‘Thank you,’ I murmured to the paramedic after she’d closed both doors.
‘No problem.’
She propped herself against the medical storage cupboards opposite my stretcher with her gloved hands braced on either side of her and her face angled away from me, looking out through the tinted side windows at the scene we were leaving behind.
Forrester Avenue receded as the ambulance weaved between emergency vehicles and then accelerated, pursued by a marked police car with two female officers inside that pulled out from the kerb as we passed. I stared at the smoking remains of the house where I’d spent my last two years, watching it grow smaller, fainter, already knowing I never wanted to see it again.
It was going to be hard to reconcile myself to the idea that Sam had lied to me from the very beginning. I didn’t know why he’d chosen me and I had no real understanding of what his intentions might have been for us in the long term. Had he really planned for us to go travelling together, or would he have looked to entrap me in some other way, I wondered?
The ambulance turned at the end of our road, rocking me from side to side, then continued on. The driver wasn’t using the blue lights or the siren and I was glad of it. I needed some quiet to try to decompress.
Looking down at my arms, I contemplated the fresh abrasions across my skin from where the brickwork had scraped me, reaching out with my finger and gently tracing the line of my scar.
‘Was that true?’ the paramedic asked me. I raised my face, a bit surprised by her tone. ‘What you just told that detective about Sam confessing to pushing Oliver?’
Her voice choked as she said it and for the first time I saw the mistiness in her eyes, the way she was pressing her lips tight together. A muscle in her cheek quivered as if she was fighting to hold her emotions in check.
Something flipped over inside me, and suddenly I knew.
Angling her head to one side, she flicked her ponytail out of the way and reached up to pluck something out of her ear between her finger and thumb, showing me the flesh-coloured nub of plastic she’d removed.
. . . They’re wearing a concealed earpiece. Sam won’t even know they answered my call . . .
I glimpsed a blurred smudge of ink on the inside of her wrist, just above the cuff of her blue nitrile gloves.
. . . she had a tattoo. Inside her wrist . . . a bumblebee . . .
And lastly, I thought about Donovan and the words he’d said to me when I’d escaped from the basement.
. . . ambulance coming . . .
I’d thought that he’d been telling me he’d called for an ambulance in the hope of saving his life. But what if that hadn’t been the only reason? What if he’d been trying to explain something else to me?
. . . ambulance coming . . .
Because hadn’t I wondered how Donovan was planning to get me away from the house without anyone noticing?
‘Just tell me if it’s true,’ the paramedic said, staring at me as if everything that mattered to her hung on my words.
I dug my fingers into the plastic-coated mattress I was sitting on as we veered around a curve. It was only a short journey to the nearest hospital. We would be there soon.
‘Who are you?’
‘Amy. Oli’s sister. I was watching Sam today. I took part in one of his support groups. We were in a seminar room at LSE. I followed him afterwards.’
It was as Donovan had said. She was the one who’d been on the other end of the phone from Donovan. She must have been on the Tube with Sam but instead of coming to our house she’d somehow arranged it so she would be in this ambulance instead.
If she was Oliver’s sister, then she was Donovan’s sister, too. As a family, they’d invested so much in this.
‘Yes, it’s true,’ I told her.
She hung her head, exhaling bitterly. ‘It wasn’t supposed to go like this.’
‘How was it supposed to go?’
‘We were going to take you away under sedation. Take you to our mother’s house. Make you look her in the eye. Make you tell her the truth.’
‘Your brother used a sedative on Bethany.’
She nodded sadly, conjuring a broken smile. ‘She wasn’t supposed to be there.’
‘But she was.’
She nodded again, as if she felt bad about that. ‘I told him to let me come into that house with him,’ she said, and thumped her fist off the counter next to her in frustration.
‘Donovan?’
‘He’s my big brother. Oli’s, too. Ever since our dad died’ – she paused, glancing up briefly at the roof of the ambulance – ‘he’s always tried to be there for us, protect us. You have no idea how much what happened with Oli ate at him. He blamed himself for being overseas and not being around. Do you know what he told me? He told me it wouldn’t be safe for me to go into that house.’
And he’d been right, I thought. It hadn’t been safe. Not for any of us.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her.
Because I was.
I was sorry any of this had happened. I was sorry he’d got hurt, that he’d terrorized me, that Bethany had been attacked and John had been threatened.
‘You got him away from the fire,’ she said to me. ‘He has a chance now because of you.’
And with that she reached into a pocket of the paramedic jumpsuit she was wearing, taking out her phone. She sniffed and swiped at her nose with a gloved knuckle, then unlocked the screen.
‘DNA results came in,’ she said with a catch in her throat. ‘You’re a match with the blood that was under Oli’s fingernails. But something you should know. Brainwashing?’ She rasped air through her lips. ‘As a doctor, I’m not sure there is such a thing. Not how you might be thinking of it, anyway. But Donovan sent me a picture when he was in there. From your medicine cabinet.’
She turned her phone and showed me the image. It was a photograph of the inside of the cabinet in our en suite.
‘Those are my anxiety meds,’ I told her.
‘Some of them, maybe. But the pills inside some of those boxes didn’t match the descriptions on the outside. And it really depends on the quantities you were taking, the combinations, the dosage, but given the right way – or the wrong way, for you – it’s conceivable they could have caused retrograde amnesia, affected your reasoning, made you more suggestible. Sam carried out some of his research work with patients in rehab centres and mental health facilities, right? My guess is he somehow got access to the drugs he needed there.’
It was a shock but also a small gift, I realized. Perhaps a way for me to begin to understand and reconcile myself to the horror that had been done to me.
‘Did you tell your brother that?’ I asked her.
‘I texted him something along those lines.’
I thought about that as the ambulance approached the main hospital building. I couldn’t help wondering if that was when Donovan’s doubts about what had happened to Oliver and to me had begun to take shape. It possibly explained why he’d been so keen for Sam to get home. I also remembered that Donovan had asked me in front of Sam if I collected the medication for my anxiety myself. He must have guessed that Sam had been switching my pills.
As I turned it over in my mind, Amy braced a hand against the rear door, bending her head to look out of the side window. The ambulance slowed and pulled to a halt beneath the lighted canopy outside the Accident and Emergency Department.
‘I need to go and find my brother,’ she said. ‘He’s strong. Stronger than anyone I’ve ever known.’
‘He was talking. Near the end. He tried to stop Sam.’
She glanced back at me, seeming to debate with herself whether to say something more.
‘Donovan did some digging into Sam. Background stuff. He looked into his career at the university. Eight, nine months back, an ex-student made allegations against him of inappropriate behaviour for events that took place three years ago. She claimed that Sam coerced her into a relationship and used controlling behaviour before she graduated and broke it off. But the disciplinary process didn’t go anywhere because she withdrew her allegations almost as soon as she’d made them. No explanation why.’
I felt as if a depth charge had gone off in my chest. I thought about the stress Sam had been under at work, how his career prospects had been derailed, how he’d complained about whispers in his department. I suspected the allegations had been part of that. And with the person I now knew Sam to have been, it seemed entirely possible that he could have threatened or intimidated his accuser until she backed off.
Three years. It couldn’t have been too long afterwards before he’d begun to target me.
I was still reckoning with the implications of that, still reeling from it, when Amy reached for the latch on the cargo doors, then paused.
‘One more question,’ she said.
I waited.
‘Sam. When he fell. I heard you say to the police that he couldn’t get a grip on you. You said he slipped. I wanted to know. Are you sure about that? Sure you didn’t maybe squirm, or kick at him, shake him loose?’
I looked at her for a beat too long, opening my mouth with no words coming out.
‘Good.’ She nodded. ‘He deserved it.’ Then she pushed open both doors and jumped down onto the tarmac, glancing over her shoulder as one of the uniformed officers climbed out of the patrol car behind us. ‘Tell them about me, don’t tell them about me, that’s entirely up to you. But one last thing. That party? I didn’t get a good enough look at you with Oli, not to be absolutely certain it was definitely you, but he came to talk to me when you first got there. And honestly? For Oli, after all his problems, all his sadness and fears, I hadn’t seen him looking as happy and excited as he did that night in a long time. In my darkest moments, I cling to that. And now I think maybe you should, too.’