That done, she grabbed the corners of the sheeting and dragged the remains to the corner of the yard. For a moment she gazed down on the misshapen bundle. “Like me,” she whispered and shuddered. “Broken. Just like me.”

Returning to the front room, she sat on the old rocking chair, closed her eyes and, for the first time in months, sang to herself. She chose the song made famous by Marlene Dietrich – “Falling in Love Again” – and sang the bittersweet words with all of her heart. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself onstage at the club, looking glorious in a flowing deep-pink gown, with her hair falling loose about her shoulders, and her new man standing at the foot of the stage, looking up at her.

She gazed down at him, as she crooned the words “Love’s always been my game,” and suddenly he was not smiling. Instead, he had the look of murder in his eyes, and the fear was like a physical presence. With a jolt she sat up in the chair and opened her eyes, staring about, searching for Drayton in every dark corner.

When she realized he was not there, she took in every dirty patch on the rug, every stain on the wall and the window panes, so filthy that you could hardly see through them.

The contrast between the magic of what she had been, and the sad reality of what she had become, was like a death-blow. Somewhere along the way, Maddy Delaney, the singer, lover and mother, had been swallowed up whole.

She curled up into the chair, like an injured animal licking its wounds. Deep in the back of her tortured mind, she feared that the Maddy she had known would never be found again.

She began laughing, a hard, angry kind of laugh that shook her whole body. When she started, she couldn’t seem to stop. And then she was dancing madly, twirling in a frenzy around the room, laughing and dancing… then crying as though her heart would burst.

When, many years later she looked back, Maddy truly believed that this had been the turning moment, when she had slipped into madness.

PART FIVE

Twenty-four

For a long time, Maddy stayed in her private madness, though now it had mellowed to silence, and simple self-loathing.

Over the years, she had slipped deeper into seclusion. Locked in her memories of a life gone away, she chose the existence of a hermit; hiding herself away in the darkness, not knowing or caring what was going on around her.

During the day she would lock her doors and windows and stay inside, even when the sun was shining, as it was today.

When evening fell, she would pull on her old coat, cover her now long undisciplined hair and partly hiding her face with a long dark scarf. Then she would hurry through the back ways to her work at the hospital.

Miss Atkins considered Maddy to be one of her best workers, and made sure she got every perk going. In truth, she found it difficult to recruit people prepared to work regular nights, and so the woman known as Sheelagh Mulligan was a valued member of staff.

Maddy knew that her strange, furtive appearance made people wary of her but she barely noticed them giving her strange looks. As far as she was concerned, she kept herself clean, did her work properly and minded her own business.

Every Friday morning, just before her shift ended, the manageress would come down with her wages, and Maddy would hurry home, stopping at the shop before it got busy, to buy enough groceries to last her a full week.

Along with a week away each year in a secluded hotel by the sea in South Devon, that was her life pattern. And she wanted nothing more.

On this particular morning, she sat with her cup of tea and slice of toast, and while she ate, she listened to the radio. Madonna was singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” – a song Maddy loved for its haunting quality. For some reason, today the music was making her tired. And she was so very tired. She was approaching fifty now, too old to be doing the heavy cleaning work.

Afterward, she could never remember how it happened, but when she stood up to clear the table, it was as though a cloud filled her vision. She gasped, gripped the table as faintness overwhelmed her and the years rolled back. She couldn’t see, then she was falling… bouncing across the concrete road, before rolling down the bank and crashing from a great height, into the ditch…

Next door, Betsy was getting her books ready for college, when she heard the almighty crash. “Dave!” she screamed. “Someone… anyone!” She had run halfway up the stairs when Dave rushed out of his room in his T-shirt and boxers.

“What’s all the noise about?” Robin asked sleepily, emerging from Betsy’s room. “What’s going on?”

Since their heart-to-heart talk some months ago, when Darren was being so poisonous, the couple had become much closer and were now boyfriend/girlfriend and passionate lovers. Robin spent as much time as he could in Bedford, as it was harder for Betsy to stay with him in his tiny room in the hospital in London.

“Something’s happened,” Betsy said worriedly. “I heard a loud crash from next door. I think she might be hurt.”

In a matter of minutes, all three of them were hammering on Maddy’s front door. Unconscious now, she didn’t hear them.

Unable to get in through the front, Robin climbed over the locked back gate to look through the window; he saw her there, awkwardly spread-eagled on the floor, with the table tipped over and the mess all around. Shouting for the others to call an ambulance, he smashed a small pane in the back door, reached inside to unlock it and hurried through to check on their eccentric neighbor. She was breathing, but had a sweaty pallor and it was obvious that she was in a bad way.

It took only a matter of minutes for the ambulance to arrive, during which they had righted the table, cleared away the mess, and made Maddy as comfortable as possible.

As she sat beside her, holding her hand and tenderly talking to her, Betsy was shocked to see how Maddy’s long, graying hair had fallen to one side, revealing the mass of scar tissue all around her left ear. “What happened to you?” she tenderly moved the hair over the scar, with tears in her eyes. She murmured softly. “Is this what made you the way you are?”

While the ambulancemen prepared Maddy for traveling, Betsy and Robin waited outside.

“Are you sure you want to go with her?” Robin was concerned to see Betsy so upset.

“Yes, I’d like to be with her,” Betsy answered sincerely. “I don’t think she has anyone else.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

“I hope it’s safe to leave the back door like this. We’ll have to replace the glass and…” she looked about. “I’d like to clean this place up – make it brighter for her to come home to.”

Robin reminded her of how, that very evening, his father was making the trip into town to meet her. “If you like, I can ring my dad and postpone it to another time?” he suggested.

Betsy told him she didn’t want that. “I’ve heard so much about your dad, I’m really looking forward to meeting him,” she said, with a cheeky little grin. “Especially now we’ve decided to get engaged.”

“He can be difficult,” Robin warned.

“So can I,” she replied, and knowing how feisty she could be, the young man suspected that Betsy and his father would get on like a house on fire.

At the hospital, while the doctor examined Maddy, Betsy and Robin were asked to fill out a form with the patient’s details. “We don’t know anything,” they said, “only that she lives next door and works at night – or at least, that’s what we think.” They could give no more details than that, but they promised to find out, if they could.