Letting out the Worms: Guilty or not? If not then the alternative is terrifying (Kitty Thomas Book 1 Sue Nicholls (best short books to read TXT) 📖

The ghastly bruises on Kitty’s sleeping face had changed to a dramatic sunset of purple, red and ochre. A heart monitor accentuated her vulnerability, and Sam tracked its peaks and troughs on the screen and listened to the accompanying beeps in case they faltered into deadly continuity.

Out in the corridor cleaners and nurses called to one another over the roar of an electric floor polisher. Officially, he should not be here at this hour, but he had stalked past their disapproval, and now he was in Kitty’s room: A new room on a trauma ward. He lowered himself into a chair and slipped off his jacket, trying not to make a noise. Kitty’s eyeballs swivelled and jumped behind her eyelids. Dragging his attention away, Sam fumbled in his pocket for his phone and checked for messages. There was one from his bank and he glanced up at Kitty to check on her before reading it. With shock, he realized that she was staring at him, lifelessly, as if he were a stranger. His thumb froze on his screen. ‘Kitty?’

Still she stared, her eyebrows pulled down under her bandage.

‘Kitty, can you hear me?’

‘Ysss.’

‘How are you?’

‘Bad.’ Kitty closed her eyes and spoke again. ‘Who?’

‘Who did this to you?’

‘Nuh. Who you?’ The eyelids lifted a fraction so that the blue of her irises was just visible between her crusty lashes.

‘Who am I?’ Sam stared. ‘I’m Sam, your friend, who loves you and works with you. Remember?’

‘Nuh.’ The lids dropped.

Sam scurried to the foot of Kitty’s bed to look at her notes. They made no sense to him, apart from the recordings of her temperature, which seemed steady. He clung to that sliver of hope. She must know him soon when the swelling in her brain had gone down.

A lanky nurse with a straw-coloured frizz of hair jutting from the front of her cap, pushed through the door, towing a machine on a trolley. In a heavy Eastern European accent, she explained that she must check Kitty’s pulse and blood pressure. She slipped a cuff over Kitty’s listless arm and inflated it. Kitty groaned. ‘Sorry dear,’ the nurse said, making no effort to loosen the machine’s grip. ‘Eet must be done so the doctor knows how you are.’

‘How is she, actually?’ Sam asked. ‘Will she be OK?’

The nurse said, ‘Doctor ees pleased wiz her progress. She ees stable and zee operation to mend her pelvis was successful.’

‘But what about her brain? She doesn’t know me…’ Pain trapped further words in his throat.

The nurse’s expression softened, but her words were frank. ‘She has had serious trauma to her head, and we won’t know zee full extent until she is more alert. We have kept her morphine levels high for zee moment to combat her pain, but we cannot keep up that level of dosage much longer. Zair are uzzer forms of pain relief zat will help her stay awake for longer. Zen we will get more idea of her mental state.’

Sam gazed at his dear girl and prayed, silently. He sat and stared at Kitty’s unmoving form for an hour, then he left.

The wet car park was so packed it was hard to see how people had opened their doors. He struggled into his car and switched on the radio. When he reversed from his space, a waiting Mini slipped into his spot.

He joined the road, peering out at grey skies and the mist-laden surface. Inside the car, the female newsreader began to report on Kitty’s accident, saying that the police believed a hit-and-run driver caused the crash.

Coward.

The woman continued with an appeal for witnesses and announced that the road was open again following law enforcement and forensic investigations. Sam wondered what investigations. Skid marks measured perhaps, and tyre tracks examined. On impulse, he swung the car in a U turn on the empty road.

Passing the accident site, Sam slowed the car to snatch a look. Channels sliced across the muddy-grass verge and black and orange streamers of tape flapped in the hedge. A flash of headlights behind made him look in his mirror in time to see a Ford Focus veer into the centre of the road and roar past him on the wrong side of the bend. Sam held his breath, waiting for a squeal of rubber and a splinter of metal, but the high-pitched engine whined into the distance. Half a mile further on, Sam pulled into a lay-by opposite a row of terraced cottages. One other vehicle shared the narrow pull-in with him: a small Renault hatch-back, spattered with muck from the wet road. He craned his neck as he climbed out, to squint through the smeared rear window at its back seats, littered with sweet wrappers. If the haphazard collection of wellies and the hanging dog lead in the porch were anything to go by, the Renault belonged to cottage number three, over the road.

A lorry whooshed past, chucking sodden grit at Sam’s legs and peppering the two cars. Pulling up his collar, he hunched his head into its fleecy lining and crossed the road, hopping up onto the verge to head back to the corner. The surface under his feet was uneven and difficult to walk on, so he dropped back onto the tarmac, walking with his back to the traffic. Vehicles swooped up behind him making him tense, but they swept past. It was not long before rivulets of water were trickling down his legs into his shoes. As he squelched along, he imagined Kitty’s bike journey that night. With her love of speed, he guessed she would have cruised past the row of houses where he had parked, then put her foot down to enjoy the sweeping bends at full throttle. It was the type of country road Kitty loved. She would have leant the bike into the first curve, then leant