A Murder Shall Commence.

Chapter 8

I pelted through the streets, not caring if anyone was chasing me. I hoped Dr. Scott would have already returned home, as it was to Harley Street again that I was headed. The snow was falling thick and fast now, and the pace I was running at was the only thing stopping me from freezing. My feet were soaked, I was dusted with a pretty hefty helping of snow, and said helping was slowly melting into my thin jacket, making me colder by the second. I was tired, extremely so, and there was a hot, sticky sensation running down my right arm which made me think I might have caught a shard of glass in it when I landed.

I slowed to a walking pace when I was about fifteen minutes from Harley Street. I just couldn't keep it up anymore, and my arm was beginning to throb quite painfully. The night was quiet and still, apart from the blur of snowflakes that swirled along the streets, curling around corners and twizzling up the lampposts and erupting like little fireworks off the tops of them. My already soaked feet were beginning to make the crunchy crunch sound on the snow. It was a nice sound, but I wished I had worn some thicker shoes.

My teeth had begun to chatter and my lips were turning blue when I finally reached Harley Street and shakily let myself in. I was using Dr. Scott's spare keys he had given me for such an occasion as this, and I was eternally grateful he had given me them. He had left the grate on over his fire, and the room was deliciously warm. In the flickering light, I finally got a look at my arm. The firelight glinted off a sharp shard of glass, and the entirety of my sleeve was stained claret, flooding out from a slice which stretched from my elbow to my wrist. I shuddered. I knew I didn't know what to do with it, or how to get the glass out. It was really very painful now, throbbing with a sort of pulsing thrumm feeling every couple of seconds. I didn't dare pull the shard out, as I knew it would just bleed more...

Then the cold, the pain and the tiredness finally overcame me, and I passed out on the rug.

I was first aware of coming back to consciousness when I absent mindedly twitched the fingers of my right hand, and sent shooting pains flying up my arm. I gasped, snapping my eyes open suddenly. As I slowed my breathing again, a slightly fuzzy face came into view. It took my slurred brain a minute to realize it was Newham.

I had the decency to look bashful. He didn't speak, just stared at me, the sort of stare that spoke a thousand words. I turned my face as far as I could into the pillow it was resting on, shutting my eyes again and ignoring the pain from my hand. He looked wrecked. I didn't want to know why.

After a few minutes, I felt the pressure on the bed lift, as Newham stood up and left the room. I was left on my own with only a sludgy, sticky silence for company.

I knew I'd gone too far. When I looked back, I realized I'd always known this would be the final straw. I shuffled around so I was sitting up and got a first look at my arm. It looked clinically clean, wrapped up in tight bandages from my elbow joint to the base of my fingers. What had I been thinking?

As the reality of the past twelve hours began to sink in, it only made everything worse as I realised what I had done. I'd broken into a public building, that was illegal, I was sure of it, I'd dived through a glass window and walked across London in the dead of night twice.

Two buildings, if you're counting the Praed Street theatre, a little voice piped up in the back of my head.

I cringed and screwed up my face. This was bad. Very bad.

Lying there for a few minutes longer, I then realized in fact it was worse. Newham, Isabel and Fisher would have assumed I had headed back to Praed Street after our argument, so Isabel would have then gone home and found me not there. Dr. Scott probably hadn't telephoned them before our night-time-escapade, and if he had done so afterwards then I would still have been pronounced missing from half past nine in the evening until at least five a.m.