The girl’s eyes fill with tears. ‘Please don’t,’ she says. ‘I can’t go back.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Vesta says, more gently. ‘But look at you, Cher. You’re broken. This isn’t something we can mend with hooky antibiotics and painkillers.’
‘It’s just a collarbone,’ she says, and bites back a squeal of pain as its ends rub together inside. God, the kid’s got guts, thinks Hossein. You’ve got to give her that. But no one whose hand is going that shade of blue is staying out of hospital. Not if they want to live.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Vesta. ‘Really I am, Cher. You gave it the best go you could. We’ll do the best we can for you.’
Cher starts to sob.