75

13 September, ten years earlier

VICTORIA LLEWELLYN IS STRUGGLING TO BREATHE. AIR IS GOING in, and out again, faster than feels normal, but it’s just not having the right effect. There isn’t enough oxygen getting to her brain and that light-headed, drifting-away-from-reality feeling is coming over her again. It’s a common enough reaction to grief, she knows, sudden breathlessness, but what she can’t deal with is this sense of the world slipping away, leaving her behind, alone, in the void.

She’s sitting, bent forward almost double, her head just above her knees. She can’t remember finding a bench on the towpath, the last thing she can remember is seeing a houseboat like the one Cathy had been living on, and then stumbling away, but the wooden slats are hard and damp beneath her and she’s grateful. Because while she’s sitting down, she won’t fall.

They are getting increasingly common, these periods when she can’t remember anything. When her life has just been wiped away like an old lesson from a school whiteboard.

A cardboard drink cup floats past her downriver and she tries not to think of Cathy and those other kids being swept away, sinking down into the depths. She tries not to think about the washed ivory skin and the matted fair hair of the drowned girl she identified only a few days before.

Cathy is gone.

She has a sense of someone hurrying past. She glances up in time to see the suspicious look, the hurrying footsteps, and she realizes that the knife is in her hand again. Her knuckles are white, her fingers starting to hurt. Without noticing it, she’s been slicing into the wooden seat beneath her. A dozen or more score marks show where she’s dug the blade repeatedly into the wood. She almost drops the knife, then, with a huge effort, manages to close it and slip it back into her pocket.

Cathy is gone. Nothing will bring her back now. Might as well get used to it.

She gets up and makes her way home.