‘Did you hear the explosion?’ Melanie asks, because for her the starting point is neutrally impersonal. But the police might need to know more about the explosion, it might be important.
‘Yes. We were in the woods …’ she says.
She sees Mr Marr looking at her, keeping his eyes on hers, and she finds it comforting; she thinks he knows that.
She remembers running through the woods with Rafi, holding hands tightly, cold, numb fingers together, so she could feel his bones, like two in-love young skeletons; which is morbidly weird but frankly she is a weird person and at a party four months ago told Rafi one of her weird (but not morbid) thoughts and wanted to grab the words back again because she had this huge crush on him. But he understood. Understood her. And it had been like their minds were touching.
The in-love bit isn’t true, not for Rafi anyway, because he is charismatic and has an extraordinary story and so that kind of thing happens to him on pretty much a daily basis; but it was unique for her – she touched a boy’s mind and he touched hers. She hasn’t ever told him she loves him.
Fuck’s sake, back to the woods, Hannah. Quarter past eight, but wintry dark, making you want to press a switch and turn on the lights. Rafi’s hand was pulling her along, helping her go faster, so she wouldn’t be late for English and he wouldn’t miss the start of the dress rehearsal. She’d left her puffer behind yesterday in the common room but she didn’t want to slow down. Rafi must have heard her wheezing because he stopped running. She sounded like an old man, not a gentlemanly one but a gross one who smokes sixty a day, huffing around in a tartan dressing gown.
‘It’s so quiet,’ she said, blaming the quietness of the woods for Rafi being able to hear her sixty-a-day old-geezer wheeze.
A cold touch on her face and she saw snowflakes, most getting caught in the trees, and it seemed for a moment that it was just her and Rafi alone in the dark tree-limbed world.
Then Rafi abruptly turned away from her. ‘Have to go,’ he said, hurrying away with his long-stride walk, a slight limp in his right leg. She wanted to tug him back to her, call after him, but made herself still and quiet. Every time Rafi left her she thought he’d seen what everyone else saw: a weird plain plump girl with too-pale skin and too-red hair and now with an old-geezer wheeze and totally undeserving of him.
‘Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent,’ Dad had told her last week; ‘Sensible lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.’ She thought Dad trawled wise female sayings to make up for her lack of mother, though he really didn’t need to and Eleanor didn’t help as she watched Rafi disappear round the bend in the path.
She remembers the woods closing in, the trees treacherous, as if moving stealthily towards her once she was alone; remembers the loss of Rafi in the hand he’d been holding, colder than the rest of her. She’d shoved her hands into the pockets of her puffa jacket but couldn’t get her fingers warm. She’d looked up at the snowflakes, doing skittish dancing above the trees, most too weightless to fall, and saw a glint, vividly bright in the dull winter sky.
She should have remembered the glint before; should have told Mr Marr. But after the glint there was so much else.
‘I think someone may have been watching us,’ she says to Melanie.
‘Watching you …?’ Melanie says like she’s a lip-glossy parrot – You were right about her, Dad – but this is on TV and the police may watch and it might be important.
‘There’s a high ropes course in the woods for Outdoor Ed; really high,’ she says. ‘We don’t use it in the winter. But someone was up there because I saw something glinting, like binoculars.’
Birdwatchers had gone up there last summer term and the PE teacher had spotted them because of their glinting binoculars and ‘read the twitchers the riot act’. But how likely was it to have been a birdwatcher on a freezing November morning?
‘How much longer till there’s an ambulance?’
‘I’m sure help will be with you as soon as possible. Can you remember anything else?’
Is Dad watching this? The thought of him watching her makes tears start; her face tightens. Frank’s phone is on 12% charge and she’s afraid it’ll run out before she gets a turn. She smiles at the screen in case Dad can see her.
‘So you thought someone might be watching you,’ Melanie says. ‘What happened then?’
It’s warm in the library, the Victorian cast-iron radiators blasting out heat as usual, but the memory makes her shiver. Frank must notice because he asks in a whisper if she’s okay.
‘Hannah …?’ Melanie says.
Courage, mon brave.
Her trainers were leaking. The cold wet of the bracken seeped into her socks. Her fingers stung with cold. Her wheezing was getting worse. She stopped and put her fingers to her lips, trying to use her breath to warm them. She turned, just in case Rafi was coming back towards her, hoping.
A brutally loud noise, an assault of sound startling birds out of the trees, as if their branches had been shaken, sending them wheeling up into the sky. And then gone. The air still, the woods quiet, the birds back in the trees. Nothing to prove it had ever happened. She’d thought it hadn’t been that loud. She was upset about Rafi and pathetic about the woods and had jumped at a loud noise. It was probably someone fooling around with fireworks or a farmer with a pigeon-scarer thing; something like that.
Taking her fingers away from her mouth, the cold air sharp against her damp skin, she’d looked again for Rafi and seen a thin pall of smoke moving between the snowflakes and the trees.
‘I heard a loud noise,’ she says to Melanie. ‘And then I saw some smoke, but I didn’t think it was anything bad. Just a pigeon scarer or something and a bonfire.’
‘Really …?’ Melanie asks, like she would have thought Clearly a bomb! and not think of normal things to explain it, like a bonfire and pigeon scarer. But being fair to lip-glossy Melanie, it’s not her fault that Hannah didn’t tell anyone.
Before Mr Marr was shot, she’d said sorry to him for not realizing and telling him because if she had maybe everything would be different. He told her other people had heard it too and not realized. One teacher had complained about some kind of rumpus in the woods; ‘Rumpus, like Where the Wild Things Are,’ Mr Marr had said, trying to make her smile, because he’s kind and knew she felt bad about not telling him and that she was afraid. It wasn’t just that he reassured her, it was that he took time with her; even with everything else going on, he took time to do that.
Then he’d put his arm around her to hurry her away from the front door and said, ‘Love is the most powerful thing there is, the only thing that really matters.’
And now he’s lying shot in the head and the foot. He’s still watching, keeping his eyes on hers, but as if it’s getting harder for him. Frank is at the back of the library again and she doesn’t blame him for leaving the area by the door.
‘You said we earlier?’ Melanie says. ‘We were in the woods? So someone else was with you?’
The producer must be talking into Melanie’s little earbud again. She imagines all the people behind the scenes finding things out; maybe looking things up about her, looking at her Facebook page and Twitter and Instagram. You’ve got to make it all private, Dad was always on at her. Any nutter can look you up.