The Split - Sharon Bolton Page 0,69

has she done?’

‘If you’re coming, we can explain when you get here.’

* * *

Delilah meets him in the car park.

‘How did you know she was my patient?’ Joe asks as he and Delilah head into the building. ‘How did you even connect her with me? Did she ask you to call me?’

‘We’re detectives.’ A second later, Delilah’s face softens. ‘I remembered meeting her on your staircase. When I saw the footage tonight I put two and two together. The car accident gave us her name.’

She takes him into the open-plan office where most of her team work. At this hour, though, most of the team are at home. A solitary detective is chatting to a couple of uniforms, a man and a woman. After introductions, they gather around a desktop computer.

‘Show him,’ Delilah says.

Joe watches CCTV footage of Felicity, shoeless, wearing the white and pink dress of earlier, running down Sidney Street. The time in the corner of the screen says 22.16. He sees passers-by watch in astonishment, one or two trying to speak to her, but she runs on, wild-eyed and frantic.

‘Her car was abandoned on Queen’s Road,’ Delilah says. ‘Sometime between seven and eight o’clock. No one else involved, thank God, but it took a nasty bump when it hit a lamppost. She claims she swerved to avoid a cat and banged her head. Can’t remember anything else.’

‘She told us a dog at first,’ the female uniform says.

‘Animal of indeterminate species,’ Delilah clarifies.

‘This is the next piece,’ the detective says, and Joe watches more footage, this time of Felicity slumped against a brick wall. The time is 23.28.

‘What happened to her?’ He leans closer. There is a dark stain on the front of her dress. Felicity looks as though she’s been stabbed.

‘We had reports of a young woman running around Cambridge covered in blood,’ Delilah tells him. ‘Miss Lloyd has some visible cuts and grazes but nothing that would cause that.’

‘If it is blood,’ the detective says. ‘It’s really not clear.’

‘She’s not injured?’ Joe asks.

‘She declined medical assistance and doesn’t seem to be,’ his mother tells him. ‘She certainly wouldn’t be up and walking around if she’d taken a wound to her stomach that would cause that amount of blood loss.’

‘Is she still wearing the dress?’ Joe asks.

‘No, it’s in her washing machine,’ the female constable says.

‘And we can’t get it out without a search warrant,’ says Delilah. ‘Which at the moment, we don’t have cause for. The only thing we can possibly charge her with is leaving the scene of an accident. And as no one else was involved, I doubt that will go very far.’

‘So, she’s free to go? I can take her home?’

The last time Joe saw that look on his mother’s face, he’d been suspended from school for smuggling beer into class.

She says, ‘Against my better judgement, Joe. That woman is trouble.’

* * *

Felicity is in jogging trousers and a sweatshirt, trainers on her feet. Her face is pale and all the make-up she wore earlier has been washed away. After apologising several times, she falls silent.

‘Another fugue state?’ he asks, as they head out of the city centre. It will not take long to reach her house.

When she answers she sounds exhausted. ‘I think so. I can’t remember everything. Bits of it, not everything.’

Her remembering even parts of what she did feels like progress, but Joe doesn’t say this. They stop at a red light and its bright colour jogs his memory.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asks, remembering the dark stain on the front of her dress.

‘A few cuts and bruises. Nothing serious.’

‘Do you remember your appointment with me?’ he asks.

‘Yes. And afterwards I walked to Heffers. I had to collect…’

He glances over. ‘What’s up?’

In a small voice she says, ‘I saw Freddie.’

‘Who’s Freddie?’

‘He’s my husband.’

It should be a thunderbolt. It isn’t. Somehow, Joe isn’t surprised. He says nothing more and drives her home. When they reach her house, he parks the car and gets out without asking her permission to come inside. Her handbag has been returned to her and she lets them both in via the back door.

‘You’re married?’ he says, when they are seated at her kitchen island and the kettle is coming to the boil.

She nods.

‘You’re waiting for details, aren’t you?’ she says. ‘You want to know how long I’ve been married, and what went wrong, and where he is now and why the sight of him would send me over the top into La-La Land. And most of all,