Land of the Living by Nicci French Page A

the building and returned with sandwiches and salad and fizzy water and tea and biscuits, and the sun moved across the sky and I talked, and sometimes, as I thought of the sheer tiredness that my life had been over the last year, I cried, but mainly I talked and talked and talked until I was exhausted and the courtyard had become dark and cold and she led me through echoey corridors back to my room.
    There was a large bunch of daffodils on my bed, and a note scribbled across the back of a used envelope. ‘Sorry you weren’t here. I waited as long as I could. I’ll come back as soon as I can. Loads of love and I’m thinking of you, Sadie.’
    I sat on the bed, weak with disappointment.
    ‘How’s the investigation going?’
    ‘We’re short of anything to investigate.’
    ‘There’s the women.’
    ‘There’s five female names.’
    ‘Six. Including me.’
    ‘If you …’ Cross paused and looked awkward.
    ‘If I remember anything,’ I said, ‘you’ll be the first to know.’
    ‘This is your brain.’
    ‘My brain.’ I looked at the scan spread out on the light-board in front of us and then touched my temples. ‘How odd to look at your own brain. Well, is it all right?’
    Charlie Mulligan smiled at me. ‘It seems pretty good to me.’
    ‘It’s a bit shadowy.’
    ‘It’s the way it’s meant to look.’
    ‘But I still can’t remember. There’s a hole in my life.’
    ‘Maybe there always will be.’
    ‘A disaster-shaped hole.’
    ‘Or perhaps memory will gradually return and fill it in.’
    ‘Can I do anything about it?’
    ‘Don’t fret away at it. Relax.’
    ‘You don’t know who you’re talking to.’
    ‘There are worse things than forgetting,’ he said mildly. ‘Anyway, I ought to be getting on.’
    ‘Back to your mice.’
    He held out his hand and I grasped it. It was warm and firm. ‘Back to my mice. Get in touch if you need anything.’
    If I need something you can do anything about, I thought. But I just nodded and tried to smile.
    ‘I read somewhere that you only really fall in love twice, maybe three times, in your life.’
    ‘Do you think that’s true?’
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe. But, then, I’ve either fallen in love lots of times, or hardly ever. There’s the bit where you can’t sleep and you can’t eat and you feel sick and breathless, and you don’t know if you’re very happy or completely wretched. You just want to be with him and the rest of the world can go hang.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I’ve had that feeling quite a lot of times. But it doesn’t last long. Sometimes just a few days; sometimes until the moment after you’ve had sex. It settles down and then you have to see what you’re left with. And usually it’s not much. Like ashes after the fire’s gone out. You think: God, what was that all about? And sometimes you still care, feel affection, desire. But is that love? The time I was most intensely in love was when I was at university. God, I adored him. But it didn’t last.’
    ‘Did he leave you?’
    ‘Yes. I cried for weeks. I thought I’d never get over it.’
    ‘What about Terry? Has the relationship with him been stronger than other ones?’
    ‘Longer, at least, which must count for something, some kind of commitment. Or endurance.’ I gave a laugh that didn’t sound quite like my normal laugh. ‘I mean, I feel I know him really well, now. I know him in a way that I hardly know anyone. All the intimate little things, all the things he hides from other people … And the more I know him the more reason there is to leave him, but the harder it gets to do it. If that makes sense?’
    ‘You make it sound as if you’re trapped.’
    ‘Lots of people feel trapped in their relationships at times, don’t they?’
    ‘So you feel trapped at work and trapped at home?’
    ‘That’s a bit dramatic. I’ve just let things get into a rut.’
    ‘Which you’ve wanted to escape from?’
    ‘You get into things gradually, and you don’t realize quite