It’s that tone again. That autocratic, lord-of-the-manor, I’m the boss here tone.
“Pretty reasonable?” She strives to keep the sarcasm out of her voice, but it’s there. “Pretty reasonable? Like, giving me permission to go poking around, is that what you mean? How very reasonable of you.”
“Hannah,” he says, and now she can tell his temper is really frayed, and that he’s holding on to the threadbare edges as hard as he can, his voice brittle with the effort. “You knew I didn’t want you to go. You’re six months pregnant for fuck’s sake, you shouldn’t be digging up some cold case that no one cares about—”
“No one cares?” she cries, so that November and the taxi driver look at her in surprise. “If April’s killer is walking free then I care, Will, and I can’t believe that you don’t—”
“How dare you,” Will shouts back now, loud enough that she has to hold the phone away from her ear. “How fucking dare you. I care, I care just as much as you, but the fact that I don’t want my pregnant wife putting our unborn—”
She hangs up.
Her hands are shaking. Her heart is thumping so hard in her chest that she feels like she might be sick.
Think of the baby. Think of the baby.
“Hannah?” November says tentatively. “Hannah? Are you okay?”
“No. No, I’m not,” Hannah says harshly. Her fists are clenched. She has never, never been so angry at Will. At Will.
This is Will, she reminds herself. Will, who has loved her, waited for her, saved her from herself in so many ways since they were both just teenagers themselves.
And right now she hates him.
“What happened?”
“He wants me to pretend there’s nothing wrong,” she says shortly. “And I can’t. I wish I could but—” And then, realizing they are almost at the hotel, she says to the taxi driver, “Sorry, can you stop at that supermarket? I need to grab something.”
The driver pulls up outside a Tesco Metro and Hannah gets out. Her pulse is still racing, but she knows it will do her good to stretch her legs for a moment, walk off some of her anger, stretch her aching back. November gets out after her, her face worried.
“Hannah?”
“I just need to get some Gaviscon. I’ve got heartburn.”
“Okay,” says November, following her into the almost painful brightness of the little store. “But what did you mean, you can’t pretend nothing’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Hannah says. She grabs a basket and begins to walk the aisles, scanning for the pharmaceutical section. “I just—it was when we were in April’s room. I realized something. Something that made me think that perhaps…” She swallows. “Perhaps we’d all been looking at this the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was when we were leaning out of the window,” Hannah says. She’s found the Gaviscon now, a box of pills rather than the liquid she’s used to, but it will have to do. She checks the label. Suitable for pregnancy. “I’d forgotten that April climbed down one time.”
“Yes, you told me,” November says, looking puzzled. “But I don’t see—”
Then she halts in her tracks, in the middle of the aisle. Her eyes are wide under the fluorescent lights.
“Wait, maybe I do. Are you thinking someone could have—”
She stops, as if she doesn’t want to say it.
“Someone could have killed April, and then climbed out the window,” Hannah finishes for her. She pays for the Gaviscon at a self-service till and then turns to face November. “We’ve all been focusing on the fact that no one could have got into the building after Neville left. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that no one could have got out. Or so we assumed. If Neville’s last sighting of April alive was correct, then Hugh and I had the staircase in view the whole time. But what if the killer didn’t use the stairs? What if he—or she—climbed out the window?”
“Hang on,” November says. They are walking to the exit now, and she runs her hands through her short hair, as if trying to cudgel her brains into action. “If someone was already in the set when Neville went up there, he would have seen them.”
“Not if whoever it was stayed in April’s bedroom. I’ve been thinking about this all evening—trying to piece it together, and it all fits. By Neville’s own account he never went farther than the living room.”