The Ambleside Alibi: 2 (18 page)

By breakfast time, Mrs Savage had been tidied away, and a crisp new bed awaited the next inmate of the little ward. Simmy asked no further questions. She was preoccupied by the difficulty of contacting her assistant, with no mobile phone, and no memory of Melanie’s number.

‘Is there a phone I can use?’ she asked the girl who brought her cereal. ‘I’ve lost mine.’ She remembered the call from Ben, on something that she had at the time assumed to be a mobile. ‘What about the one I had a call on the other day?’

‘Sorry. We only use it for incoming calls.’

She remembered a time, nearly twenty years earlier, when a college friend had her appendix out and Simmy visited. There had been a trolley arrangement, on which a coin-operated telephone sat. It could be moved from bed to bed, cumbersome but efficient. Gone were those days, she thought gloomily. 

‘How am I meant to contact people, then?’

The girl spread her hands helplessly. ‘Everyone has mobiles. You could borrow one, maybe.’ They both looked at the old lady in the bed by the window, and grimaced ruefully. ‘Bad luck. I’ll see if I can find someone who’ll let you make a call.’

‘Thanks.’ It would be
two
calls, at least. The only number lodged in her head was the landline at her parents’ house. She’d have to ask them to track down Melanie’s number, or at least pass on a message. Plus, she found herself wanting to speak again to Julie, her hairdresser friend. But she couldn’t remember her number, either.

The need to contact Melanie took greater priority, having a higher moral urgency to it. Her assistant would be feeling neglected, unsure of her role regarding the shop, if any. She would be jealous if she learnt that Simmy had spoken to Ben, and not her. Melanie had a knack, Simmy was discovering, of not being in the right place at the right time. And with her encyclopaedic knowledge of the community, this was a waste.

But the nurse did not come back with a borrowed mobile. Instead, there was an atmosphere of bustle. After her charts had been inspected and annotated, there followed an alarmingly prompt exercise session, which covered a substantial panoply of movements designed to cope with the demands of daily living. She was told how to sit, and how to stand up again without putting strain on her pelvis. How to manage steps – terrifyingly difficult – and how to get in and out of a car. ‘I’ll never remember it all,’ she complained.

‘We’ll do it all again this afternoon. Meanwhile, you can
stay out of bed for the rest of the day, and take yourself to the loo and back when necessary.’

‘Gosh!’ said Simmy, with a flash of apprehension. ‘Am I ready for that?’

‘You’d better be. There’s a review of discharges in a little while. Don’t want anybody to be stranded if we can help it.’

‘Stranded? What do you mean?’

‘Weather, pet. We’re due a whole lot of snow tonight. Haven’t you heard?’

‘How would I?’ Had her parents not seen the forecast, either? Had it changed since the previous afternoon? ‘Are you saying I might go home
today
?’

‘It’s possible. You’re doing well. No sign of infection, reduced pain, bruising fading. Not much we can do for you here that can’t be done at home. Someone will pop in and see you over the weekend, I expect, to check you over.’

‘Weather permitting,’ added Simmy, her old forebodings about snow returning with a rush.

‘It’s never as bad as they say it’ll be,’ chirped the woman. ‘And you’ll be snug indoors. Still, it’s a pain, I know. Everything grinds to a halt when it snows.’

Back in the ward, she sat in a hospital chair with a soft seat and adjustable back, trying to read a book that a woman had given her from a mobile library trolley. The words on the pages entirely failed to hold her attention. She could not have recounted the story or named the characters, two minutes after putting it down in despair. She found she was shivering, despite the overheated room. Her teeth were chattering. There was a sour taste in her mouth. Sweat was trickling down from her armpits and her chest started to
constrict.
I’m having a heart attack
, she thought wildly, and tried to find the button they’d told her to press if she wanted anything.

‘Nurse!’ she called, her voice thin and breathless, as she fumbled blindly for the alarm. People were passing in the corridor outside, but none of them glanced in through the glass panel in the door.

‘Maisie?’ came the quavering tones of the old woman on the other side of the room. ‘Is that you?’ She reared up suddenly, her eyes sharply focused on Simmy for the first time.

‘No!’ croaked Simmy. ‘For God’s sake.’

At last she got hold of the button and pushed down with her thumb. As far as she could tell, nothing happened. But two long minutes later, during which she shook so much that the book fell on the floor, a nurse came into the room. ‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘Something’s wrong with me. Look!’ She held out her quivering hands. ‘I can’t breathe.’

The nurse approached, and gave her a close appraisal, feeling her brow and clucking like a soothing mother hen. ‘Shock,’ she diagnosed. ‘Delayed shock.’

‘What?’
Delayed
seemed like a major understatement.

‘It does this. Sometimes it’s a week or more after the original injury. We’ve kept you busy with other things, plus the medication. Now it’s catching up with you. We’ll just pop you back into bed and you’ll be fine.’

‘Are you sh-sh-sure?’ Her chattering teeth made speech difficult. ‘I feel s-s-sick.’

‘We’ll give you a quick once-over to make sure there’s nothing else, but I’m pretty sure, yes.’ She attached the
blood pressure monitor, fixing her gaze on the screen behind Simmy’s head for a few moments. ‘Yes, that’s all good. No internal bleeding. It’s your system finally realising something big happened to you. It’ll all be over soon, you’ll see.’

She summoned assistance to get Simmy back into bed, her sore pelvis and ribs making their presence felt in the process. ‘It’s worse for victims,’ said the second nurse, who was older than most of the others. ‘The sense of vulnerability throws you all out of balance. Changes the way you see the world.’ Her colleague gave her a startled look at this non-medical observation.

Before she knew it, Simmy was weeping. Warm tears gushed from her eyes and down her cheeks. Her nose was running. ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ said the younger nurse, more amused than annoyed. She plucked a bunch of tissues from a bedside box and helped mop up the flow.

‘Best thing,’ said the philosopher. ‘Very therapeutic.’

Simmy felt herself adrift on a dark sea of helplessness and humiliation. She was pathetic, useless. What would her mother say if she could see her? She took the tissues and blew her nose. ‘Sorry,’ she said wetly.

‘That’s better. You should try to talk to someone about it, before long. Get it into perspective. And not that scruffy detective bloke. He’s only going to make it worse.’

That wasn’t fair, Simmy thought. He’d had her best interests in mind. He’d been worried about her. He’d sent a minion to guard her, hadn’t he? ‘He’s quite kind, really,’ she protested.

‘Everybody’s talking about you,’ said the younger one, recklessly. ‘How you were nearly murdered. There’s no sign of them catching the swine who did it, either.’

‘Hush, Maxwell,’ chided her colleague. ‘That’s not going to help, is it?’

‘I expect they will,’ said Simmy, noticing that her shaking had abated. ‘They’re trying hard.’

‘He certainly comes to see you often enough. Every day, isn’t it?’

Simmy couldn’t remember. It had not crossed her mind to wonder how the hospital staff regarded her, except to assume she was a nuisance, with her police guard and regular visits from a senior detective. Were they gossiping and speculating about all her visitors? Was there an amateur detective in their midst who was trying to make sense of it all?

‘I don’t think it was being attacked that set me off,’ she said slowly, ignoring the immediate question. ‘It was something else.’ She looked around the ward with its crisp lines and clean floor. There were no patterns, no focal points – just a jumble of pastel colours and artificial lights. Her eye fell on the chair she had been sitting in. ‘The chair!’

The memory returned, complete in every detail. She had waited in just such a chair for Tony to come and collect her after she had delivered the stillborn baby Edith. She had felt its yielding seat as she shifted her sore posterior. Then, as now, there had been padding around a bruised pelvic area, making it difficult to sit comfortably, delicate skin chafed and raw. Tony had promised to be there by five o’clock – ten hours after the baby had been born. He was late, and she waited, numb, hollow, content for him never to appear, if that’s the way it was going to be. Life had seemed arbitrary, pointless and entirely conditional. She had not wanted to live without a baby. A husband was neither here nor there, utterly irrelevant.

Her brain had seized up then, as now. People had pushed and pulled her, faces had loomed smilingly at her, giving inane reassurances that were patently unreliable.

‘It was the chair,’ she said again. ‘It brought back memories.’

‘O-o-kay,’ said the older nurse, doubtfully. ‘That can happen. But you’re all right again now, very nearly. If it happens again, you’ll know what it is. You’ll know not to panic.’

That sounded unduly optimistic to Simmy. If it was as easy as that, there wouldn’t be ex-soldiers cringing in terror every time a car backfired. Her own trauma and loss seemed as bad to her, at that moment, as the experiences of a man on a battlefield must be to him.

‘My baby died,’ she said starkly.

Both women looked at her with wide eyes. Neither said a word, but a glance was exchanged. Something accusing, with a dash of defiance. A
Well, you can’t expect us to have known that
sort of message passed silently between them. They were not good at death, Simmy understood. Who was, when it came right down to it?

Somehow the morning struggled on, and the lunch, when it came, was good. Breast of chicken in a bold sauce that did not skimp on the garlic. Sautéed potatoes and cauliflower came with it. Simmy made a clean plate, and tried to persuade herself that she was all right. How could she not be, if she could eat with such healthy appetite? In the bathroom, she manoeuvred unaided on and off the lavatory, and then undressed far enough to inspect her wounds.

Her bruises had faded even more, to bluish-grey in
most places. The flesh was painful when pressed, and the prospect of wearing a bra made her wince, but she could see a possibility of a return to her former shape and colour. Painful breasts, too, were a reminder of the loss of little Edith, she suddenly remembered. Somehow, nobody had thought to give her the pills that dried up breast milk, so she became engorged and hot in that first day or two. It had been one of the most cruel aspects of an unbearable time. She had entertained mad ideas of offering herself to someone else’s baby – even a puppy or kitten might succeed in alleviating the agony. Tony had laughed at this, before informing her that, in earlier times, precisely that had been tried as a remedy for the problem. Tony had a liking for odd facts of history, whether or not they held any relevance for modern times.

It had been the laughter that sliced through her, making her hate him for a few seconds, before she reminded herself that he had every right to laugh if he felt like it. At least nobody was laughing at her now, she thought, returning to the present. Nobody thought it funny that she’d been thrown into a freezing beck and battered half to death on the rocks a few inches beneath the hostile water.

And so she began again on the familiar round of questions. There had to be an answer hiding somewhere – some suspicion that if grabbed and articulated would incriminate the killer of Nancy Clark. She, Simmy, must know something without realising she knew it. She must have heard or seen some snippet of evidence, which somebody could not afford to let her pass on. And it could only have to do with Mrs Joseph’s flowers, or the people in the café, or the car on the ice in Troutbeck. And all those instances
included one person, and only one: the girl who called herself Candida Hawkins.

She thought again of Melanie, who was much the same age as the suspicious individual, and who might have insights into her character. She would be more likely to spot signs of dishonesty and subterfuge, knowing the sort of language to employ and the minutiae of daily experience. Or would she? Melanie had a streetwise manner, but had seldom been beyond the borders of Cumbria. If Candida really did live in Liverpool, she would be far more sophisticated, with a very different set of skills and assumptions. She, Simmy, was probably being deplorably ageist, just to think there might be invisible similarities.

A nurse came in quickly, distractedly, holding a clipboard. ‘It’s started!’ she announced. ‘Hours before they said it would.’

‘What has?’

‘The snow. We’ll have to try and contact your people and get them to come for you. We’ve got staff who live up on the fells – they’ll be wanting to go home early.’ She was frowning, doing mental calculations, eyeing the still-empty bed in the ward.

‘Is that allowed?’

‘Not really, but we’ve got a system, based on where people live. Quite a few stay in Barrow overnight, instead of going home.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘Not much so far. It’s supposed to really get going this evening.’

‘Phone them, then. They won’t want to be out in the dark if there’s a blizzard.’

‘It won’t be dark for a while yet. And nobody said anything about a blizzard. It’s not windy. But yes, I will. Remind me where they live.’

‘Windermere. Forty minutes away, at least.’

The woman made a mark on her clipboard and went away. Simmy carefully pulled herself into a sitting position, mindful of the anguish this had caused a few days before. Now it was almost easy. She almost felt a fraud. Had her bones knitted together already? Had they ever been actually broken – or just cracked? Her crutches were tucked out of sight somewhere, rendering her helplessly stranded. She would presumably have to get dressed, in order to go out into a sub-zero world, in a car that might end up in a snowdrift. It seemed criminally reckless to eject her from the nice warm hospital. She realised that she really didn’t want to go. Perhaps if she claimed a violent headache, or acute nausea, or a new pain in her ribs or back, they would relent and let her stay.