Losing You (39 page)

Forcing herself past the rebuff, Phyllis said, ‘Mrs Dempster, from along the road, is coming to help sort out the flowers and cards outside. I got talking to her when I was out there yesterday. She said you’ve been very kind to her.’

‘Not really,’ Emma responded, straightening Lauren’s pillows and feeling as though the day Mrs Dempster had received a visit from a golden angel had happened years, rather than weeks ago. ‘Would you mind asking her if she needs to go to the supermarket?’ she said. ‘They’ve cancelled the old people’s bus, so she struggles to get there on her own.’ Then it came to her who had been behind the golden angel scheme, and she felt her head starting to spin. ‘Nothing’s ever the way you think, is it?’ she said faintly.

Phyllis was watching her closely. ‘What is it?’ she asked gently.

Emma shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Phyllis turned away, then came back again. ‘If you’re going to try and keep Lauren alive through your own force of will,’ she said, ‘you’re going to need all the energy you can get, so please let me make you some breakfast.’

Emma’s eyes widened as she registered what her mother had said. She turned to look at her.

Phyllis held the look, and Emma felt unsteadied by the determination and emotion in her mother’s eyes. ‘You can do it,’ Phyllis told her, ‘and whether you like it or not, I’m going to be here making sure you do.’

*

Twenty minutes later, having eaten most of the bacon sandwich her mother had prepared, Emma was about to leave for the hospital when Clive Andrews arrived.

‘I don’t want to hold you up,’ he said, as she let him in, ‘but there’s something I need to discuss with you.’

Experiencing an all too familiar churn of fear, Emma showed him into the sitting room, looking curiously, anxiously, at the heavy box that he put down next to the coffee table.

‘I picked this up yesterday,’ he explained. ‘It’s from Lauren’s car; her flute case, handbag, shoes – and the laptop.’ As he said the last he lifted it out to show her.

Looking at the computer with Lauren’s name in thick pink pen across the front, along with stickers of her favourite musicians, Emma had to take a moment before she could thank him. Shoes? Why were her shoes there? They must have come off in the accident. What if they were broken? She wasn’t sure she could bear to see them.

As he handed the computer to her, she said, ‘Was it ...? Did it prove useful?’

‘If you mean did it yield up any deep, dark secrets,’ he replied with a smile, ‘then I don’t think so.’ His face started to colour, as though he was embarrassed by what he’d said and was wishing now that he hadn’t. ‘The car is ready to come back to you,’ he continued. ‘I’ll give you the address of where it is.’

‘We have to collect it?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Taking a quick decision to leave that to Will, she said, ‘Please sit down. Would you like a tea or coffee? I was just going to the hospital, but Lauren’s leg is being operated on this morning, so I don’t really have to be there until they bring her back to the ward.’

‘That’s very kind,’ he responded, ‘but I’ve just had a coffee.’ He cleared his throat. ‘A few things have happened, relevant to Lauren’s case ...’

Hating the reminder that her daughter was a case now in both a legal and medical sense, Emma heard herself saying, ‘She had a good night. I rang the hospital about an
hour ago. No more sudden surges in pressure, or drops either – and she’s still breathing on her own.’

‘That’s encouraging,’ he said with a smile. ‘Ah, Mrs Stevens, how are you?’

‘Please call me Phyllis,’ she said, coming to shake his hand. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’

‘Emma already has, but I’m fine, thanks.’

‘Apparently a few things have come up,’ Emma told her.

Phyllis looked concerned. ‘I’ll let you have some privacy,’ she said, turning to leave.

‘No, stay,’ Emma insisted. She looked at Clive Andrews again. ‘It’s good for me to have someone with me when news is being broken,’ she explained. ‘I’m sure I’m taking it in, but then I can never seem to remember it all later.’

He smiled sympathetically, and waited for Phyllis to sit down. ‘Well, to begin with,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a mishap at the labs. It seems, for the moment at least, that the blood samples Oliver Lomax provided have been ... mislaid.’

Emma became very still. ‘What does that mean, exactly?’ she asked.

‘It means that without the results of his blood test a prosecution for drink-driving is going to be difficult to pursue.

The colour drained from Emma’s face.

‘Of course, we’re still hoping ...’

Emma wasn’t listening. ‘So my daughter is in a coma, and might even die, while the boy who put her there walks free? Is that what you’re saying? Is it? Are you seriously telling me that because some idiot has lost this blood, it’s all over for Oliver Lomax? Well, it’s not going to happen. I won’t let it, and nor will her father. That boy has to pay for what he’s done. He needs to learn that he’s not above the law, and that when he gets into a car, drunk, there are consequences to be paid, consequences my daughter is paying ...’ Her voice started to fracture with rising emotion. ‘He’s got to be taken off the road,’ she cried shrilly. ‘No one’s safe while people like him are around. I’m telling you, he has to be taken off the road and put behind bars.’

‘Believe me, I understand how you feel,’ Andrews said
gently, ‘and I promise you, everyone’s looking for these samples, so they might yet turn up ...’

‘His father’s behind this!’ Emma shouted. ‘That newsreader. He’s used whatever contacts he has to make that blood disappear.’

‘I really don’t think that’s the case ...’

‘How do you know? They wouldn’t tell you.’

‘No, but ...’

‘And what about the breath tests? They were positive, weren’t they? Can’t you use them?’

‘Probably not on their own, I’m afraid, but I’m not going to rule it out, because I think prosecutions have gone ahead in the past based only on a breath test. And don’t forget, there’s still the charge of dangerous driving ...’

Emma was suddenly beside herself. ‘I can’t believe this,’ she cried, clutching her hands to her head as she shot to her feet. ‘That boy gets into his car, knowing he’s drunk, not giving a damn about anyone else, and now Lauren, my precious baby, is so badly injured that she’s barely able to hold on to her life, never mind fight for it.’

Looking as wretched as he felt, Andrews said, ‘Believe me, I’m not in the business of defending Oliver Lomax, but ... I’m not sure whether or not it’ll help you to know the reason he got into his car that night – it was because he thought his mother was about to commit suicide. He’d received a call from her, and was on his way to try and stop her when he ... when the accident happened.’

Emma’s eyes closed as her heart launched a dreadful beat. A strange darkness was coming over her, a weight that was unbearable, a fear that seemed to be sucking her into a terrible abyss.

‘Sit down,’ her mother told her, coming to her. ‘Take a deep breath ...’

Emma’s head was still spinning. Everything felt wrong; nothing was making any sense.

‘I’ll get some water,’ Andrews said.

As he went off to the kitchen he was willing his mobile to ring with news that the samples had been found, but of course it didn’t. He felt doubtful that the missing blood would ever reappear. Obviously the Lomax family would
be hoping that it wouldn’t, and did it seem entirely fair for the boy to pay with a driving ban, even imprisonment, for dashing to his mother’s aid? On the other hand, he’d known very well he’d been drinking, and he could always have called the emergency services, but hadn’t, and since nothing in the world could justify the price Lauren Scott was already paying for his foolhardy errand of mercy, Andrews’s sympathies for the boy could only go so far.

For Lauren, it was a totally different story: his entire heart went out to her, in spite of now knowing how she’d come to be in Lomax’s path that night. Since learning the truth, he’d been trying hard to find a way to break it to Emma, and had decided in the end that she really wouldn’t want to hear it from him. She needed to read the diary for herself, so he was going to leave it with her and when she was ready they could decide together what should be done.

Something Russ really hadn’t counted on finding, when he and Charlie turned up at Sylvie’s flat, was a strange man slumped in the bed beside her. Just thank God he’d steered Charlie straight to the kitchen, and that Jolyon wasn’t due to join them for another hour – he was going to need every minute of that time to sort out this mess, plus a small miracle to get her compos mentis by then.

Connie, having found herself locked out last night, had been waiting at the door when he and Charlie arrived, still unaware at that point that Sylvie had a guest. The first she’d known of it was when she and Russ had walked into the bedroom, a moment ago, and nearly gagged at the stench that assailed them.

Chances were Sylvie’s one-night stand (if it had even got that far) had no idea that his willing conquest occasionally became incontinent when under the influence, and unfortunately for the middle-aged stud this was one of those occasions.

Shaking the poor bloke awake, Russ stood over him, waiting for his eyes to focus, while Connie went to check the state of the bathroom.

As he came round, the befuddled visitor peered at Russ, looked scared, groaned at his aching head, and tried to sit
up. Catching the smell, he glanced down and almost leapt from the bed. ‘What the fuck?’

‘I’m sorry, my friend,’ Russ said quietly.

‘She’s only gone and ...’

‘I know, but you don’t need to shout about it. Just ...’

‘Who the hell are you? What the hell’s going on here?’

‘I’m her husband. Now I want you to put on your clothes and then I’m afraid you’ll need to leave by the fire escape.’ Although tragic, the scene contained the elements of farce, he thought, with the husband bundling the lover out of the window.

It happened pretty much that way, with Russ tossing a forgotten shoe down into the street after the humiliated, unwashed Romeo had made his unseemly descent.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Connie whispered as Russ returned to the bed. ‘I should have taken my keys ...’

‘I’m the one who should be sorry,’ Russ interrupted, turning Sylvie on to her back. She snuffled, moaned, but didn’t wake up. ‘When you rang to tell me she’d locked you out, I should have got straight in the car.’ Faced with the choice of preventing his wife from sinking herself in a vat of vodka last night, or stopping Oliver from going back to his computer to carry on tormenting himself over the girl, he’d chosen Oliver. Bad call, looking at this, but his sons would always come first.

Lifting an empty vodka bottle from under the pillow and placing it on the nightstand, he told Connie, ‘You might not want to watch what I’m going to do now.’

Connie said, ‘I’ll go and fetch some towels.’

As she went into the bathroom Russ took hold of Sylvie’s nightgown and ripped it right down the front. It was easier than trying to get it off her in the normal way.

The sight of her body shocked him, even though he’d been forced to bathe her recently. Today, the bruises she’d acquired from all the staggering about and crashing into furniture were livid purple clouds over her fragile bones, and her once pert breasts hung like empty pockets from her frame. The pubic hair that she’d always kept so neat had become a dry, grizzled patch of neglect.

And she stank in the worst ways it was possible to stink.

Next door Connie had turned on the bath; even the sound of fresh water felt cleansing to him. Taking the towels Connie brought back, he began wiping away the worst of the soiling, then sitting Sylvie up he slipped the remnants of her nightdress down over her arms.

‘
Qu’est-ce que tu fais
?’ Sylvie slurred, barely opening her eyes and unable to hold her head up. ‘Who are you?
Laisse-moi
.’

Ignoring her, Russ whipped the sheet out from under her and tossed it on to the pile of dirty towels.

‘Can I come in?’ Charlie called out, knocking on the door.

‘No,’ Russ barked, ‘your mother’s not decent,’ and wrapping the duvet round Sylvie in order to protect his clothes, he scooped her up and carried her into the bathroom.

‘I want to pee,’ she rasped in a parched voice as he set her down on the toilet.

Lifting her up again, he raised the lid, removed the duvet and left her to it.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, putting out a hand to stop herself tilting any further towards the wall. ‘And what is the smell?’

He didn’t answer, merely tested the water and turned the taps to increase the pressure.

Her head fell forward, hanging as if her neck was broken, and for several minutes she didn’t attempt to lift it. When she did, he scooped her up again and put her straight into the bath.

After a cry of protest she murmured luxuriously, as the warm water embraced her.

‘Would you like me to wash her?’ Connie offered from the door.

Yes, he would, very much indeed, but what he said was, ‘If you could take care of the laundry, I’ll be fine here,’ and pressing down on Sylvie’s shoulders he dunked her right under the water to wet her hair. Though she spluttered and splashed and choked when he brought her up again, she seemed to enjoy the way he squirted shampoo over her head, like fresh cream over a cake. He was brutal in the way he lathered it.

Five minutes later he pulled the plug from the bath, stood her up and turned the shower on full blast, cold.

She shrieked and tried to leap out, but he held her there, getting wet himself in the struggle, but not caring. He was going to bring her to her senses or bloody well drown her, and right now he didn’t much care which proved more successful.

‘Let me go!
Let me go!
’ she gasped, trying to wrest herself free and step out of the bath. He grabbed her leg and forced it back.

‘I hate you. You cannot do this,’ she spluttered.

Only just catching her as she staggered, he stood her up again, and resisting the urge to tie her to the taps and simply leave her there, he turned off the water. ‘Here, dry yourself,’ he snapped, handing her one of the clean towels Connie had brought in.