She’s very cold. Every muscle in her body protesting. Her head screeching. She finds herself on the bathroom floor. God, how humiliating.
Somehow Beatrice manages to haul herself up to sit on the side of the bath. She leans over to turn on the sink tap, desperate to get water into her mouth as fast as possible. But when she tries to move her jaw, it hurts so much it feels like it might detach itself from her skull.
In front of her a tangle of wet clothes from yesterday, everything totally sodden right through to her underwear.
Thankfully, she appears to have managed to wrap herself in a dressing gown before, presumably, falling asleep here last night. It would have been unforgiveable if Charlotte had found her naked.
But when she eventually manages to pull herself to her feet and, with some trepidation, walks across the landing to 260Charlotte’s room, Beatrice finds it’s empty. It doesn’t look as if her bed has been slept in either. Where on earth can she have gone? Perhaps she got lucky. Perhaps she has plunged over a precipice in her silly heels.
Beatrice loads the washing machine with her soaking garments and hangs up her coat to drip dry in the utility room, every movement revealing more damage.
When she returns to the bathroom to run a hot bath, she catches sight of herself in the mirror. She is shocked by the state of her face. She rinses off the blood while she waits for the bath to fill.
As she gingerly steps into the warm water there is the sudden image of the man in the black balaclava – she gasps, slips and twists her ankle as she jolts down in the bath, splashing water everywhere. She recalls going over on that same foot as she ran down the path from the North End, terrified that he’d catch up with her, desperate to escape. God. The thought of what might have happened, what might still happen, makes her heave.