The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel by Steve Mosby Read Free Book Online Page A

something’s possible, you can work backwards from that. The kind of person who would do that to themselves, what kind of story would they tell you, and how would they present themselves? This kind of story, I decided, and probably very much like this. Confused. Vulnerable. On the verge of being angry.
    Thanks again, Pete .
    At the same time, the cuts bothered me. Someone else had done them to her, she claimed, and I could hardly ignore that. While the whole thing seemed an utter waste of time, and almost certainly would be, I had a duty to pursue it at least a little further.
    So I suppressed the sigh I wanted to give.
    ‘I believe something happened to you. And I want to understand what.’
    ‘Everything’s hazy right now.’
    ‘Well ... let’s see about that.’ I thought about it. ‘Do you remember what happened yesterday, before you were found?’
    ‘I was in an ambulance.’
    ‘No, before that.’
    ‘I mean I was in another ambulance, before the one that brought me here. A kind of ambulance, anyway. It was white – really white – and there was a man with me.’
    ‘Can you describe him?’
    ‘Not really. He’s old. He’s some kind of doctor.’
    ‘You’ve seen him before?’
    ‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘I think so.’
    ‘And what was he doing in the ambulance? Did he speak to you?’
    ‘Yes, but I can’t remember what he said.’ She frowned at that. ‘And I need to, because it’s important. I was awake for a bit, and he was trying to tell me things. But I must have gone back to sleep again.’
    Drugged? I wondered – but then realised I was taking the story at face value. There probably never was an ambulance or a man. Nevertheless, I presumed the doctors would have done blood tests, and even though they wouldn’t necessarily be conclusive, I reminded myself to ask Fredericks about it on the way out.
    ‘The next thing I remember is lying in a field. I was on my back, and I could feel the damp grass around me – it was overgrown enough to be taller than me lying down. There were birds singing, and the sky hurt my eyes. It wasn’t too bad at that point, but it was still too much. I knew it was going to be too much.’
    ‘Too much?’
    ‘The detail. The everything .’
    I looked around, understanding now why the room around us was so dimly lit.
    ‘Because it’s dark where I’ve been,’ she said. ‘I remember that much about it. Everything’s very dark when you’re dead. Being back wasn’t so bad at first when I was lying there in the field, but as soon as I stood up, it got worse. When I walked for a bit.’
    ‘How long did you walk for?’
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes? It’s hard for me to judge. Not long. I came to the road, and the cars ... I walked a little way along, but it was all yammering at me.’
    She cupped her hands over her ears now, wincing, as though even the memory of all that noise and static was difficult for her.
    ‘I couldn’t carry on. I sat down. People started talking to me, and I just wanted it all to stop, to go away. I could only cling to a couple of things. I knew who I was. I knew what I needed to say. Some of it, anyway.’ She looked worried by that. ‘I need to remember.’
    My head throbbed suddenly. I took a sip of the water I’d brought in with me, but it tasted warm and metallic now, and it didn’t help. Something had clearly happened to this woman,but that didn’t mean that anything about the story she was telling me was true. I was trying to think about the man, the ambulance – at least two people involved, then, as there would have to be a driver – but then this woman wasn’t Charlotte Matheson, and she hadn’t died in a car crash two years ago. Since everything else she was telling me was built on those shaky foundations, there was no point assuming that any other part of the structure was solid.
    ‘You don’t believe me,’ she said.
    ‘I want to help you,’ I said. ‘I want to understand.’
    ‘No, you think I’m