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Oh God, oh God. Not now—please not now.
My side was throbbing, and I felt like I was going to throw up—but I made my legs work just a little harder as I ran down the steps towards the platform.
“Police!” I heard from behind me. But platform 6 was blessedly crowded, and as I flung myself around the corner at the bottom of the stairs, I found myself face-to-face with a gaggle of teens, all similar heights to me, two also wearing black fleeces with the hood up. I sent up a silent prayer of thanks to the god of teenage boys as the train doors opened, and I shoved my way through, with scant regard for good manners.
Close the doors, close the doors.
Inside, I pushed my way down the crowded aisle and into the next carriage.
As I did, the announcement came over the speaker.
“This is the delayed fifteen thirty-one service to Birmingham New Street, this train is now departing, please stand clear of the doors.”
I held my breath, ducking my head to peer out through the window, at the platform. The police officer was standing there, looking irritated, speaking into his walkie-talkie.
And then there was a jolt that made me stagger and press my hand to my side, and we were moving. We were away. But that had been entirely too close for comfort.
As the train drew out of Milton Keynes, I felt the tension go out of my body with a rush that left me weak and trembling, and desperate to sit down. When I had picked up the go bag back in Salisbury Lane I’d congratulated myself on how light it was. Now, even though I’d eaten most of my provisions, it felt like a lead weight on my shoulder. I let it slide to the floor and looked around for a seat. I was trying to decide whether I was better off moving down another carriage or asking the woman opposite to remove her shopping bags from the seat next to her when I felt a trickle of something hot down the side of my stomach. When I slipped my hand up underneath the fleece, my fingertips came out red. The dressing must have come loose with all the running. I was bleeding again.
Shit. The fleece was black, so the bloodstains wouldn’t show, but I couldn’t afford to bleed onto the train seats or anywhere people might see. If there was one thing that would attract attention, it would be that.
There was a toilet sign over the doorway to the next carriage, so with an effort I pulled the rucksack back onto my shoulder and began squeezing along the aisle, desperately hoping as I pushed past a woman with her baby that I wasn’t leaving smears of blood on her pram.
The toilet was the old type with a slam door and a lime-scaled loo which I wouldn’t have been surprised to find emptied onto the track. But as I closed the door behind me and slid the bolt across, I wouldn’t have cared if it was the toilet out of Trainspotting, I was just so thankful that it had a lock that worked, and a tap.
Hooking the rucksack over the back of the door, I pulled off first the hoodie and then my ruined white top, now adorned with a dark red poppy of blood that bloomed across one side.
My first thought, when I examined the dressing, was that it didn’t look too bad—the running had just pulled the cut open again, and the blood had soaked through the gauze. Probably all I needed to do was stick on a new one.
But when I peeled off the corner of the soggy square, what I saw underneath made me blench.
The underside of the dressing looked even worse than the one Cole had helped me remove yesterday, soaked with a mixture of blood and what looked worryingly like pus. The wound itself was angry and swollen in a way that even I, someone with zero medical training, could tell wasn’t good.
An infection would explain why I was feeling so strange—my legs so weak and jelly-like, my skin running hot and cold—and reluctant as I was to admit that Cole was right, I was starting to think he might be correct; I did need antibiotics. But that was a risk I couldn’t take.
In the end I splashed warm water over the skin, flushing away as much of the gunk as I could and trying to ignore the queasy smell that came up from the sink along with the steam. The water stung, but not as much as I would have thought, and the sharp sensation was almost a relief from the constant low-level throbbing which had been gnawing at my side all day.
When the cut was clean, I patted it dry with toilet paper and then stuck on another of the dressings I had stolen from the shopping center. I held it against my ribs, shutting my eyes against the pain as I pressed down, and even through the layers of gauze and paper, I could feel the heat coming off the wound. There was nothing to be done apart from crossing my fingers and trusting to my immune system. Shivering now, I pulled the blood-stained top back over my head, dragged on the fleece, and tried to think what to do.
My ticket wouldn’t work on this line—which meant I would somehow have to blag my way out at the other end. That might be easier at a small country station, maybe even one small enough not to have ticket barriers. The only question was where.
I dug in my pocket for my phone, to check the train’s stopping points, but before I could open it I saw a Signal notification on the lock screen. It was a message. From Hel.
“Jack?” it read. “Are you there? How did it go?!”
A rush of relief spiked through me. Hel. God, I wanted nothing more than to talk to her—I wanted to blurt out this whole tangled mess and get her cool, analytical appraisal of what the fuck was going on and what all this meant.
Was it really possible that Cole was responsible for Gabe’s death? He hadn’t killed him—I was sure of that, or at least, as sure as it was possible to get without having witnessed the murder myself. The shock in his voice when I had told him, the anguish as he had stammered out “They—they cut his throat?” That hadn’t been fake, I was sure of it. But the insurance—why else would he have taken out the insurance? That wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. He must have spent days getting hold of Gabe’s ID, his credit card details, filling out forms. That was coldly premeditated in a way that made my head spin, and I couldn’t begin to parse what it all meant.
Hel was the one person whose opinion I trusted more than anyone else’s in the world—more than Gabe’s, in a way, because Gabe was an optimist, and his perspective was always colored by wanting the best for people and believing the best of them. Hel was… well, she wasn’t a pessimist exactly. But more of a realist. We had been through the same things, survived the loss of our parents when we were barely adults. We had both lost our trust in things turning out okay that night, in a way that Gabe never had. And besides, Gabe was gone.
Because of that, she was the only person who might, just might, be able to help me get to the bottom of this. But it wasn’t just my own confusion stopping me from replying. There was something else, a feeling which I realized now, looking down at the lock screen, had been dogging me for some time, ever since I messaged Hel before I went into Sunsmile. I hadn’t had time to think about it then, but there was something wrong. Something…
And then it came to me.
In fact, it was staring me in the face with its little round eyes.
Hel’s shocked emoji, the one she had sent me two messages ago. And before that, the now-deleted “You go first” message with its uncharacteristic smiley face. Two emojis that she had never used in her texts before.
