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“Let me guess,” November breaks in, a little dryly. “Another prank?”
“This was before I’d learned to be quite so suspicious. I raced in, and at first I couldn’t see April at all. Then I saw it—two pale hands clutching at the windowsill.”
“What?” November says with a short laugh, a mix of puzzlement and amusement on her face. “How on earth? We’re about four floors up, aren’t we?”
“Look down,” Hannah says, and November peers over the sill, and then begins to laugh in earnest.
“Okay. I get it. She lowered herself out to stand on that bay window.”
“Yup. Except then she couldn’t get back in. She wasn’t tall enough to get a purchase on the sill, and I wasn’t strong enough to pull her up. In the end she had to shinny down the drainpipe.”
They both stare out at the rusted drainpipe that runs down beside the bay window serving the flats below, and November gives a little smile.
“Well, that sounds like April.”
There is a moment’s silence.
“Do you think—” November starts, and then glances over her shoulder at the closed bedroom door, as if she is looking for someone, worried about being overheard.
“Do I think he did it?” Hannah says. She has lowered her voice, even though it’s unlikely Dr. Myers would be able to hear them from outside two thicknesses of wood. And they would have heard him reenter the set.
November nods.
Hannah shrugs.
“I have no idea. Before we came here it felt like the best possibility. But now… now I just don’t know.”
They go out into the main office again and stand there, both looking at the spot where April was found.
“It was there, wasn’t it,” November says at last. “I recognize it from the photos.”
“Yup,” Hannah says shortly. Suddenly she very much does not want to be here. The memories are too close, crowding in on her with painful intensity. April, sprawled across the rug, her cheeks still flushed and streaked with the afterglow of the copper makeup.
She sways, steps to try to catch her balance. She feels suddenly as if she might faint.
“Are you okay?” November asks, alarmed at something in her face. “You’ve gone really pale. Sit down.”
Hannah nods and gropes her way to a chair.
There’s a knock at the door, and November barks, “Just a minute! Hannah’s feeling a bit faint.”
“Oh, of course.” Dr. Myers’s worried voice comes through the wood. “Anything I can do?”
“No, she just needs to sit down for a moment.”
“I’m okay,” Hannah manages. “I can go.”
“He can fuck off,” November snarls. “You’re sitting here until you feel okay.”
That’ll be a long time, Hannah wants to say, but she knows what November means. She knows too that it’s the truth. She will never really be okay again. Something broke in her the night of April’s murder. Something nothing will ever be able to mend—not Will’s love or her mother’s care, not the baby in her belly. Not the fragile peace she has constructed in Edinburgh.
“I’m okay,” she says now, and she stands, carefully, steadying herself on the desk. “There’s just—just one more thing.”
November watches uneasily as she moves to the other side of the room, to the door to the right of the window, and pushes it open.
Inside it’s been transformed into a kind of stationery store, along with boxes of Jiffies, headed paper, envelopes, pens, and branded Pelham maps and leaflets.
She stands, looking, trying to remember. And then a last shaft of evening sun breaks through the autumn clouds and falls through the leaded window, slanting across the old oak boards, and suddenly, there it is—in her old room, with her bed to the right, her old desk across from her. And she is there too. Hannah. Not the Hannah of now, but the Hannah of then. The Hannah of before. Young, happy, full of hope and promise, and so unbearably, unutterably innocent of all the horror that life could hold.
