Thieving Fear Part 28

'Is there something? What a'

'You can't see if anyone's coming along up above.' More disdainfully than she would ever have expected of him Hugh said 'You need to be up there.'

She ought to have known this without being told. It showed how thoroughly she was absorbed in her own flesh, which was infecting her mind with sluggishness. As she lumbered to the foot of the path she saw that the entrance to the burrow was wide enough for a thin person to crawl forth. Despite this it was darker than ever, perhaps because the sky was, so that she had to squint in an attempt to be sure that the clay at the back wasn't shifting furtively. 'Aren't you going?' Hugh urged.

His wearily impatient gaze sent her plodding upwards. Every stretch of the zigzag track brought her above the hole in the cliff. It occurred to her that the higher she climbed, the greater the weight of the clay she was tramping on, rendering it heavier. If Hugh's digging had undermined it, suppose she was the factor that made it collapse? She glanced down from a bend in the path as he unloaded the spade across an immoderate extent of beach. He looked up to discover why she was hesitating, and for an instant if not longer a it felt as protracted as the worst nightmare a she saw his unconcealed disgust at the sight of her. She must be even more revolting when viewed from below. He didn't have the grace to blush as he neutralised his expression and said 'Anything up?'

Even if she had been able to part her swollen lips she couldn't have answered him. When she floundered along the path it was mostly in a desperate bid to leave his revulsion behind. With each laborious step she seemed to feel her legs bulge from supporting their unsavoury burden. She tried to forget herself in her surroundings, although the blackened sky towards which she was climbing felt like more weight she was unable to avoid. She couldn't tell whether the wind was raising the smell of the cliff or of her clammy self. She clambered over the treacherous edge at last and might have fled across the common if Hugh hadn't immediately shouted 'Anyone?'

The expanse of restless gra.s.s was deserted all the way to the distant hedges that enclosed its landward sides. 'No,' Ellen said. The wind made short work of her answer, and she leaned over to call 'n.o.body.'

'Tell me the moment there's somebody.'

'You too,' Ellen immediately regretted having said.

Either Hugh couldn't bear to look at her or dismay at her remark kept his head down, unless he was bent on making sure there were no signs of life within the burrow. He ducked into it, and she heard a dull thud almost too m.u.f.fled to be audible but unpleasantly reminiscent of a tentative heartbeat. It was the impact of the spade, and in a few seconds another heap of clay was strewn across the beach. The hole must be dauntingly wide and deep by now, since Hugh barely reappeared in the course of the action. The next soft thump was still more muted, and only clay emerged. By craning over the edge, Ellen was just able to distinguish another buried thud, but how audible would any warning be to him? While the beach remained empty, the weather mightn't daunt walkers much longer; a strip of light had begun to glare beneath the lid of the sky across the river. She could almost have imagined that Hugh's digging had magicked the entire landscape open. She was gazing at the horizon, where the cloud was lifting in the direction of the beach, when she heard voices across the common. Two women in orange anoraks and tugged by large russet dogs had appeared at a gap in the hedge.

'Hugh.' When this brought no response she leaned out so precariously that she was afraid her weight would overbalance her. 'People,' she cried.

A wind did its best to return this to her mouth. She had to repeat it before Hugh followed the latest evacuation of clay out of the tunnel. 'Where?' he demanded.

'Up here. Coming this way.'

'Get rid of them. I'm seeing more in here.'

He vanished into the tunnel without giving her time to reply, and she turned to see the foremost woman stooping to release her dog from its leash. Ellen imagined the animal racing unchecked across the common and down the path to join Hugh. It might dig faster than he could, not to say unstoppably, and what would happen once the woman followed it? 'Excuse me,' Ellen protested, which had no effect. 'Don't,' she shouted and tramped across the gra.s.s, waving her blurred blobs of hands on either side of her face.

The woman who had yet to emerge from the gap in the hedge spoke to her friend, who peered towards Ellen and to some extent straightened up. 'Can we help you?' she rather less offered than said.

'Don't come this way,' Ellen cried. 'Don't let your dogs.'

'We're allowed to let the dogs off here.'

'Not down the cliff. It isn't safe.'

She was dismayed to be reminded how that might apply to Hugh. The sounds of the spade were inaudible now. The women shaded their eyes as harsh light spilled from beneath the cloud. 'We can't hear you,' said the woman who had nearly unleashed the dog.

'Not safe,' Ellen came close to screaming, and floundered after her ma.s.sive shadow as it flopped towards her audience. 'Not safe.'

'What isn't?'

'The path. It's gone.'

'Still can't hear you.'

'You heard me just before.' Ellen had begun to feel that her voice was as feeble as a cry in a nightmare. Was only the wind stealing it? The unquiet gra.s.s fluttered the outline of her shadow as if it were preparing to grow more misshapen. 'No path,' she cried with all her breath.

'Where isn't there?' the woman enquired, stooping to her impatient dog.

'To the beach. You can't go that way to the beach.'

Ellen was about to claim to be helping the rangers in case this lent her credibility when the woman shaded her eyes once more. She stiffened and then stood up fully, yanking at the leash. Whatever had changed her mind affected her friend too. Without speaking, both women retreated, dragging their dogs through the gap in the hedge.

They must have seen Ellen clearly at last. Her hideousness was some use after all. She turned to trudge back to her post and was instantly blind. The cloud had lifted above the sun, which was all the more dazzling because of the blackness. Ellen shielded her eyes and kept them lowered so as not to see her hand in any detail. 'They're gone,' she called as she reached the edge of the cliff.

Hugh didn't respond, surely only because the wind had borne her voice away from him. She was about to lean over when she heard a dog bark. She swung around, but it wasn't as close as the wind must have made it seem. It wasn't on the common. Just her shadow was, and the shadow of the hand that was about to take her arm.

'Hugh, are you trying to scare a' None of this had even left her mouth as she turned to confront him. The sun glared around him, blotting out his face and appearing to char his silhouette thin a altogether too thin. She was able to cling to the notion that it was Hugh until the figure darted forwards, its skin flapping in the wind, to demonstrate with its embrace how skeletal it was. It might have been whispering a parody of affection in her ear, unless that was simply the wind in its gaping face. Certainly the hiss grew sharper as her captor drove her backwards. Its spidery weight shouldn't have overwhelmed her, but terror did. Perhaps it took away her sight as well, or perhaps that was the sun.

THIRTY-TWO.

'Look at it now,' Hugh protested and swung around, brandishing the shattered mirror, but there was n.o.body to accuse of the damage. He was alone on the beach.

The cliff seemed to loom over him as the landscape borrowed blackness from the sky, unless his vision was growing as dark as a tunnel. He was scarcely aware that the mirror had slipped from his fingers. If he didn't hear it fall, no doubt that could be blamed on the amplified pounding of his heart, which was pumping his face hot as shame. He'd driven Ellen away by not caring how sensitive she'd become about herself. He'd been so determined to make her look in the mirror that he'd neglected to consider how threatening she might find it. 'Ellen, I'm sorry,' he called, but the wind was as good as a gag. At least she couldn't have gone far while his back was turned, however little she might like him to find her. The only concealment within hundreds of yards was a vertical ridge of the cliff just a few paces away, and now he noticed a trail of marks in the sand. At first he hadn't realised they were footprints because they were so partial, but they led from beside him to the far side of the ridge. 'There you are,' he said and followed them.

He thought he was answered, but not as he might have expected. He heard a stuttering hiss like a thin surrept.i.tious giggle behind the ridge, and had to a.s.sume it betrayed how nervous he'd made Ellen. 'I'm sorry,' he murmured. 'You mustn't hide from me.' How desperate was she to do so? Hugh could have imagined there was only s.p.a.ce in the niche for someone much thinner than even Ellen had grown. 'I didn't mean a' he said as he stepped forwards, but there was no reason to continue. n.o.body was behind the ridge.

As Hugh stared at the expanse of clay he heard the shrill sound again. It was an intermittent whisper of sand that was trickling over the edge of the cliff. Ellen couldn't have gone up there un.o.bserved, but she'd had as little time to hide anywhere else. All the same, he had lost her or a perhaps worse still a had overlooked her. It left him feeling unutterably lost himself.

'Ellen,' he cried and heard the mocking whisper of the sand. Another shout that left his throat raw started bones rattling restlessly together, unless it was the wind clattering the branches of shrubs on the cliff. A supine shape reared up at the water's edge and split into airborne fragments a a flock of birds. A distant form threw itself flat in the water and went under, crushed by the fishing boat of which it was the reflection. A thin silhouette was standing in wait for Hugh when he moved away from the ridge. It was the spade, and its having remained where he'd left it suggested that it might be the solitary fixed point he could rely on. He dashed to it and clutched the handle with both hands. 'Ellen,' he yelled.

Suppose his shouts were driving her away? She could well have had time to dodge out of sight while he'd been wandering under the delusion that he could find his way again. Could she have taken refuge in the abandoned hulk of a boat? Surely she didn't loathe him so much that she would lie among the rubble, but wasn't it more a question of how much she loathed herself? He was clinging to the spade while he craned on tiptoe in an attempt to see into the boat before he risked making for it when the rudiments of a body sprang up beside him.

He nearly lost his grip on the spade, not to mention any sense of where he was, in the moment it took him to realise that the faceless shape was his shadow on the cliff. The sun had prised up the lid of black cloud above Wales, spilling light across the beach. It seemed to delineate movement near the water. Not just the pools left behind by the tide but every trace of moisture on the sand had grown as blinding as the exposure of the sun, so that Hugh had to slit his eyes in order to distinguish the blurred silhouette at the river's edge.

It could only be Ellen, even if he didn't understand how he'd overlooked her. The loss of perception was so close to unforgivable that his face blazed with more than sunlight. As the outline of the silhouette began to flutter, he was afraid she was shivering until he realised that her clothes must be flapping around her thin form. The spectacle of her standing alone, surrounded by trembling clumps of gra.s.s on the beach as harshly bright as sc.r.a.ped tin, distressed him so much that he could barely speak. He let go of the spade and cupped whichever hand it was by that side of his mouth. 'Ellen, come back. It can't be safe.'

Although she didn't turn, she must have heard him, because she took a pace away from him. How treacherous might the sand be if it was as wet as the light made it appear? He s.n.a.t.c.hed his other hand off the spade and was about to yell more of a warning when he grasped that the mere sound of his voice might be intolerable to her just now. Instead he padded as fast as he stealthily could across the beach.

The route was even less direct than it looked. The sand around the numerous pools exuded water just as deep if he strayed too close. Rocks that promised to act as stepping-stones across expanses of mud proved to be lumps of it into which his feet sank. More than one narrow elongated stretch of water pretended to be shallow enough to walk through until he was nearly at the margin, and then he had to tramp the entire length of the obstacle, because all the points where he thought he could jump across turned out to be too wide. Whenever he was diverted away from Ellen he had to keep glancing back for rea.s.surance that she hadn't disappeared again. She seemed not to have stirred, and he would have liked to think she was waiting for him. He was still unable to distinguish her as more than a bony sketch against the intensifying sunlight. How could the wind be fluttering the outline of her head? Of course, it was her hair.

The sh.o.r.eline was by no means as close as the perspective made it seem. In any case the dazzle that had settled on the beach, collecting in the furrows of the sand as well as permeating every sc.r.a.p of water, rendered his vision nearly useless. He almost trod in the next extensive pool until he saw how wide and deep it was. The detour would take him hundreds of yards further from Ellen, and he seemed no closer than he had been five minutes ago. He was growing desperate to speak to her, to persuade her to come back a and then, blushing at his stupidity, he understood that he didn't need to shout. He dug out his mobile and keyed her number.

There was no immediate response, and he wondered if the cliff was blocking the signal. The display showed a call in progress, however. A wind blundered into his ears, so that he was barely able to distinguish Ellen's ringtone, which sounded like a shapeless cry. For a moment he a.s.sumed the wind was also why it sounded more remote than Ellen appeared to be. Then the wind subsided, and the twitching clumps of gra.s.s did, and there was no question how distant her phone was. Not only that: it was behind him.

Ellen must have dropped it in her haste to flee. Hugh saw her realise as he did. At least, the figure turned sideways towards him and the sound. Its profile was alarmingly unstable with the fluttering of hair blurred by the light on the river. Then the light finished jittering as the wind dropped, and Hugh was able to make out the profile, such as it was. The head was as hairless as a skull. The material that had kept flapping was all that remained of the face.

Hugh was staring in paralysed fascination as the entire outline of the silhouette recommenced flickering with the wind when Ellen's ringtone ceased, having completed its word and the next few jolly bars. He clutched his phone to his ear and had begun to gabble a warning that was almost incoherent with panic before he heard the automatic message. 'Stay where you are,' he could hardly wait to plead. 'Call me and say where you've gone.'

Was the silhouetted figure listening? Except for the instability that outlined its bony shape, it hadn't moved. It might have been waiting for him to stray within range a and suddenly Hugh realised how easy it had been made for him to come this far, particularly given the state of the beach. He'd been too grateful for his sense of direction to suspect why it had been returned to him. How long would it stay with him if he retreated? The only way to find out was by turning his back on the figure at the sh.o.r.eline. He thrust the uncommunicative mobile into a hip pocket and had to remind himself how far away the figure was before he could face the cliff.

He was dismayed to see how far away it was a considerably farther than the river's edge. His extended shadow slanted towards it, petering out at a pool that drowned the shadow of his head. The spade was standing guard in front of the hole in the cliff, some distance upriver. The route to it was a maze of water and glistening sand that the lurid light rendered indistinguishable from mud. Which path had he originally taken? He was so far from identifying it that he could easily conclude there wasn't one. A pace in the direction of the spade sent his shadow forwards, and he was terrified that it would be joined by a companion. He twisted around, shading his eyes. The sh.o.r.eline and the beach along it were deserted.

At once he sensed a presence at his back. He even thought he heard the surrept.i.tious flapping of its ragged skin. As he spun around so wildly that he almost sprawled into a patch of mud, a black shape jerked out its hands. It was his shadow, but had the figure at the sh.o.r.eline cast one? In any case it might be thin enough to hide behind him without betraying its position. He imagined whirling helplessly in a desperate attempt to locate his tormentor while it continued to dodge out of sight, his gleeful partner in a nightmare dance that would s.n.a.t.c.h away the last of his sense of direction. Could the apparition on the sh.o.r.eline have been designed to lure him away from his only weapon, or from Ellen, or both? Perhaps the panic that was close to shutting down his mind was meant to keep him where he was. With an inarticulate cry that might have expressed rage or determination if the wind hadn't stifled it, he dashed towards the cliff.

He could barely see his footing, but this drove him heedlessly onwards. He slithered over mud, flailing his arms as his shadow mocked his efforts not to topple headlong. He waded through pools that filled his shoes with water and pasted his trousers to his shins. He stepped on rocks that gave beneath his weight, revealing they were lumps of mud that hung onto his feet and relinquished them with a sound like the smacking of satisfied lips. All this appeared to bring him no closer to the spade or the cliff, which shone beneath the black sky as though it and its bristling gra.s.sy scalp had just been dug up. Whenever he was tempted to detour around an obstacle, he imagined turning aside to find the ruin of a face at his shoulder. Even when he reached dry sand his feet sank into it, so that running felt like floundering in slow motion through a medium that ought not to have existed outside a dream. Only the sight of the spade, and the impression of a pursuer that was delighted to bide its time until it chose to seize him, kept him struggling onwards as if he could catch up with his faltering breath. His shadow parodied his labours and taunted him with how much closer it was to his goal. It was on the far side of a pool through which he had to splash; it was supine on a stretch of mud that didn't yield beneath it, instead waiting to give way underfoot; it was pretending that an extensive brownish slab was as solid as a rock. At last it touched the expanse of dryish sand on the far side of which the spade was printing a T on the cliff. Hugh's shadow lurched for it, and as he followed, the hole in the cliff gaped to remind him that its tenant was elsewhere. He grabbed the handle and swung around, wielding the tool like a scythe. n.o.body was behind him, or behind him, or behind him.

Then where was the figure he'd seen? Had it followed Ellen, wherever she was? Hugh clung to the spade and faced the mouth of the river as he groped for his mobile. He was using the wrong hand for whichever pocket it was, but he was afraid to let go of the weapon, if indeed the spade could function as one. He only just managed to extract the phone without dropping it, and then he had to key Ellen's number wrong-handed. He brought the mobile to that side of his face and heard his call arrive. He lowered the phone and strained his ears, to no effect beyond tuning in the sound of his unnerved heartbeat. He could hear the shrivelled ringing of the mobile in his hand, but there was no sign of Ellen's ringtone.

The hole in the cliff emitted a derisive whisper, and he couldn't be sure it was soil shifting in the wind. Ellen's mechanical message came to an end as he pressed the phone against his ear. 'Call me back,' he pleaded. 'I need to know where you are. You could be in danger. I'm not just saying that. Don't stay away. We need to be together.'

He'd run out of words. No one who could be any use to a writer would have, but he hadn't time to bemoan his inadequacy. He terminated the call and thumbed through the list to Charlotte's name. She wasn't replying either. She must be inside the hospital, but her unresponsiveness aggravated his panic. 'I've lost her. I've lost Ellen,' he confessed, but how did that help? 'Call her when you get this,' he tried urging. 'Tell her she's got to call me. Call me if you speak to her. Call me anyway. Somebody call me.'

His words were letting him down again before deserting him. He had an unhappy sense that they were playing tricks on him. How long might he have to wait to hear from Charlotte? At the very least until she made her way out of the hospital and listened to his message and contacted Ellen or gave up the attempt. He shouldn't leave her to try to raise Ellen. He redialled Ellen's number and lifted the phone, and then he s.n.a.t.c.hed it away from his face. Her mobile was singing, faint with distance but increasingly unmistakable, somewhere above him.

Did this mean she was coming back? Hugh opened his mouth to shout, but the risk of scaring her off silenced him. He shoved the mobile into his nearest pocket and sprinted to the path. As he began to scramble upwards her ringtone fell silent. He hoped she might call to discover what he'd wanted, but his phone stayed mute. He climbed faster than he'd ever climbed in his life, digging the spade into the path for extra speed. It couldn't have taken him much longer than a minute to reach the top and crane his head above the edge of the cliff. Nevertheless the common was deserted.

Hugh levered himself onto it with the spade and leaned on the handle as he took out his mobile again. He jabbed the redial key, and in just a few seconds he had his answer, somewhere ahead. The crescendo and its conclusion weren't as distant as they'd seemed; up here they were more obviously m.u.f.fled. He advanced a tentative step, and another faltering one, and then he was hurrying across the common, almost blind with the light on the gra.s.s and with panic that his shadow mimed by brandishing its spade. Ellen's phone wasn't in the distance. It was under the earth.

THIRTY-THREE.

Charlotte thought she had nodded off for only a moment again, but this time it wasn't a jerk of her head that roused her. Her eyes wavered open to see that Rory's were still dormant. Though the whole of him was as inert as his flaccid hand in her determined grasp, she was sure there had been movement. She glanced across the aisle at Annie, who leaned sideways on her chair while keeping hold of her husband's fingers. 'Is he back?' she whispered.

Hairs stirred at the nape of Charlotte's neck, and she was hardly rea.s.sured by recognising that a breath had troubled them. It must be a breeze through the window under which she was sitting, which let her feel marginally less enclosed whenever she remembered it was ajar, but she couldn't help peering over her shoulder to make certain the gap was unoccupied. 'Who?' Annie had left her anxious to know, or at any rate anxious.

Annie's laugh wasn't quite as sure of itself as she wanted it to sound. 'Why, who do you think?'

'I've no idea,' Charlotte said, hoping she hadn't. 'That's why I'm asking.'

'Who else could it be but your Rory?' Having issued the rebuke, Annie said 'It's all right, you've just woke up.'

Charlotte felt as if she hadn't entirely once she realised she should ask 'Why were you saying he's back?'

'I was only asking. It looked like he woke you. I couldn't see what else would.'

Charlotte thought the conversation had grown uncontrolled as a dream a perhaps not a nightmare, but little more bearable. 'Do you mean you saw him move?'

'No, I saw you.'

'It wasn't just me.'

As Charlotte finished speaking, the truth caught up with her. She laid Rory's hand down and took out her mobile to see that she had indeed missed a call. 'It's never that devil of a thing again,' Annie said.

'It is.' Charlotte stayed polite while adding 'Would you mind if I step out and deal with it?'

'It's not up to me to mind.'

'If you mean Rory, I don't think he will.'

'We can't say, can we? n.o.body's really sure if they know we're here, our men. Maybe we're all that's keeping them here.'

Charlotte squeezed Rory's unresponsive hand for encouragement a his or her own a and stood up. 'I definitely need to take this call,' she said. 'I won't be any longer than I have to be.'

'I expect he'll understand. You've still got a job.'

Charlotte let the misunderstanding explain her haste in making for the corridor. Her anxiety for her cousins was almost enough to blot out any other. She hurried to the lifts, where a nurse beside a patient on a trolley stopped a pair of doors from closing. Charlotte immediately regretted sidling in, because the trolley seemed to take up far more s.p.a.ce than was reasonable. She tried to breathe evenly as the doors crawled together and the occupant of the trolley raised his sketchily grey-haired head to speak. 'Who's in here?'

'Just a lady who's having a ride with us, Jonah.'

'I know there's a girl.' The man's loose wrinkled face worked as if his dissatisfaction were a weight he was unable to dislodge from it. 'Aren't we moving?' he complained.

'Just as fast as we can.'

Charlotte was afraid this might mean not at all. The man's head fell back, and his watery eyes rolled in their sockets as if searching for an intruder or some a.s.surance that the lift wasn't stuck. Perhaps he was sensing her nervousness, but his unease was aggravating hers, so that she imagined their fears nourishing each other while the lift stayed buried between floors and the air grew unbreathably stale. Since the trolley blocked her access to the controls, she was on the point of asking the nurse to give the b.u.t.ton another push when the lift shuddered like a troubled sleeper and settled into place before, with a considerable show of reluctance, it set about parting its doors. As Charlotte hauled them wide and launched herself between them, she heard the man protest 'Who's in here?'

If there had indeed been an intruder she was ashamed to hope she'd left it beyond the doors, but she did. Too much of a crowd surrounded her in the reception area and in the smoky open air for her to look at every face. She was busy retrieving the missed call, which began to address her as she did her best to emerge from an oppressively insubstantial medium composed of the murmur of the loiterers outside the hospital. 'I've lost her,' Hugh confessed, or rather had. 'I've lost Ellen. Call her when you get this. Tell her she's got to call me. Call me if you speak to her. Call me anyway. Somebody call me.'

He sounded reduced to a nightmare. How could Ellen have left him in that state or indeed at all? For the duration of several unnecessarily conscious breaths Charlotte couldn't think which of them she ought to phone first. Replying to Hugh's call would be easier, and only a sense that she ought to have news about Ellen made her key that number instead. Since Ellen was presumably not answering his calls, had the cousins fallen out somehow? Not necessarily, because she didn't respond to Charlotte either. When the pretence of a bell ceased at last, it had only roused the answering service.

'Ellen, why aren't you answering anyone? You've got me worried. Why aren't you with Hugh? We don't want you splitting up. We don't need this on top of everything else. I've had to come out of the hospital again to call you. I'm going to wait here for a few minutes, but I don't want to be away from Rory any longer than I absolutely have to be. Please let me know what's going on. Please call.'

She was beginning to sound far too much like Hugh's message, overwhelmed by an excess of words. Having to speak to someone who wasn't even a version of Ellen or indeed real had brought her close to babbling. Until she shut up, Ellen wouldn't be able to reply, and so Charlotte ended the call. She stood with the inert mobile in her hand while black shapes multiplied next to her a taxis full of visitors to the hospital. The gathering blackness reminded her of nightfall, although that was hours away. Her mobile didn't ring, and didn't ring, and didn't ring. She bore its silence for a little longer than she thought she could, and then she gave in to calling Hugh. His phone rang as long as Ellen's had and spoke to Charlotte in exactly the same automatic voice.

She could have imagined that she was the victim of a trick a that somebody who had answered both her calls was putting on the bright efficient female voice. Perhaps the truth was worse: perhaps Charlotte had missed her chance to speak to Hugh. 'Hugh, I'm sorry,' she said. 'I should have called you back. I was waiting to hear from Ellen. Have you yet? Call me anyway. I'll try and stay out here until you do. Don't leave me worrying. Let's talk and decide what's to be done.'

She was losing control of her words again, as though they were being sucked into a black hole. If they were being swallowed by deadness, why were his and Ellen's phones dead? There must be a signal at Thurstaston for Hugh to have made the call. Ellen might have switched off her mobile so that he couldn't reach her, whyever she was behaving that way, but it made no sense for him to have turned off his. Could the batteries have failed in both? It seemed far too conveniently inconvenient. Charlotte paced back and forth alongside the taxis, only to have to a.s.sure the foremost driver that she wasn't looking for a ride. When his replacement made the same a.s.sumption Charlotte felt as if they were urging her not to loiter. 'Aren't you there yet? Where are you?' she said uselessly twice to the same artificial voice, and then she knew that wasn't enough.

If she called the police, what could she tell them? Certainly not just that she was unable to raise her cousins, but how could she explain that she was concerned because of their intentions? Suppose she managed to persuade the police to search, what might they catch her cousins doing if they found them? Of course she was presuming that the disinterment was taking place, if it hadn't already happened, whereas she could be sure of nothing of the kind. She only knew that Hugh and Ellen weren't receiving her calls, and she'd had enough of herself and her doubts. What if she and her cousins were being prevented from contacting one another?

As soon as she thought it she knew she had been resisting the notion. However credulous it was, could she dismiss it when that might be at her cousins' expense? She stared at her silent mobile and then at the taxis before marching towards the hospital. She was willing the phone to ring, but as she reached the lobby she had to mute it. She dodged around a queue of visitors at the reception desk and sprinted into a waiting lift. 'Who's in here?' a voice enquired as the doors shut, but surely that was just an echo in her head. Her fears for Hugh and Ellen outweighed any other panic, so that she was able to ignore the lack of windows in the lift and in the corridor.

A nurse was writing on the clipboard at the end of Rory's bed. 'Any change?' Charlotte was more than anxious to discover.

'He hasn't missed you.' That was Annie, and the nurse said 'Nothing yet.'

'I've been called away urgently. Can I leave you my number in case anything happens?'

'Give it in at the desk. We'll do our best to keep you posted.'

Suppose Charlotte became as unreachable as her cousins? Perhaps it wouldn't need to be like that; perhaps she would hear from one or both of them before she ventured too far. She advanced to give Rory's hand a squeeze that felt like leaving him for worse than the unknown. As she turned away Annie met her eyes. She looked as though she had a less than favourable question, but all she said was 'I'll be here.'

Charlotte remembered her saying 'Maybe we're all that's keeping them here.' That might be true, but as she'd meant it or the opposite? Perhaps if Charlotte didn't act he might stay there until he died. That was one more fear to drive her away from him. 'I will be,' she promised and managed not to add 'I hope.'