Free Road Kill by Zoe Sharp

me, more sharply: “Then you’re out, yes?”
     
    “OK,” I agreed meekly and sat down again.
     
    Sean met my eyes fleetingly as he began to shepherd Jamie towards the doorway. There was everything and nothing in that brief glance.
     
    Clare waited until they were well out of earshot before she spoke again, tracking them anxiously.
     
    “Charlie, I need you to do something for me. For us, really,” she said, keeping her voice low so I had to lean towards her to hear it properly.
     
    “Name it,” I said, without hesitation.
     
    Clare hesitated a moment. She let go of me and toyed with her nightie instead. She was wearing an elderly sack in faded cotton with the words ‘hospital garment’ running through it in red and blue letters so that from a distance it looked like a pattern. Stops people stealing them, I suppose. I was suddenly glad I’d brought her her own stuff.
     
    “I need you to look after Jamie for me,” she said in a rush.
     
    “What?” It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I sat up, my face blank. “Why?” I said.
     
    She flushed a little. “He’s going to Ireland with a group of bikers at the end of this week,” she said. “Some trip Slick was organising, I think. I-I don’t want him to go.”
     
    I frowned, remembering the conversation I’d had with Jamie last night. “But he’s from Ireland,” I said. “I can’t stop him going home.”
     
    “It’s not that,” Clare said, her face miserable. “It’s the people he’s going with. They’re, well, they’re like Slick. They ride like a bunch of total idiots and they’re going to get him killed. Jamie hasn’t had his licence for that long. He’s on a bike half their size and he won’t admit he can’t really keep up.” She gave me a wan smile. “You know what these fellers are like.”
     
    I did. Clare was ferociously quick. She’d left more than one bike wreck behind her as a testament to the foolish assumption of less experienced – and usually male – riders that any corner she could take, they could take faster.
     
    “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I said. I nodded to the mechanical construction that was holding her bones together. “At the moment, he might just listen to you.”
     
    She shook her head. “I’ve always been something of the wicked stepmother to Jamie,” she said with candour. She was folding the edge of the starched sheet over and over, her eyes fixed on her fingers. The knuckles of her right hand were bruised solid purple like she’d been in a fight. “I mean, Jacob and Isobel’s marriage was history long before I came on the scene but when I did I suppose Jamie knew they weren’t ever going to get back together again. He’s always resented me a little for that, I think.”
     
    “So what do you want me to do?”
     
    She stilled a moment, like she hadn’t thought it through that far, then shrugged, looking close to tears again. “I don’t know,” she said, back to restless. “I suppose I was hoping that, if you can’t stop him going with them, you could, maybe, even go with him?”
     
    It was said hesitantly enough to turn it into a question, with a little wince at the end as though she was expecting me to shout her down.
     
    I didn’t shout. I sat still for probably five full seconds wondering how to ask when my friend had developed this massive maternal instinct for someone else’s child. And why.
     
    Clare took my silence for refusal. “Please, Charlie,” she said, reaching to grab my hand again. “Look, you’re a bodyguard now, aren’t you? So – I’ll hire you! Name your price.”
     
    She said the words with a big smile but there was panic in her voice and cowering behind her eyes. Across the other side of the ward the nurse’s head snapped up like she could sniff the patient distress in the air. She started to move purposefully in our direction.
     
    “Charlie, please!” Clare said quickly, sounding desperate now. The panic had climbed out of