A Finer End

As she walked, she became aware of movement in the woods, an agitation more intense than the usual nocturnal shufflings of badgers and rabbits. Fiona stopped, listening, wondering what could be disturbing the woodland creatures on such a calm and beautiful night. “What is it?” she whispered, but there was no response. Feeling uneasy, she continued onwards, but more cautiously.

When a tendril of wind moved down the lane, disturbing a bit of rubbish, she started, then chided herself. It was only a supermarket carrier bag, and as she watched it blew a few more feet, lodging against something larger in the road, a dark shape, perhaps a fallen branch, and beside it a longer, more solid object. Drawing closer, she saw that the more solid shape was oddly human. Another trick of perception, she decided. Her steps slowed until she came to a halt beside the thing.

Not until she knelt and touched the form was she convinced that what she saw was real. It was a woman, her upturned face a pale smudge, and beside her not a branch, but a fallen bicycle. Fiona pulled her small torch from the pocket of her jacket, then gasped as it lit the woman’s face.

Jack Montfort came to a halt a yard inside the intensive-care unit, overwhelmed by the sight of the machines and tubes surrounding Winnie’s slight, still form. Why hadn’t they told him she would look like this—alien, and frail beyond hope? A tube ran into her nose, another into her mouth, and on a shaved strip of her scalp the angry edges of a wound were held closed with clips.

“You’re here to see Winifred, aren’t you, dear?” a soft Irish voice said beside him.

Jack turned, barely registering scrubs, a friendly smile, and a name badge that read “Maggie.” He nodded, not trusting his voice.

“You’re her ‘friend,’ I take it? Her brother came in a bit ago. Took one look, turned green, and bolted, poor man.”

“Did he?” Jack’s resolve not to do the same strengthened, as he suspected she had intended.

“It’s all these high-tech doodads give folks the willies. But don’t let them frighten you. They’re just keeping her comfortable, and letting us know how she’s doing.”

“How—how is she?”

“We’ve got her warm and toasty now, and resting quite comfortably. She was hypothermic when they brought her in, and her heart was a bit dicky, but she’s stable now—”

“Heart?” A fresh jolt of fear shot through him.

“A bit of cardiac arrhythmia, due to the warming process. All perfectly normal. She’s a lucky girl, your Winifred. Do you know where she was found exactly?”

“In Bulwarks Lane, below Glastonbury Tor.”

“On the tarmac itself? Probably saved her life, then. The tarmac would have held the day’s heat. A few feet either way into the grass or the ditch …” Maggie shook her head ominously.

It had been Suzanne Sanborne who had rung Jack in the early hours of the morning. He had been increasingly uneasy about Winnie—it wasn’t like her not to let him know her whereabouts—but he had told himself that she must have had an emergency. He had, in fact, imagined her sitting at the bedside of an ill or dying parishioner. That was an irony too painful now to contemplate.

In a daze, he had driven the thirty miles to the hospital in Taunton. While Andrew Catesby acknowledged him with a tight-lipped nod, Suzanne told him that the police believed Winnie must have been on her way to visit her friend Fiona Allen when she had been struck by a hit-and-run motorist. It had been Fiona who had found her, rung for police and medical aid. Fiona had then rung Andrew, who in turn had called Suzanne. How like Andrew, thought Jack, not to have rung him.

By daybreak, they had still not been allowed to see Winnie and Suzanne had been unable to stay longer. Left alone with Andrew Catesby, who glared at him from across the waiting room, Jack had left the hospital and driven to police headquarters in Yeovil. There he had seen Detective Inspector Alfred Greely, the officer who had taken the call on Winnie’s accident. Greely, a phlegmatic man with a farmer’s face and a West Country burr, held out little hope that the driver of the car could be traced. There were no witnesses, and little, if any, possibility of forensic evidence on the bike—their only avenue lay with Winnie herself, if she should awaken and remember something vital.

Now, looking down at her smooth face, calm in a repose more profound than sleep, Jack asked Maggie, “Can I speak to her? Will she know me?”

“Of course, you can, dear, and the more the better. And it’s a good bet that when she wakes up, not only will she remember that you’ve been here, she’ll remember everything you’ve said to her.” Maggie fetched a hospital-issue chair that looked too insubstantial to support Jack’s large frame and placed it next to the bed. “She’ll need you to anchor her, give her consciousness a focal point. Talk to her, touch her, hold her hand. Tell her what’s happened to her.”