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I reached Dylan Lowe first, my back shielding him briefly from view. I think now that I must have known, even then, what I had done. I reached him, and the blood was spilling out from the hole in his chest and my eyes were racing, up his body, down his body, looking for the gun that I know he had. That he must have had.

But there was nothing there. Just a boy lying on the floor. Dying.

I pulled the gun from my ankle-holster. Placed it in his hand.

There seemed to be no other way.

I know now that this was the beginning of the end. That the night would never leave me. That it would haunt my dreams, dominate my waking hours, so that in the end everywhere I turned, there was Dylan Lowe. I could not talk about it, seemed no way for the thoughts to be translated into words, just clumsy pieces of sound and smell and touch. Instead they crawled over me, oozing until they became a second skin, until there was no way to be rid of them. No way but this.

I sit for a moment, the car engine idling, my gaze caught in the rear-view mirror. For a fleeting second it seems that once again I can see Dylan Lowe, that he is standing before the wide-eyed window of the off-licence, watching me. I cannot move. I cannot breathe. I stare into the rear-view mirror. Blink. Now there is nothing. Dylan Lowe is gone.

I DRIVE BEHIND
him, an undercover cop in a bad movie, leaving two cars between us. I follow him as he drives into Swansea. I follow him as he pulls into the hospital car park.

My hands feel like they don’t belong to me, my feet someone else’s. This isn’t real. So I follow him, like I am caught on a thread, because I cannot believe that what I know is happening
is
actually happening.

I dialled Aden, as we crawled in end-of-holiday traffic along Fabian Way. I held the phone in one hand, the wheel in the other. Waited to hear his voice, for him to talk me down, tell me that I’m nuts. But it just rang and rang.

I pull into a space, watch him watch the hospital. Realise that my hands are shaking so badly they seem to be vibrating against the steering wheel. He isn’t doing anything. He’s just sitting there. Staring.

I’ve got carried away. It isn’t what I think it is. It can’t be.

But what the hell is he doing?

His head is tilted, he is studying the fascia of the hospital, and I follow his line of sight, my eyes trailing up the building. Second floor. Look back at him, back to where he is staring. Second floor.

I watch him, am thinking of Emily and I can’t . . . I don’t understand what it is that he is doing here, what will come next. Then something shifts and I think further back than that, to the boy who was there when this began. And I could kick myself for my blindness. I have been so focused on Emily, so determined to find out what happened to her, that I failed to see that there may have been other motives. Other people he could target.

Dylan Lowe.

It’s like those stereograms – those visual illusions you had when you were a kid – when you stare and stare and there’s nothing there, just a bunch of shapes and colours that mean nothing. And then something changes. And then everything becomes clear.

The second floor is Ward 12. The second floor is where Dylan Lowe is.

He is going to kill him.

I grab for the phone. This time I dial 999. ‘Come on, come on!’

‘Which service, please?’

‘Police.’

There is movement in the other car; he is shifting, changing position.

‘Police, what is your emergency?’

My voice has got higher, there is a hysterical twinge to it. ‘There’s a man at Mount Pleasant Hospital.’ He is out of the car now, lifting the bag, hefting it onto his shoulder, and here, in this light, it seems breathtakingly obvious that the shape within it is a gun. ‘He’s got a gun. You have to send someone here. He’s going to kill Dylan Lowe.’ The words tumble out of me, nonsensical almost, and I wish that I could be clearer, wish I could make them understand, but it seems the words are stoppered up, that there is a bottleneck now between my brain and my mouth. The operator is saying something to me, but I don’t hear it, because everything I have is focused on him. He stands beside his car, looks up, his gaze fixed on the second floor. I think of Carla, sitting there, saying goodbye to her son. And then he is moving, and the thread is a chain, connecting me to him, and I hear myself say, ‘Please, hurry’. And even though I know it is not enough, I drop the phone, throw open the car door so hard that it hits the Fiat beside me and I’m out.

I can smell the sea air. The sky is blue. It seems unthinkable that anything bad could happen on a day like today.

He is a couple of hundred yards in front of me, moving through the knotted smokers, in through the sliding doors. I take off at a run, calling his name. Push past a stick-thin man with his cigarette and his IV bag, the curl of smoke hitting my lungs, choking me. In through the doors. To the lobby.

I stand there, gasping like I have just run a marathon. Feels like I have run from one world into another. Because there’s nothing – no sound, no fear – just people moving about as they always do. And I can’t see him. He has come in and vanished, and the panic is rising in me, so fast I can’t speak. Part of me registers Ernie, standing in a queue in the coffee shop. But I cannot think, speak. My gaze is darting around the lobby. I must find him.

A couple walk towards me, the woman achingly thin, her hair cropped down to the tightest of curls, the man patting her arm, talking to her in a low voice. They walk towards me and then past and out through the doors. Then I see him.

He is standing at the edge of the lobby.

He is staring at Imogen.

She is staring at him, a mobile phone held forgotten in her hand. They are frozen.

Then Rhys pulls out the gun.

Time truly stops then.

He levels it at her, pointing it so that it is level with her heart. And she isn’t moving, she’s just staring at him, at the gun. And my brain won’t work, and my feet are stuck. Without thinking, I open my mouth.

‘Rhys!’ It comes out like a scream.

But even whilst the sound hangs in the air, there is a boom that reverberates through my body and she falls to the floor, the blood spraying out in a thick shower behind her.

Rhys stands there, a dark shape in his firearms uniform, such a common sight in the hospital now that he would have been all but invisible as he marched in, bearing death. He stares down at her, the gun still level with where she should have been. Then he pirouettes, and I see him full-on now. Only I’ve never seen
this
Rhys before. The dark hair is askew, the deep-brown eyes – the ones that women go so wild over – are empty. He tracks the gun around the lobby. Then stops.

I look, I don’t want to look, but I have to look. Ernie is holding his coffee. Is staring at Rhys, at the gun, like his brain simply cannot understand what it is that he has seen.

Boom!

There are screams. I’m watching the gun, watching it slide round the room, watching it find another target. The old woman is walking with laborious steps, her head down; it doesn’t look like she has even realised she is about to die.

Boom!

She slips to the floor like she is dissolving, puddling against the linoleum.

I have to move. I have to get towards him. Get to the gun. But I can’t. My feet are glued, watching the barrel of the gun circle like the hour-hand on a clock. It finds a man in a shirt and tie. He looks like he has had a job interview. He stares at Rhys. Lifts up his hands in an empty gesture of surrender.

Boom!

Then the gun slides around. Finds me.

ADEN FLEW THROUGH
the traffic, his foot flat on the accelerator. His heart thundered in his chest. Trying to breathe, trying to tell himself that it was just another job, but he couldn’t. Because it wasn’t Steve; it hadn’t been Steve all along. Because Steve was in custody and, if Steve was in custody, that only left Tony, with his fury and his pain. The call had come over the air, gunman at the hospital, and with a startling clarity Aden had known. Today it wouldn’t just be a story, where the gunman appeared and then disappeared as if he was never there. Today would be different. He yanked the car over hard into the car park, mounting the kerb as he took the corner too sharp. There were people up ahead, running. They flooded out of the doors, billowing towards him in a shoal, separating so that they surrounded the Armed Response Vehicle, then rejoining. Running. All running.

Aden threw open the car door. Grabbed the G36.

He could see bodies. There, through the sliding glass doors, were lifeless limbs, scattered across the floor. He felt his brain slow, struggling to piece it together, that Tony would be capable of this. A man hobbled past him, all skin and bone, dragging behind him a metal IV stand, sucking on a cigarette so hard that it seemed his face would turn inside out.

Aden raised the weapon and began to run towards the doors.

The dark figures lay stark against the light floor. The blood had pooled, had made a sea in the centre of the lobby. Aden scanned, left to right, could feel the gun, steady in his hands.

His hands steady as a rock.

Then he saw them.

They stood, carved in stone. Charlie – his Charlie – her stance wide, her chin up, daring death to take her. And Rhys.

The gun in Aden’s hands sank, his mind struggling to catch up. Because this wasn’t the way he thought it was going to go. Not at all. And now it all seemed slightly ridiculous, like some joke that had gone wrong.

‘Rhys?’

Charlie started, looked at him, and he could see the courage flushing out of her, the tears springing to her eyes. She looked from him to Rhys and back. Was mouthing something. It looked like sorry.

‘Rhys, what have you done?’

Rhys didn’t answer, didn’t look. His face was slack, eyes dead. Aden’s gaze tracked over him, at the gun, the jacket just slightly open, the body armour visible at the neck. Aden waited for Rhys to turn, to look at him, for his face to change, the colour and the life to flood back in, to say that it wasn’t the way it seemed, that it was all some kind of elaborate ruse. But there was nothing. Just Rhys, staring through his sight at Charlie.

Aden raised his handgun.

‘Rhys. Drop the gun.’

Rhys didn’t move, didn’t seem like he was even breathing.

‘I will shoot you. Drop the gun now.’ Aden was surprised to hear his voice, had expected to hear a break in it, was surprised at how much like iron it sounded. ‘Don’t make me kill you, mate.’

That was it. Those were the words. Something happened then, a change sinking its way across Rhys’s features and he shifted, looked up. His eyes locked on Aden’s and for just a moment there was something that looked a lot like a smile.

‘I need it to end, Ade.’ The words were soft, a whisper.

Then he turned, the gun swinging, off Charlie, onto Aden.

And Aden’s finger, the one that had refused to move before, was moving now, pulling the trigger. An explosion of sound, the gun slamming into his palm, and then pain – more pain than should come from the kickback. But there wasn’t time, not right now.

The shot was a good one. It hit Rhys in the forehead, and he dropped to the ground.

Aden stared at him, still holding the gun up, tracked the muzzle across the fallen man. But there was no doubt about it. Rhys was dead.

Aden lowered the gun, was aware of Charlie turning towards him. Dimly heard her say something, although the words had been drowned out now by the pounding in his head. Then his legs buckled beneath him and he fell.

THERE WERE PIECES
of light, shards of it puncturing the darkness. The strangest of sensations, a weeping, a lightening. There was no pain. Not now, just a sinking dullness, as if she had drunk a strong sleeping potion and was now drifting in some dark hinterworld.

Imogen, if that was who she was now, considered dying. It seemed, when one thought about things rationally, to be a highly likely proposition at this point and, if she was being utterly and totally honest, not an entirely unpleasant one. There was a comfort in the thought: that one could simply let go, unknot one’s raft from the harbour and drift away. It would certainly be easier.

She lay on the cobblestone path or on a feather-filled bed – she was unsure which – and thought about giving in. Her body was already halfway there, she could feel it. Her skin, her blood, her bones, all of it just aching to yield. All that was required now was for her mind to join in the ‘abandon ship’.

Then a thought, clearer than all the others, piercing the blackness. Amy.

Imogen thought of the dimpled hands, the pixie-fine hair, the hospital bed, the seizure gripping and dropping Amy. And then another thought, just as distinct. That she did not want to die today.

She began to swim back towards herself. Amy. Amy. Sounds beginning to sweep in now: a shout, footsteps, hands, not on her back this time, but gripping her arms, stroking her head. A voice she didn’t recognise. It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.

Wanting to believe that more than she had ever wanted to believe anything.

Now the pain, waiting for her just beyond the darkness. It hit her like a wall, a visible force, and she rebounded off it, the urge to let go never stronger. But she had remembered and now she could not forget. Amy. Amy needed her.

Imogen opened her eyes.

A woman was kneeling beside her. Another voice, a little further away. The words ‘ambulance’ and ‘hurry’. Pain in her stomach and her arms and her legs and her back. The woman speaking to her, words she could barely piece together, but they sounded soft, like a lullaby. And the sunlight. It seemed like it came from nowhere, hitting her suddenly, warmth billowing against her skin.