Read Online Requiem for a Dealer by Jo Bannister - Free Book Online Page A

Staff Nurse French. ‘We wondered if you’d do it.’
    Daniel was taken aback. ‘I’m not a relative. I’m not even a friend. We only met when Brodie was giving me a driving lesson and I ran her down. I apologised, she shouted – that was it.’
    â€˜You cared enough to come and see how she was. It would help her if you’d come again.’
    Daniel could never refuse an appeal to his better nature. ‘All right. Of course. Now?’
    â€˜As soon as you can make it. Thanks, Daniel.’
    Â 
    She didn’t even recognise him. He saw her eyes light on him as he walked down the ward towards her, and explore him anxiously for signs of familiarity, and slide away disappointed when she found none. What she wasn’t was alarmed.
    Daniel didn’t know whether to be offended or relieved. It was beginning to look as if he was the only one to take Alison Barker’s fears seriously, Alison included.
    But then, today she wasn’t half the girl he’d seen that night, running too quickly for her own good, fast and agile and angry. But nor was she the unconscious girl he’d seen here on Thursday, still in the bed but for the odd restless twitch, white, blind and hung around with tubing. Her eyes were open now and intelligent if confused. The nurses had raised her head a little so she could see something other than the ceiling.
    Daniel smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring manner and refrained from pulling out the chair until she asked him to sit. ‘My name’s Daniel Hood. We met a few days ago, on Fisher Hill. You were crossing the road, I was driving up it.’
    Alison Barker frowned so carefully it must have hurt. ‘I know you?’
    Daniel remembered this: waking from a nightmare only to find that reality had nothing much to recommend it either. That the world had changed fundamentally while you were asleep, and it was alien and scary and you didn’t know how it worked, and right now you couldn’t see anyway of catching up.

    â€˜Not really,’ he admitted. ‘I knocked you down.’
    For a second she shrank from him and her eyes were afraid. He hastened to explain. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
    Her eyes were brown, like peat-pools in the pallor of her face. Daniel watched the fear in them subside and a kind of puzzlement take its place. Her voice was a breathy murmur, rusty with lack of use. ‘I remember …’
    â€˜We wanted to call an ambulance,’ said Daniel. ‘My friend and I. But you dashed off, and I hoped that meant you were all right. And then I heard you were in here.’
    It was difficult to judge if she was remembering or just taking in what he was saying. ‘An accident. That’s why I’m here?’
    So no one had told her. He wasn’t sure if it was his job or not. But he wasn’t going to lie to her, and he couldn’t think of a good reason not to answer so he did. ‘Well, no. The police think you overdosed on – I can’t remember the name, some drug. Scat or Scratch or something.’
    For the first time he got a flash of the girl he’d met in the rain. Her eyes spat contempt at him. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
    â€˜I may have got the name wrong …’
    â€˜I drink coffee. I drink wine with a meal. I don’t smoke and I don’t take drugs.’
    Daniel didn’t know what to say. ‘Well, I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re treating you for.’
    â€˜Drugs?’ The confusion in the girl’s face slowly gave way to anger, and behind that a resurgence of the fear. ‘Dear God. So he found a way.’
    Daniel bit his lip and said nothing.
    Finally she noticed that he was standing at the end of the bed as if expecting to be thrown out at any moment. She jerked an unsteady hand at the chair. ‘Sit down, will you, before someone hangs a drip from you.’
    Daniel did as he was