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least, she knows I don’t have a life outside Penhally, because she can see the surgery car park from her house up behind it, and she’ll know my car’s always there unless I’m out on a call or visiting friends, and she can see my window here—that’s her house over there,’ she said, pointing out to him the pretty little cottage tucked against the hillside above the surgery. ‘So there’s nothing I can do without her knowing, and if I had a man, believe me, Penhally would be talking about it. And the last man I was seen with was you, and of course she knows we’d worked together, that we were friends.’
    ‘I don’t know how you can stay in this place,’ he said gruffly, and sighed. ‘You reckon she knows?’
    ‘I think so. She gave us a look as we left the surgery.’
    ‘A look?’
    ‘Yeah—one of those knowing ones.’
    He grinned a little crookedly. ‘Ah. Right. And do you think she’ll tell your father?’
    Lucy felt a little bubble of hysterical laughter rising in her chest. ‘I wish. Maybe that way he’d calm down before I had to talk to him about it.’
    ‘You really think it’ll be that bad?’
    She stared at him blankly. ‘You don’t have any idea, do you? Because you haven’t seen him since Mum died, apart from thelifeboat barbeque. Ben, he—’ She broke off, not knowing quite how to put it, but he did it for her, his voice soft and sad.
    ‘Hates me? I know. I’ve already worked that out. And I can see why.’
    ‘But it wasn’t your fault!’ she said, searching his face and finding regret and maybe a little doubt. ‘Ben, it wasn’t. The inquiry exonerated you absolutely. Mum died because she didn’t tell anyone how sick she was until it was too late. I wasn’t there, Dad was too busy setting up the practice with Marco, and she downplayed it just too long.’
    ‘Lucy, she died because when she arrived in the A and E department she didn’t check herself in straight away, so nobody flagged her up as urgent, nobody kept an eye on her, nobody realised she was there until they found her collapsed in the corner. There’d been a massive RTA, there were ambulances streaming in, we were on the verge of meltdown— I don’t have to explain it to you. You know the kind of mayhem I’m talking about, you’ve seen it all too often. I was trapped in Resus, the walking wounded were way down the list. Too far. And the other people waiting just thought she was asleep, instead of which she’d all but OD’d on painkillers and by the time we got to her it was too late.’
    ‘They said her appendix had ruptured. She must have been in so much pain. I knew she’d been feeling rough but I had no idea how rough. It must have been agony.’
    ‘Yes. Hence the painkillers. She’d obviously had a hell of a cocktail. We found codeine and paracetamol and ibuprofen and aspirin in her bag. The codeine must have knocked her out, but it was the aspirin that killed her. By the time she arrived at the hospital, she was too woozy to talk to anyone. The CCTV footage shows her stumbling to a chair in the corner and sitting down, and because she didn’t check in or tell anyone how bad she felt, she was overlooked until it was too late. You know how aspirin works—it’s an anticoagulant, like warfarin, and it stops the platelets clumping to arrest a bleed in the normal way. And with the rupture in her abdomen, she just bled out before we could get to it. If your father hadn’t phoned her mobile, she wouldn’t have been found until she was dead. It was only because the phone kept ringing and she was ignoring it that the alarm was raised. And we did everything we could at that point, but it just wasn’t enough, and everything we touched was breaking down and starting another bleed. And I can tell you how sorry I am for ever, but it won’t bring her back.’
    She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut to close out the images, but they wouldn’t be banished, and she knew her father had seen it because