Lasting Damage

Lasting Damage

Sophie Hannah

www.hodder.co.uk

Also by Sophie Hannah

Little Face

Hurting Distance

The Point of Rescue

The Other Half Lives

A Room Swept White

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Sophie Hannah 2011

The right of Sophie Hannah to be identified as the Author of the Work has been

asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior

written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of

binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 9781444711486

Book ISBN 9780340980651

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For 7GR

Saturday 24 July 2010

I’m going to be killed because of a family called the Gilpatricks.

There are four of them: mother, father, son and daughter.
Elise, Donal, Riordan and Tilly
. Kit tells me their first names, as if I’m keen to dispense with the formalities and get to know them better, when all I want is to run screaming from the room.
Riordan’s seven
, he says.
Tilly’s five
.

Shut up
, I want to yell in his face, but I’m too scared to open my mouth. It’s as if someone’s clamped and locked it; no more words will come out, not ever.

This is it. This is where and how and when and why I’m going to die. At least I understand the why, finally.

Kit’s as frightened as I am. More. That’s why he keeps talking, because he knows, as all those who wait in terror know, that when silence and fear combine, they form a compound a thousand times more horrifying than the sum of its parts.

The Gilpatricks
, he says, tears streaking his face.

I watch the door in the mirror above the fireplace. It looks smaller and further away than it would if I turned and looked at it directly. The mirror is shaped like a fat gravestone: three straight sides and an arch at the top.

I didn’t believe in them. The name sounded made up
. Kit laughs, chokes on a sob. All of him is shaking, even his voice.
Gilpatrick’s the sort of name you’d make up if you were inventing a person. Mr Gilpatrick. If only I’d believed in him, none of this would have happened. We’d have been safe. If I’d only . . .

He stops, backs away from the locked door. He hears the same footsteps I hear – rushing, a stampede. They’re here.

One week earlier

Chapter 1

Saturday 17 July 2010

I lie on my back with my eyes closed, waiting for Kit’s breathing to change. I fake the deep, slow sleep-breaths I need to hear from him before I can get out of bed –
in and hold, out and hold
– and try to convince myself that it’s a harmless deception. Am I the only woman who has ever done this, or does it happen all the time in houses all over the world? If it does, then it must be for different reasons, more common ones than mine: a cheating wife or girlfriend wanting to text a lover undetected, or sneak one last guilty glass of wine on top of the five she’s had already. Normal things. Ordinary urgencies.

No woman on earth has ever been in the situation I’m in now.

You’re being ridiculous. You’re not ‘in a situation’, apart from the one you’ve brewed in your imagination. Ingredients: coincidence and paranoia.

Nothing I tell myself works. That’s why I need to check, to put my mind at rest. Checking isn’t crazy; missing the opportunity to check would be crazy. And once I’ve looked and found nothing, I’ll be able to forget about it and accept that it’s all in my head.

Will you?

It shouldn’t be too long before I can move. Kit’s usually dead to the world within seconds of the light going out. If I count to a hundred . . . but I can’t. Can’t make myself focus on something that doesn’t interest me. If I could, I’d be able to do the reverse: banish 11 Bentley Grove from my mind. Will I ever be able to do that?

While I wait, I rehearse for the task ahead. What would this bedroom tell me about Kit and me, if I didn’t know us? Huge bed, cast-iron fireplace, identical alcoves on either side of the chimney breast where our two identical wardrobes stand. Kit likes symmetry. One of his reservations, when I proposed buying the biggest bed we could find to replace our ordinary double, was that it might not leave room for our matching bedside cabinets. When I said I’d be happy to lose mine, Kit looked at me as if I was an anarchist agitator plotting to demolish his well-ordered world. ‘You can’t have a cabinet on one side and not the other,’ he said. Both ended up going in the end; having first made me promise not to tell anyone, Kit admitted that, however inconvenient it was to have to lean down and put his book, watch, glasses and mobile phone under the bed, he would find it more irritating to have a bedroom that didn’t ‘look right’.

‘Are you sure you’re a genuine, bona fide heterosexual?’ I teased him.

He grinned. ‘Either I am, or else I’m pretending to be in order to get my Christmas cards written and posted for me every year. I guess you’ll never know which is the truth.’

Floor-length cream silk curtains. Kit wanted a Roman blind, but I overruled him. Silk curtains are something I’ve wanted since childhood, one of those ‘as soon as I have a home of my own’ pledges I made to myself. And curtains in a bedroom have to pool on the floor – that’s my look-right rule. I suppose everybody has at least one, and we all think our own are sensible and other people’s completely ridiculous.