“I certainly feel lucky,” Laura said.
The doctor smiled at her indulgently. “You’re lucky that the breaks were clean. With the right physical therapy, you should get back your full range of motion.”
Back in physical therapy. Just like old times.
“It feels like we’ve come full circle,” Laura’s mother said. She’d been keeping up a histrionic weeping at Laura’s bedside for what was probably just a few minutes but felt like days. “I can’t believe we’re back here again, you gravely hurt, in hospital. . . .”
“Still, at least this time it’s not because your bit on the side ran me over with his car and drove off, is it?”
Her mother didn’t stay long. Her father didn’t either, because Deidre was in the car outside, parked on a double red line. “With any luck, they’ll tow her away!” he said with a nervous laugh, glancing over his shoulder as though worried she might overhear. He squeezed Laura’s good hand and kissed her on the forehead, promising to visit again soon.
“Perhaps when you’re better,” he said as he paused in the doorway on his way out, “we could spend a bit more time together. We might even get a place together, what about that, chicken?”
Laura shook her head. “Dad, I can’t, we tried that. Me and Deidre, it’s never going to work.”
“Oh, I know,” he said, nodding vigorously. “I know that. I know you couldn’t live with her again. I was thinking a bit further down the road, you know. After I’ve left her.” Laura smiled at him reassuringly. She wasn’t going to hold her breath.
* * *
Egg had come to see her too. Detective Barker, his name was; she’d finally got it into her head, though in her heart, he would always be Egg. He came to say how sorry he was that she’d been hurt, and also to say that Miriam from the canal had withdrawn her complaint about Laura. “She admitted having your key,” Egg told her. “We’ve had to talk to her about a number of statements she made during the investigation which turned out to be not quite accurate.”
“I’m shocked,” Laura said, smiling at him. “Truly shocked.”
He raised an eyebrow. “She had quite the story. She claimed to be trying to help you, who she believed to be guilty, while also trying to incriminate Carla Myerson, who she believed to be innocent but who was, in fact, guilty.”
“You really couldn’t make this shit up,” Laura said.
He smiled at her then. “You’ll be hearing from us, Laura,” he said on his way out. “There’s still the matter of this stolen bag, with the knife and the jewelry.”
“Don’t forget the thing with the fork,” Laura reminded him.
“Yes, of course. The fork.”
* * *
At night, lying in her single bed, threadbare sheets tucked tight around her body, Laura lay with her good palm pressed against the wall, on the other side of which was Daniel’s room. There was something uncannily circular about all this, how it started out with her in Daniel’s bed and finished with her separated from his bedroom by just a few inches of Victorian brick.
She returned often, in her mind, to the night on his boat, to the morning dawning, and the strange thing was that what tormented her was not him, not the sudden change in his behavior, the flick of a switch from charm to cruelty, it wasn’t the look on his face when she lunged at him, teeth bared.
No, the thing that she could not get out of her head was the moment she left the boat, the moment she stepped from the back deck to dry land and glanced up to her right, the moment she saw, in that gray dawn half-light, a woman up on the bridge looking down at her. The thing that tormented her now was that she could not if her life depended on it conjure up that woman’s expression; she could not say whether she looked sad or angry, broken or resolute.
EPILOGUE
A man has been found dead on a houseboat on the canal.
Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.
Carla heard the rumors, the silly jokes from the other women, at lunchtime. He another one of yours, Cazza? Been a busy girl, incha? She went to the library that afternoon; she wasn’t permitted to read news stories about crimes on the internet, but she persuaded one of the guards （a “Myerson megafan!”） to print the story off for her at home and bring it in.
SUSPECTED KILLER FOUND MURDERED
The partially decomposed body of 58-year-old Jeremy O’Brien, who was also known as Henry Carter and JH Bryant, was found on a partially submerged boat on the Regent’s Canal. O’Brien, who was wanted in connection with the 1983 murder of teenager Lorraine Reid, had previously been assumed to have taken his own life after he disappeared within days of the Reid killing.