Detective Inspector Jones pulls a recording device from her bag and places it on the bedside cupboard. She switches it on without asking permission. ‘We’re thinking it wasn’t last night.’
‘It was Friday night.’ Felicity’s throat feels sore and she isn’t sure until she hears words coming out of her mouth whether or not it will work. It does, but the effort hurts. ‘At least, I found it on Friday night, it could have been earlier in the week and I didn’t notice it. I couldn’t get a glazier out before next week so I nailed some wood to the frame to make it safe.’
‘Didn’t work too well, did it? So, you’ve had two break-ins on two successive nights. Did you report the first one?’
Felicity shakes her head.
‘I’m sorry, could you speak up for the tape?’
‘Don’t you need my permission to record me?’
‘No, but you don’t have to talk to me. Of course, if you refuse, I’ll have to take this to the next level.’
Felicity doesn’t need to ask what the next level is. The hospital, and her frail condition, will only protect her for so long.
‘I didn’t report the first break-in. Nothing was taken.’
‘Even so, someone breaks a window to enter your house and you don’t report it? Why ever not?’
‘I don’t know,’ Felicity says. It is the truth. She doesn’t know. So much of what she does she can make no sense of, even to herself.
Joe’s mum is looking for something in her bag. When she straightens up, Felicity gasps. She is looking at a knife in a large plastic bag.
‘Recognise this?’ Joe’s mum asks.
She can see faint brown specks on the blade that could be blood. ‘Is it one of mine?’ she asks.
‘You tell me.’
‘I have a set like that,’ Felicity says. ‘You can check easily. If there’s one missing from the knife block, it’s mine.’
The policewoman nods. ‘We think it’s yours,’ she says. ‘We’ll need to keep it for a while.’ The knife disappears back into the bag. ‘What can you tell me about your assailant?’
‘He was very strong,’ she says. ‘And fast. He kept coming at me. From every direction. I’m sorry, could you pass me some water?’
Breathing heavily, Joe’s mum pours water from the jug on the bedside cabinet, spilling some of it. Felicity pushes herself up in the bed and holds out her hand.
‘He?’ DI Jones asks. She makes the handing over of water, the most simple of human courtesies, feel begrudged.
Swallowing hurts. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said “he”. It was a male then?’
It has never occurred to Felicity that her attacker might not have been a man. She remembers the voices screaming in her ears. Kill him, this is your chance.
‘I assumed so,’ she says. ‘He was very strong.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘It was dark.’
‘How tall?’
‘He attacked me from behind. I didn’t really see him.’
‘Black, white, Asian?’
‘It was too dark.’
‘Was he masked?’
‘Maybe. I’m not sure.’
‘Did he speak to you? Did you hear his voice?’
Impossible to tell. She had heard so many voices.
‘No. I didn’t hear his voice.’
‘The medical staff tell me you declined an intimate examination.’
‘I wasn’t raped.’ There had been nothing sexual about the attack. It had been about maiming, killing, obliterating.
‘There’s a cut on your neck, some bruising on your head and around your neck,’ DI Jones says. ‘You had concussion. What do you think the motive was?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you have any enemies, Miss Lloyd?’
Does she? She feels as though she does, and yet none she can name. ‘No,’ she says.
‘Was anyone behaving oddly when you were out last night?’
‘I didn’t go out last night. I was home all evening.’ No sooner are the words out of her mouth than Felicity’s heart starts to hammer in her chest. She tries to turn back the pages in her mind and sees them all blank. She has no memory of going out last night. And yet she has no idea what she did instead.
In the meantime, Delilah’s eyes have become mean slits in her puffy face. ‘You had dinner with my son at Galleria,’ she says. ‘You were both caught on camera on Jesus Lane. I collected him from your house myself.’
Felicity has no memory of meeting Joe. She is going to be sick. She looks around but she cannot get out of bed without unhooking herself from machines and drips.
DI Jones does not seem to notice her panic. ‘My son tells me you have an estranged husband. He thinks you’re afraid of him.’
Felicity gulps in air and says, ‘Is he supposed to tell you that?’
The policewoman knows a threat when she hears one. She gets up from her chair. ‘He also tells me you’re leaving town,’ she says, as she switches off the recording equipment. ‘Have a good trip.’
58
Joe
Joe walks into the café expecting to meet his supervisor and sees his mother at a table by the window, tucking into smashed avocado on sourdough toast. She folds up her newspaper and lifts her bag from the other chair. For a moment, he is tempted to walk out.
‘Seriously?’ he says. ‘This is verging on stalking.’
‘Get over yourself,’ Delilah snaps. ‘I’ll be gone in five minutes. I wanted to catch you before work. I won’t get a moment to fart once I get in.’
‘And people wonder why I’m a bit rough around the edges.’
Joe orders an Americano from the counter and sits down. ‘What’s up?’ he says, although he knows this can only be about Felicity. He has spent twenty-four hours telling himself that he cannot visit her in hospital, that he can’t even phone to check on her progress.
‘Felicity Lloyd has discharged herself from hospital,’ she begins.
Joe isn’t surprised. ‘Never a good idea,’ he says.
‘She wasn’t that badly hurt.’ Delilah slices into a tiny vine tomato. ‘She’s also contacted the station saying she doesn’t want any further action taken in regard to her break-in. She thinks now that she was probably confused. She got up in the night, disorientated because all the lights were out and because she’d had a bit to drink the evening before – I guess you’d know something about that – she fell down the stairs. She says she’s sure now that she wasn’t attacked and apologises for wasting our time.’
‘Are you serious?’
Delilah drops her fork with a clang on the counter. ‘Do I look like I’m playing for laughs?’
‘Does it ring true to you?’
She resumes eating. ‘It rings like complete bollocks. Even without two sets of fingerprints on the knife we found, and two distinct types of human blood. We’ve also found both sets of fingerprints in other places. One set occurs throughout the house, so probably Felicity’s. The other in just a few places on the ground floor and around the basement window, so probably the intruder.’