She is backing into a corner, and she knows it, but if she can just get him to take one more step forwards…
She takes one more step back.
He takes one more step forwards.
And Hannah runs.
Will swears, but that last step has put the kitchen table between him and the door, while giving Hannah a clear line.
She runs, barefoot, out of the kitchen, down the hallway and down the stairs, hearing a thumping clatter as Will tries to follow and trips over one of their kitchen chairs. Out in the street the cobbles are bitterly cold under her feet and wet from the night’s rain, and she slips, but then rights herself and runs towards the open end of the mews. Behind her she can hear Will’s feet pounding down the stairs.
Her heart feels like it’s going to burst. She holds her stomach with one hand, as if she can protect her unborn child. She forces herself to run just a little faster down the last few meters of Stockbridge Mews… and then she is out, onto the main road, skidding around the corner, the asphalt of the council-owned pavement biting into the soles of her feet. She looks wildly up and down the road. A car passes. Then another. They are going too fast for her to stop, and they don’t spare a glance for the wild-eyed pregnant woman running barefoot down the street. Can she flag someone down? Run into a cafe? The nearest one is closed and she draws a shuddering breath and runs on, towards the park.
“Hannah!” she hears from behind her, Will’s roar of a kind of fury she has never heard from him before. He has rounded the corner onto the main road and is gaining on her. “Hannah, what are you doing?”
She makes her legs work harder—runs across a junction without looking, and then another and then—
There is a screech of tires and the sound of swearing.
“Jesus Christ! You trying to get yourself killed?”
It’s a taxi driver. He’s leaning out of the window of his cab, his face red with annoyance.
“You coulda killed yourself—and the bairn!”
Hannah just stands for a moment, panting hopelessly, her hands resting on the bonnet of the car. Will can’t do anything in front of a taxi driver, surely? But the man is going to drive away—he’s going to leave her—and then she looks up, and she feels a huge, drenching wash of relief.
The yellow light on top of the cab is on. The taxi is for hire.
She doesn’t wait. She runs around to the side, wrenches open the door, just as Will comes pounding up to the junction.
“Drive,” she says urgently to the cabbie. “That’s my husband, he—we just had a row.”
A row. The word comes out like a sob, and yet it’s so pathetically understated. “A row” barely even starts to cover it. I have just found out my husband might be a killer.
And yet she can’t say it. She can’t bring herself to say the words, to make them real.
Will is a killer.
Will murdered April.
If she keeps repeating the words to herself, perhaps she can make herself believe them.
“Understood, hen,” the driver says sympathetically. “Aye, it’s a tough one. Where can I take you? Your mammy? Or maybe not, by your accent?”
Hannah thinks of her mother, far away in Dodsworth, several hundred miles south, and tears spring into her eyes. If only she could go back there, fall into her mum’s arms, sob out her troubles.
But she can’t. It’s a good eight hours on the train, more on a Sunday. She has no coat, no shoes. She doesn’t even have any money, apart from Google Pay on her phone. She can hardly take a taxi to southern England. Where can she go?
And then it comes to her.
Hugh.
Hugh will shelter her. Hugh will loan her money and she can buy herself a jacket and some warm boots and figure out her next move.
“Do you know Great King Street?” she asks the driver, who nods.
“Aye.”
“Thanks.” She sinks back onto the seat, feeling her heart slow and her numb feet begin to thaw. “Thanks, I’d like to go there.”
AFTER
As the taxi draws up outside Hugh’s flat, Hannah gets her phone out to pay. To her dismay, the inky shadow inching across the screen has spread. It’s now covering almost the whole screen, leaving only a small triangle at the top left.
However, she holds it against the card reader, mentally crosses her fingers, and sighs with relief as it beeps obediently.
“Good luck, hen,” the taxi driver says gently. “You need a lift anywhere, you give me a call, ken?” He pushes a business card through the hole in the plexiglass screen, and Hannah takes it, trying to smile. Now that the adrenaline is wearing off she feels almost unbearably shaky; her hands are trembling and cold. “And dinna you be in too much of a hurry to go back tae him. Leave him to stew in his own juices a wee while.”