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“Hold the flashlight steady,” she barks at Conor, leaning down over my niece and feeling for a pulse. It seems to take the longest time, but finally Rose nods.
“She’s alive.”
“Oh, thank god!” Lily says, but the smile soon slides off her face. “Who did this?” Nobody answers. “Which one of you did this? She didn’t lock herself in the bloody cupboard.”
“Wait,” says Rose. “She’s alive, but something isn’t right.”
We watch as she examines Trixie from head to toe. She’s unconscious, deathly pale, and I notice that one of her socks is missing. Rose sees it too, and stares down at her bare foot.
“There is a small amount of dried blood between her toes,” Rose says, almost to herself.
“What does that mean?” asks Lily.
“I… can’t be sure. But my best guess is that someone has injected her with something.”
“What? Who?”
“I don’t know,” Rose replies. “But we can’t find Nancy. Your diabetic kit was inherbedroom, and your insulin pen is now missing from it—”
Lily shakes her head. “You can’t seriously be suggesting that our mother did this to Trixie? Shelovesher grandchild, far more than she ever loved us.”
Rose sighs and seems to visibly deflate. “Then where is Nancy now? We don’t have time for this. I need your diabetic kit.”
Lily hands it to her, and Rose takes a small device from the bag. Nobody dares to ask what she is doing, and I feel as though we are all holding our breath. Rose pricks Trixie’s finger and squeezes a tiny drop of blood onto the machine.
“I think she’s been injected with insulin. If I’m right, we have to act quickly or—”
“Just do whatever you need to do,” Lily says in a quiet voice, and it is so strange to see her crying and vulnerable. She was always the indestructible sister.
Rose runs to the library where she slept and returns with a bag of her own. It looks like an old-fashioned brown leather doctor’s bag. A gift from Nana when Rose got a place at Cambridge to study veterinary science. She opens it, takes out a large needle and a small vial.
“What is that?” asks Conor.
“Glucagon. There should be some in Lily’s kit, but that’s missing too. It’s the same treatment for dogs, so if I’m right, then…”
“What if you’re wrong?” Lily whispers.
Rose ignores her and injects the drug into Trixie’s arm.
We wait for what feels like forever. Time seems impossible to tell. Then Trixie opens her eyes. They blink a few times before finding Lily.
“Mum?”
“Oh, thank god. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Lily says, sweeping Trixie up in her arms and kissing her. I’m crying tears of joy, and relief, and love. Looking around, I see that we all are. Nobody who is here now would ever have hurt this child.
A short while later we are all back in the lounge, with a chair up against the door to prevent anyone coming into—or out of—the room. We have barricaded ourselves inside and are huddled around the fire for heat. Rose has lit some old candles for light. Even in the darkness, I can see that Lily is trembling. Trixie is by her side, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the flames. We don’t have anything to eat or drink, but I doubt any of us have an appetite. It feels as though none of us want to acknowledge what is happening here tonight, as if maybe by not talking about it, we can pretend it isn’t. Nana and Dad are dead, and Nancy is missing. Either she did something very bad, or I fear something very bad has happened to her.
The last thing Trixie remembers is drinking a cup of tea—which we all know contained one of my mother’s sleeping pills—and Lily placing a blanket over her on the window seat.
She doesn’t remember being in the cupboard.
Or how she got there.
Or who locked her inside.
Or who she was in there with.
All Trixie knows is that she went to sleep on the window seat,then woke up in the hall. I know that being completely oblivious about everything that happened in between is best for her, but it’s frustrating and frightening for the rest of us. I think back to last night, when we were all sitting around Nana’s kitchen table, joking about how we would murder someone if we wanted to get away with it. Rose was the one who said insulin between the toes. Seems like someone had the same idea as her, and tried using it to kill my niece.
