“It’s OK, you don’t have to talk about it.”
“No,” she interrupts me. “I do. There have been more attacks, haven’t there? Since me, I mean.”
“Err. . .”
“How many?”
“Two.” I admit. “A girl at a Tube station, her face was. . .” I gesture weakly to the red score lines engraved in her face. “Well, y’know. And then me, yesterday.” I fill her in on the details of my own encounter and she watches me with wide eyes, barely blinking.
“The girl at the Tube,” Tasha says slowly. “How do you know about her face?”
“I was there.” The words barely make a sound in the room, but I swear if she was a cartoon character, a big, yellow lightbulb would be springing out of the air above Tasha’s head right now.
“So, let me get this straight.” Tasha uses her good hand to tick off the fingers on her bad one and I try not to grimace at the sight of her mangled nail beds. “First, you swap rooms with a girl on our course and she dies – is murdered – minutes later. Then you lend me your top andI’mattacked and put in hospital. You get on the Tube and a girl is mauled. And finally, you’re ambushed in the library where this guy, Will, works.”
“Yeah,” I mumble.
“Niamh, what did the other girls look like?”
“Um.” I mumble again. My shoes are suddenly pretty interesting.
“They looked like you,” Jess supplies quietly. “Or Niamh. Long, straight, dark brown hair, tall. I’d easily confuse them in the dark.”
“Enough!” I say. “I know, I know, the victims all look like me, but I’m not the link here.” Jess and Tasha exchange a meaningful glance and frustration pours out of me. “I’m not! Believe what you want, but the first attack happened two weeks before I was even in the country. Check the newspapers if you don’t believe me!”
“Niamh, it’s OK, we believe you.” Jess’s voice is soothing, like she’s talking to a little kid. It would usually annoy me but I’m too tired to be annoyed. Tasha is looking exhausted, and I feel guilty.
“I’m sorry,” I say. They glance at one another as I make eye contact with them both, try to prove I’m not a total psycho.
“Don’t be sorry.” Tasha speaks gently. “It’s not us who should be sorry.”
“She’s right.” Jess leans over the bed, takes Tasha’s free hand and offers me her other one. I take it. A hot tear runs down my cheek. “If it is Will, we can do something about it. We’ll go to the police, tell that detective everything we know. Tasha can identify him as the one who attacked her.”
She squeezes my hand. “Maybe we can stop him before he does it again.”
“Yeah.” I squeeze her hand back, my fear slowly retreating. I look Tasha in the eye and there’s a glimmer of hope reflected there. “Yeah, maybe we can.”
“I think we’ve gone the wrong way.”
“Really, you think?” Jess mutters sarcastically. She looks around at the maze of corridors. “I’ve never been down here before. We must’ve taken a wrong turn when we left Tasha’s ward.”
I hang back as she wanders back down the passageway towards a multicoloured sign. We’re in a much older part of the hospital here, the floor chipped and dirty brown, the lower walls lined with that shiny green tile you sometimes see in public toilets – or in a Tube station, I realize. I let my eyes drift along the old door frames, each one a large arch with a little Art Deco plinth on the top. The whole place is saturated with a decaying air of grandeur and sadness ... definitely sadness.
“Back this way, I think.” Jess is only a few steps away but her voice echoes like we’re at opposite ends of a cavern. I follow her, aware of how quiet it is, our footsteps falling into a steady rhythm when I catch up. “We’re going straight back to the police station, right?”
“Right,” I reply, distracted by the wooden plaques hung above various entrances. They’re all carved with names, the gold paint faded, a ghost of its former glory. We pass the Sir Lawrence Fortescue Ward, the Lady Pembroke Neonatal Unit, the Jane Alsop Children’s Unit.
“Wait.” I stop dead.
“What’s up?” Jess follows my gaze and her eyes clear with comprehension. “Jane Alsop, no way! She was that rich girl whose family owned the factory – the girl who died. Geoffrey told us about her.”
I nod slowly. “The one I dress up as.”
“I wonder why the unit was named after her? They must’ve been real high society types.”
“Why?”
“You had to donate a load of money to have somewhere like this named after you, especially back when this was built.”
