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feel as if it was connected properly to my body anymore.
    “Couldn’t be smashinger.” And that was the last thing I remembered.
     
     

Chapter Five
     
     
    There was someone crying in the distance. At least, I thought that was what I could hear. My eyelids seemed to have been weighted down with lead and the inside of my mouth tasted icky, as if I’d been sick. My head rested on something firm, I tried to raise myself up and failed. The fortune teller had been right about my life being in danger. This would teach me to pay more attention to my horoscope in future.
    Maybe I was dead. Was this what the afterlife was like? Had I been the first person to die on a Ropes and Ladders abseil?
    Oh crap! The abseil! Perhaps that had all been a dream and I hadn’t woken up yet. I tried once more to force my eyelids open.
    Green and white shapes swam in and out of focus. Dimly, I realised there was a sort of antiseptic smell tickling at my nostrils and adding to my general queasy feeling.
    “Am I dead?” My voice came out as a muffled mumble and I suspected I’d drooled onto whatever my head lay on.
    A blurry face came close to mine and something bright shone straight into my eyes searing the backs of my eyeballs.
    “What you doing?” If I wasn’t dead I must have been badly hurt. I tried to wriggle my toes in an attempt to feel my feet.
    “You’re in hospital.”
    I didn’t recognise the male voice. It appeared to belong to my torturer with the bright light.
    “What happened?” Relief, I could move my feet; I couldn’t have broken my neck.
    I couldn’t see my torturer any more. With a lot of effort, and by screwing my eyes open and shut a few times, my surroundings gradually began to come into focus. Definitely a hospital cubicle. A stainless steel trolley was next to my bed and my arm was hooked up to some kind of machine.
    “Chloe? Oh thank God, Chloe.”
    “Shelly?” My friend arrived at my side, her face white with anxiety.
    “God, Clo; I thought I’d killed you.”
    “Huh?” Now I could see more clearly I noticed Shelly’s eyes were rimmed with red as if she’d been crying.
    “The tablets, you nonk, how many did you take?”
    Tablets? I tried to concentrate. Shelly’s tablets. I remembered taking two at the flat and one when I was inside the tower and I might have taken one on the way to the abseil but I couldn’t be sure.
    “Um, two or three?” What was Shelly saying? I was in hospital because of the tablets?
    “Bloody hell. I told you to only take two.”
    “You mean I’m in here because of the tablets? I didn’t fall off the top of the castle?”
    She blew out a breath. “You never got to do the abseil. One minute you were talking to Ben, you said you felt hot and then your words went all slurry. Next thing, you threw up all over his shoes and collapsed in a heap. They called 999 and rushed you in here.”
    My body flushed hot and then cold as her story struck home.
    “But Merv? The charity money?”
    “Merv ended up doing the abseil instead of you. Ben stepped in and did some commentary and I ended up following the ambo here to find out what was wrong with you.”
    “Oh God!” I was probably jobless. Merv would be livid. As for Ben, he’d almost certainly never want to speak to me again.
    “Then, when they found the pills in the pocket of your jeans I had to tell them,” Shelly gulped. “I honestly thought I’d killed you.”
    “Well, I suppose you got me out of the abseil, that’s one good thing. I don’t suppose Merv was very pleased if he had to do it instead though.”
    “I heard Ben reporting on it on the car radio on the way here. They were making a huge thing about your collapse and how ill you were.” She pulled a tissue from her bag and dabbed at her nose. “I was so scared.”
    “Yeah, well, it was my fault for taking too many.” Tears prickled at the corners of my eyes.
    My white-coated torturer with the light bustled back in “That’s what you get when you