The ground-floor canteen was quiet this time of night: on-duty doctors keeping an eye on their beepers and phones; one poor soul fast asleep by a potted plant, his head looking uncomfortable on a wicker divider; a clutch of porters playing cards; and a few nervous-looking family members, not sure they were in the right place, glancing around. The catering staff had gone for the day; it was just vending machines and hideous coffee in plastic cups with plastic stirrers. Ashkan brought back two teas and gave both of them to Lissa, pulling out his own flask of vegetable juice he squeezed himself. Ashkan took his health extremely seriously and usually headed straight for the gym at the end of his shift. Lissa had always teased him about how vain he was—he spent longer on his shiny black quiff than she did on her spirally curls, although, to be fair, they were liable to turn into frizz in the wet, so she just got them out of the way in a tight ponytail. Plus, the fewer things that stood out about her physically, the less abuse she normally had to take from people not quite in their right minds by the time they showed up at A&E.

Lissa took the tea, feeling it burn her fingers through the thin plastic—Ashkan was harshly opposed to single-use plastic, so his doing this was a clear sign of how concerned he was. She understood all of this—kind of—from a long, long way away. She could sense how worried he was. But somehow she just didn’t care. About anything. Because that boy was dead, and nothing mattered, and she felt half dead herself.

The harsh strip lights felt purgatorial; the rain-spattered windows showed nothing but themselves back to them. Lissa wondered for a second if they had all died in that ambulance. Her eyes were drawn to the door as a bent-over woman entered, her face anxiously scanning everybody in the room. When she saw Lissa, she blinked.

The woman who approached them couldn’t have been much older than Lissa, was surely only in her thirties. But the expression on her face was that of someone who’d lived a million lives.

Chapter 5

The woman was pulling her cardigan around herself, shuddering in the cold wind, the rain spattering from the south.

“Och, hello there, Cormac.”

“Hello there yourself, Mrs. Coudrie.”

There was a pause. “Could you just . . . I really don’t want to bother the doctor.”

He turned to Jake. “Off you go,” he said. “I can get myself home.”

Jake grimaced. “Is it wee Islay?”

The woman nodded.

“Aye, aye, I’ll come along,” said Jake, with the resigned voice of a man who knows that his dream of a lovely foaming pint and possibly a quick flirt with Ginty MacGuire has almost certainly just vanished forever.

Chapter 6

Lissa lifted her eyes to the strange woman’s. The lady’s face was drawn with pain.