No Time Like the Past (16 page)

In the distance, out there in a world a million miles away from this one, I could hear shouts, cheers, and a series of explosions. The Raft Race was ending. The next event was the musical sidesaddle demonstration. I should be going. If I didn’t turn up, they’d come looking for me and suddenly, I didn’t want them to find her. Suddenly – God knows why after everything she’d done over the years – I wanted her to be free. To start again somewhere. To defeat her own demons. Not to let John Maxwell win. I didn’t know why it was so important to me. I just knew it was.

I stood up slowly. She still didn’t move.

 I said very quietly, ‘I’m going now. I’m going to walk away and take a chance on whether you’ll let me. Whether you’ll take the first step of your new life. Today. Now. Whether you can leave all the shit behind you and move on. Goodbye, Isabella. I wish you the very best of luck. Be amazing.’

I stepped past her and she still didn’t move. I took two more paces and then looked back at her, sitting on the corn bin, her hair, so like mine, lit up in a shaft of sunlight shining through a chink in the roof. As if she felt my gaze, she lifted her head. We looked at each other for a long time and then she smiled, uncertainly. I smiled back at her. A bit of a first for both of us. I felt a sudden conviction. She would make it. She was tough. She could start again.

I walked across the barn, heading for the open doorway. Back towards the sunshine. People. The rest of my life.

I turned my back on her.

And then the bitch shot me.

Chapter Twelve

I’ve been wounded several times. I’ve had my fair share of being stretched out on the ground, wondering what the hell just happened, and always with that voice in my head screaming at me to get up. But not this time. This time it was as if the connection between mind and body had been severed. No messages were being received. I wasn’t even sure they were being sent out.

I lay on my stomach where I’d fallen. I could feel cold hard earth under one cheek. I could see a hand on the end of an out-flung blue velvet arm. In the absence of anyone else, I supposed it must be mine.

Even as I stared at it, trying to piece together what was going on, I felt and heard slow footsteps approach. I saw a pair of mud-splattered Timberlands come to a halt about two feet away.

‘Look at me.’

There was no chance. I could hardly move my eyes, let alone my head. Realising this, she took several steps backwards and knelt. Now I could see all of her. Especially her face, frighteningly blank, her eyes empty, completely in control of herself.

She calmly took out the clip, inspected it, and shoved it back in again. Prolonging the moment. Her hands were quite steady.

So was her voice. ‘I’ve always hated you, Maxwell. You’re scum, but I never thought even you would try to buy your life by spewing such filth. You’re a poisonous bitch. You wreck people’s lives. You contaminate everything you touch and I really can’t allow you to live any longer.’

She raised the gun.

I refused to close my eyes. Actually, I wasn’t even sure I could. There didn’t seem to be a single part of me that was working properly. I wasn’t even sure I was breathing. Perhaps I was already dead and these were my last thoughts slowly spilling away …

I stared up at the gun, her arm, her face, those eyes … There was no one else in the world … I saw her finger tighten …

The gunshot sounded loud. Incredibly loud, even to me. For long seconds I stared up at her.

She knelt, motionless, and then, with shocking suddenness, a thin, red line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth. Her arm dropped to her side as if, all at once, she was too weary to hold it up any longer. Then, as I watched, she fell forwards onto her face. She thudded into the earth and because that’s the way the gods like to do things, her face was about eighteen inches away from mine. Dying, we each looked into the other’s eyes.

I felt no emotion. No fear. No shock.

There were more footsteps, slowly approaching. Someone else was here.

Not that it mattered. Still we stared at each other. The last thing either of us was going to see was each other. The gods must be laughing their heads off.

Someone kicked away her gun. Someone stood behind me. I saw her body jerk with the impact of the first shot. And again. And again. Someone was ending her life and still she wouldn’t look away from me, hanging on to her hatred, even in her last seconds.

Someone emptied an entire clip of ammunition into her.

She died between the fourth and fifth shots. I saw the change. Dead eyes now. And still her body jerked and spasmed as bullet after bullet penetrated her now-dead body. Blood and worse splattered my face as the thing that had been Barclay slowly disintegrated in front of me.

I didn’t stay for the end. Somewhere around the ninth or tenth shot, I closed my eyes and let go.

I was out of the game for a very long time.

I know that in fiction, the brave protagonist throws aside the bedclothes, leaps from the bed announcing that he/she/it/everything is absolutely fine, and gets out there and solves the crime/ catches the villain/ saves the world/whatever.

I did none of that.

I lay, staring up at the ceiling or, when they sat me up, out of the window instead. I barely moved. I didn’t speak. There was so much banging around in my head and I hadn’t a clue how to deal with any of it, so I didn’t deal with it at all. I just sat and stared at nothing, unable to comprehend what had happened and unwilling to try, until one day I felt the bed sag. I withdrew my thoughts from wherever they had been and focused to find Leon sitting on the bed, pale and shadowed with worry. He took my hand.

‘Enough. Come back to me.’

I stared for a long time while questions surfaced and sank again in the seething cauldron of my mind, but I had to say something. I made huge effort and returned to the land of the living.

My voice was hoarse with disuse. ‘Who won the Raft Race?’

‘Debatable. Our boat sank first, but after everyone had fought their way to land, it was discovered that Mr Markham had, in fact, swum underwater, reached the rosettes, grabbed both of them, and presented them to the Chancellor. By that time you’d been discovered and no one cared anyway.’

‘Does everyone know?’

‘No. The Open Day carried on around you.’

‘Did we make any money?’

‘Yes.’

I ran out of questions I could use to avoid the issue.

He waited.

‘Who found me?’

‘Van Owen. You didn’t turn up for the musical ride. She came looking.’

I nodded carefully.

He waited some more.

Finally, since I obviously wasn’t going to say anything, he said, ‘What happened, Max? Tell me. How did you and Barclay get into that barn? I assume she shot you. Who shot her?’

I shook my head. ‘The shooter was behind me. I never saw him.’

‘Do you remember what happened?’

Reluctantly, I nodded. I wasn’t going to lie to him, but if he didn’t ask the right questions, then I wasn’t going to put him right.

He waited. He was doing a lot of that. Where to begin? What to say? How could I possibly deal with the guilt, the self-blame? How could anyone manage to get her whole life so wrong?

‘She ambushed me while I was watching the race. She had a gun. We went to the barn. She shot me. Someone shot her.’

‘She shot you in the back. At close range. You turned your back on her, Max. What aren’t you telling me?’

I drew a deep ragged breath that hurt my chest and still couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs.

‘We promised we would always talk to each other, Max. You and I have been through a great deal together and I know this is difficult for you, so I’m saying this. Tell me now and I’ll tell those that need to know. You won’t ever have to say another word if you don’t want to. Helen won’t like it, but I’ll make everything right with her. And Dr Bairstow. So tell me what happened and then we’ll never speak of it again.’

I still couldn’t breathe properly. Somewhere, something bleeped. I heard the door open.

‘Not now,’ he said, quietly enough, but with that note in his voice, and the door closed again.

He smiled reassuringly. ‘Well, that’s both of us in trouble, now.’

I gripped his hand. Hard.

‘I thought I’d got through to her. I really did think I had got through to her. I thought it was over. I thought she would go away and start a new life. That because I had done that, she could too. It was her chance to start all over again. To leave everything behind her. To go away. I really thought she would do it, because her hatred was consuming her. It was burning her up. She said I ruined her life and she was right. Only I had it wrong because I never listen properly and it wasn’t you she was talking about. But I never knew. Until she told me, I had no idea. And then she told me and everything changed.’

He said carefully, ‘I think I got most of that but I need clues. What did she tell you?

‘That … that she was my sister.’

There. It was out. What would happen now?

He wrapped both his warm hands around mine.

‘No, she wasn’t.’

‘Yes, she was. And as soon as she said it, I could see …’

‘No, sweetheart, she wasn’t. She was not your sister. She never was your sister. Isabella Barclay is – was – the only daughter of prosperous parents, Patricia and Robert Barclay. She went to school in Stoke-on-Trent and from there she studied computer sciences at the London College of Computer Technology. She spent a few years in the private sector and then came to St Mary’s. Don’t you think Dr Bairstow does an extensive background check on everyone here? There is no way she could be your sister and he not know about it. It was just something she said to mess with your head and it worked. You turned your back on her, just as she planned, and she shot you, and if that other, unknown person hadn’t been there, she would have got away with it. The final victory would have been hers.’

I stared at him. ‘Not …?’

‘Not your sister, no.’

‘She said …’

‘All lies.’

All … lies. The words drummed in my head. All … lies. Picking up speed. All lies. I’d been manipulated. How she must have laughed inside as I sat before her, earnestly imploring her to leave it all behind and start again. I’d bared my soul to her. Told her my secrets. And that tentative little smile she’d given me as I got up to go … the one that convinced me she had heard my words … So that I would turn to go … She’d staged the whole thing and I’d made it easy for her and it was … all … lies. Something was building inside me. Something that had been lying dormant for years and was big and ugly and looking for something to hurt …

‘Leon, you should leave now.’

All lies.

‘No.’

All lies.

‘I mean it. You must go.’

‘No.’

Lies. Lies. Lies.’

He got up off the bed and walked to the door. He was leaving after all. No, he wasn’t. He locked the door and returned to the bed.

All the time, something was coming. Something was coming fast. Something red and hot and huge and all-consuming and uncontrollable … Doors that had remained safely closed for years were flying open … 

‘Here.’ He handed me the water jug.

And then – suddenly – it was here.

Rage. Pure and primal. A desire for violence …

I screamed. It hurt my throat and I didn’t care. I hurled the water jug across the room. It shattered against the wall and made a satisfying dent in the plaster, too. But not satisfying enough for me.

I’ve had one or two occasions in my life when the proverbial red mist has descended. I’m not proud of them, but they happen occasionally. This was one of those occasions. I have no memory of getting out of bed, or even of the next few minutes at all, but when, finally, I came to rest, I was standing, panting and in pain, by the window, tangled in tubes, with IV drips on the floor, the fruit bowl in tiny fragments, the window broken, the bedclothes on the floor, and one of the pillows ripped to shreds and bits of it floating everywhere.

Silence settled along with the filling.

I slowly became aware of people pounding on the door.

Leon approached, holding a blanket, although a chair and whip might have been more appropriate.

‘Better now?’ he said, calmly.

 I was still shaking in the aftermath, although whether with shock, cold, or relief, I couldn’t have said. He wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and I sat on the window seat, exhausted.

He opened the door. I braced myself because this was unacceptable behaviour and God knows what was going to happen now, but he simply picked me up and carried me into the empty isolation ward down the corridor. The bed was warm and soft. I vaguely remember people disentangling tubes and things, and drawing the curtains. Voices came and went. I lay for a while with my eyes closed, gently closing the doors on now empty rooms as silence finally fell.

I felt Leon curl himself around me and knew I was safe.

‘No hanky-panky,’ said Helen’s voice from a million miles away. ‘We’re not licenced.’

I slept.

He was as good as his word. I don’t know what he did or what he said, but with one exception, no one ever mentioned Isabella Barclay in my hearing ever again.

Kal and Dieter came to visit and we all pretended everything was normal.

I had important questions. ‘Did we make any money?’

‘Masses,’ said Kal, writing ‘NIL BY MOUTH’ and pasting it over the bed. ‘Apparently we could have made even more, but Dr Bairstow vetoed the plan to charge people to view your body. We did suggest a chalk outline and letting people visit the crime scene but he said it would be in poor taste, and I suppose what with the Chief Constable being there we had to behave ourselves …’

She tailed off.

‘Shame,’ I said.

Dieter nodded. ‘We thought so, yes.’

My next visitor was Markham. I was so pleased to see him.

‘Hey!’

He deposited the entire supply of chocolate for the northern hemisphere on my bed. ‘There! That should see you through to lunchtime.’

I laughed for the first time in what seemed like ages. ‘Good to see you’

‘Good to see you, too.’

He sat on the bed and smacked me a huge kiss, just as Leon entered.

 He shot to his feet. ‘Whoops. Here’s Chief Farrell. Do you think he saw anything?’

‘No, you’re quite safe. He never notices when other men kiss me.’

Leon sighed. ‘I’m almost afraid of the answer, but might I enquire why you are kissing the Chief Operations Officer?

Markham beamed, unabashed. ‘Sorry, Chief. I didn’t mean to make you feel left out. Deepest apologies.’

He threw his arms around Leon, kissed him soundly on the cheek, and released him.

I stared at the pattern on the curtains. Blue stripe, green stripe, cream stripe, don’t laugh …

Leon stood stunned. In fact, he made Mrs Lot look like bowl of quivering jelly.

Cream stripe, green stripe …

He dropped his flowers on the bedside table and turned to Markham. ‘Seriously, is that the best you can do? No wonder Hunter won’t give you the time of day.
This
is how you really kiss a girl.’

I smiled and lifted up my face, but he seized Markham in his arms, bent him over backwards, planted him one firmly on the lips, and in walked Nurse Hunter.

I waited with interest to see what would happen next.

She said, ‘For God’s sake, you two, get a room,’ and walked out. Markham tore himself free and raced after her.

Leon called after him. ‘Don’t tell me the magic’s worn off already.’ He turned to me. ‘What are you laughing at?’

‘Well, if you don’t know the answer to that one …’