When I open my eyes, I see Clarke, but I think it’s Frank.
Excruciating pain shoots through my hip and arm. I try to speak but he puts a hand on my arm, tells me to hang on, Detective Fields, hang on. My hands move to my belly, but I black out again. When I come to, I’m in the backseat of a car. With every jolt, the pain cuts through me. I try to focus on the baby kicking but throw up instead. Sorry, I’m saying. I’m so sorry.
It’s okay, someone answers kindly, but I wasn’t talking to them.
I keep my eyes tightly shut, breathe through the pain, like my mother used to tell me to when I cut my knee open on the tarmac at the car park near our house. ‘Mind over matter, my Ally bird,’ she’d say, tapping my nose with her finger. ‘I’ve got you. You will be okay.’
But now it’s Clarke saying it, and I’m on a gurney in some echoey corridor, the smell of disinfectant overwhelming.
‘The baby,’ I croak, but nobody hears me. Then I’m dreaming about demons and long stretching shadows, and someone is crying.
When I wake up, I’m in a hospital bed, there’s a monitor belt strapped across my belly and my head is wrapped in bandages. I can’t move my right arm without wincing. I am completely alone. But the feathery heartbeat on the monitor next to me is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.
‘There you are now.’ A nurse walks in briskly. Her pixie peroxide hair is as dramatic as her drawn-on eyebrows. ‘Gave us all an awful fright, Alison.’ She smiles kindly. ‘You are at the hospital in Ballyowen.’
I can only nod weakly, too exhausted to tell her please call me Ally. I blink slowly, groggy from whatever pain meds they’ve given me. But I need to get back to Dublin. I need to be in my tiny apartment, with the door closed and the brick view from the window. I need to retreat.
‘Baby’s fine,’ she says quickly. ‘Doctors are happy with the scans so far, but we’ll be monitoring you for a few hours yet. The arm, on the other hand… kaput.’ She makes a cracking open gesture with her hands and grimaces good-naturedly. ‘How are you feeling?’ She steps closer to me. ‘I’m Maria.’
‘That was my mother’s name,’ I say faintly, the throb of my head making my eyes twitch.
Maria hands me a glass of water from my locker and I sip gratefully. As I lie back, she fiddles over my shoulder with the drip, fixes my hospital gown. The gentle hands are so comforting that I close my eyes and pretend it’s her.
A while later there’s a small rap on the door and Clarke Casey pokes his head around it. He looks exhausted, his tie loose, his trousers creased.
‘Now this one,’ Maria says as she bundles the plastic wrapping from one of the tubes into a crinkly ball and stuffs it into a stainless-steel bin with a tinny clank. ‘This one has been here all day. Needs a bed himself by the looks of it.’
She smiles and lays a hand on his shoulder as she trundles past him out of the room, promising to page the doctor to come and talk to me as soon as she’s free. Then it’s just Clarke and me.
‘How are you doing, boss?’ he asks shyly, and I sit up a little in the bed, embarrassed suddenly by how exposed I feel. He senses it too. I pull the blue hospital covers a little higher. ‘How’s the arm?’
‘I believe the medical term is kaput.’ I smile awkwardly and with my good arm pull my plait to one side, fiddling with the ends. My tell. I’m uncomfortable with all of this, not used to being this side of the hospital bed. ‘Nancy?’ I ask as he pulls a plastic seat towards my bed. He’s far too big for the room and knocks the rim of the chair against the steel bar of the drip stand. He winces an apology, bottom teeth bared.
‘They took her to Mount Michael in Dublin.’ He grimaces again and shakes his head a little. It isn’t good news. Mount Michael is the national head injuries unit. ‘Tim has been calling regularly with updates. She’s critical, I’m afraid.’
I think of Nancy’s animalistic howling in the upstairs room of her burnt-out former home. Whatever happened the night of that fire, it set off a series of ripples that affected far too many lives.
‘Is there anyone I can call for you?’ he asks gently, handing me the plastic cup of water I’m struggling to reach. Despite my bravado, I feel bone-achingly weak. ‘Your aunt maybe?’
Suddenly I’m too tired to do anything but lie back on the pillow. Besides, I don’t want Sammy or anyone else to worry about me. Maria, the nurse, implied that I’ll be home once the doctors are happy with the baby.
‘And your head…’ Clarke says. ‘It looks… well, how do you feel?’
I wince slightly as I gently tap my head, feeling the extent of the injury.
‘Honestly? Like I’ve been on a whiskey bender.’
He smiles.
‘I told DI Nolan about what happened, by the way,’ Clarke says, not meeting my eyes.
I swallow softly. Outside the room, in the corridor, something wheels past. There’s a low tracking sound as it lurches slowly past my half-open door.
‘I told the boss that you’d be off for the rest of the week. He said to finish up for… you know, for the baby.’
I’m about to argue but he’s not finished. He starfishes both his hands between us, as if to pause my reaction. ‘But I knew you would want to see things through here. So, why don’t you take a few days and I can cover for now and obviously keep you informed.’
There’s no way I could sit at home not knowing how this all finishes up. I have to find out what really happened to baby Liam. But right now, I’m too tired to think of anything beyond the next few hours.
‘How bad is Nancy?’ I ask, guilt gnawing that I was the one who encouraged her down those unstable stairs.
Clarke describes how he arrived at the house just moments after we fell. He found both Nancy and I inside the derelict house. ‘When the beam fell, it must have hit her pretty hard. It’s a serious head injury. She’s on the trauma ward. You were in and out of consciousness. You gave us all a fright.’
‘I should have handled things differently. I should have waited for you…’ I sit back against the pillow, feeling defeated, my head throbbing. We agree that Nancy was probably expecting Gerald Barrows to show up at the burnt-out house on Eastbourne Road. This could have been so much worse. Gerald had a lucky escape, but the more I try to remember what happened in that house, the more it seems to drift away from me. What had Nancy meant when she told me that it was all her fault?
‘You were lucky, Detective Fields,’ Clarke says. Those eyes are too kind again, and it makes me uncomfortable.
‘Nancy kept saying it was all her fault,’ I tell Clarke instead, pulling at the dark strands spiking out of the bobbin at the end of my braid. My movements feel weighted down, syrupy slow. I think of what Tim and the babysitter May had said – that Nancy was leaving her family. Could she have harmed her child? It’s possible. ‘Could it have been a sacrifice of sorts? She said she was to blame for Liam’s disappearance. What did she mean?’
I think of the crystals in Nancy’s caravan. The shrine of dreamcatchers. Did any of it mean she was capable of something so unthinkable?
We both listen to the thunk, thunk of the baby’s heartbeat a moment as we consider the case. ‘Such a beautiful sound,’ Clarke says, a look on his face that I can’t pinpoint. ‘In some more positive news,’ he says after a pause, ‘we have a Zoom with Jim Aylesbury – the fire inspector – tomorrow. And Frank Nolan has given the go-ahead to get the kid formally DNA tested. Paperwork’s in motion.’
‘Did Frank say anything else?’ I can’t help asking.
Clarke looks at me and shakes his head. Maybe I imagine the pity in his eyes. I didn’t expect Frank to drop everything exactly, but it would have been nice to know he was bloody concerned about me and his unborn child. Didn’t I deserve to have someone hold my hand and tell me everything was going to be all right?
‘DS Fields?’ Clarke is looking at me quizzically. ‘I was saying that I’m trying to arrange a meeting with Vee, Nancy’s sister. She lives in Dublin.’
‘I’ll come,’ I say quickly, searching around the room for my phone. ‘We need some answers. Didn’t May say that Vee came over with a peace offering that night? What was she apologising for? Maybe it was her on the phone arguing with her sister?’ Clarke starts to interrupt, but what am I going to do, sit at home watching EastEnders for the next few days? ‘It’s just a broken arm, Clarke. Don’t be such a granny. You’ll have to drive me back, though.’
He looks at me a moment and then shrugs. ‘Whatever you say, boss.’
He hands me my phone and leaves the room. I lie back against my pillows, close my eyes, listening. Smiling.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thunk.