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IT’S SOME TIME LATER THAT Hannah opens her eyes. She hasn’t been asleep exactly, just drowsing, trying to throw off this weird groggy feeling before they reach the police station. But the noise of the traffic has faded away, and they seem to have been driving for a long time, longer than she would have thought.
It takes a while for her to focus on the road ahead and make sense of what she is seeing—because they are not in Edinburgh anymore, but on a country road, quite a narrow one. There are no streetlamps, only the powerful beams of Hugh’s headlamps lighting up the low hedges on either side of the track. It’s not a route she recognizes, but from the dark shapes of the hills she thinks they may be heading west, towards Berwick.
“Hugh?” She sits up, pushes her glasses up her nose, looks around, trying to figure out where they are. The chemical taste is still in her mouth, and her throat feels dry, her voice croaky. “Hugh, what’s going on?”
Hugh makes a rueful face.
“Sorry, only just outside Edinburgh, but I must have put the postcode into the satnav wrong. It took me all round the houses before I realized what I’d done. We’re heading back now. Sorry, incredibly stupid of me. I’m just trying to find a route round, I don’t want to pull a U-turn in such a narrow road.”
Hannah sinks back in her seat and they drive for a while in the darkness. They pass a farm track, then another, and beneath the fog of tiredness she begins to feel uneasy.
“Hugh? Should you turn around? This road only seems to be leading us farther away. Look, there’s a house coming up.” She points, but Hugh doesn’t slow, and it flashes past.
“Don’t worry,” he says, his voice calm, “I’ve got another route planned out.”
But when Hannah glances across at the satnav on his dashboard, it’s turned off.
Her fingers close around the phone in her pocket, before she remembers, and a kind of sick shiver runs through her.
“How long until we get to the police station?” she says.
“Oh, not long,” Hugh says. “Twenty minutes maybe?”
Hannah flicks a look at the clock on the dashboard. For a moment her vision is too blurred to read it, but she blinks, concentrates. The screen says 4:41. They have been driving for more than half an hour.
“We’re late,” she says.
“They sounded quite relaxed about the time,” Hugh says, “but you could call them if you’re worried. Give them a heads-up.”
“I can’t,” Hannah says. She tries to keep her voice level. “My phone’s broken, remember?”
“Oh, of course,” Hugh says breezily. “Well, never mind. We won’t be long now.”
She falls silent and they sit in the darkness, Hannah listening to Hugh’s breathing and hearing her own pulse in her ears. The countryside is becoming more and more deserted. The clock on the dashboard ticks down the minutes: 4:47, 4:49, 4:50. A sick feeling is starting to roil in Hannah’s stomach. What is going on? Does Hugh not want her to go to the police?
“Hugh,” she says again, and this time she can hear the tension in her own voice. “Hugh, turn around.”
“Relax,” Hugh says. His voice is smooth, urbane, reassuring. She imagines it’s the voice he uses on his patients. “We’ll be there shortly.”
She looks at his profile in the dim light of the dashboard. She feels strange, sluggish, slow-witted, as if she has not properly woken up, as if this is all one long nightmare. Why, why is she so tired? Is it possible… She glances down at the water bottle in the door, remembering its strange chemical taste, the same taste that was in her mouth after that horrible sweet tea, and a prickle of fear runs through her.
Something is wrong.
Something is wrong.
The minutes tick on. 4:52. 4:57. 5:00.
And with a kind of slow, mounting sickness, Hannah realizes the truth. Hugh is not driving her to the police. Hugh hasn’t called the police.
Instead he drugged her, and he is driving her to an unknown destination, far from Edinburgh.
She just doesn’t know why.
Because Hugh cannot be April’s killer. He can’t be. He was with Hannah from the moment April left the bar until the moment they discovered her body. He is the one person she has always known she could trust, absolutely.
So what is he doing? And why?
