Shooting in the Dark

my arms around her and told her to keep still. She looked frightened and I told her to listen for a bird. The ice was no longer dry. Where we were sitting on the ice the water was slowly rising. Isabel said there was water in her wellie, but I wouldn’t let her take it off.
    ‘The fire engine came. We saw it pulling up at the edge of the pond. A huge monster with the mechanical ladder on the top. Red in the white landscape. Red, to match our wellies. And then we were gripped by panic.
    ‘The men jumped down from the fire engine and started running around, shouting out to us. I couldn’t make out what they were saying and I don’t think it would have made much difference if I could. I was paralysed. Isabel began crying and everything suddenly seemed hopeless.
    ‘They pushed a ladder out towards us and one of the men crawled along it. He pulled and pushed me until I was on the ladder. But when I got on to the ladder the ice cracked again, sharply, as if it had snapped, and I turned and saw Isabel topple over sideways and disappear.
    ‘I screamed. I suppose you’d call it a scream. But it was something else. I’ve been in a couple of scary situations since then, situations where I’ve screamed. But the scream that came out of me that day, when Isabel went under the ice, well, I’ve never been able to reproduce it. It wasn’t confined to my throat, to my vocal cords.’
    She picked up the fire-fork for a moment and held it in two hands. Then she placed it back down again, partly missing the hearth. She knew it was half on the hearth and half on the rug but she didn’t care. She didn’t look at him.
    ‘I was five years old, Sam. A scrap of a girl. I didn’t know I had a being until that moment.’
    He put a hand on her shoulder, squeezed it lightly. She reached up and brushed his fingers. Sam’s voice was husky. He said, ‘Go on, what happened next?’
    ‘The fireman went in after her. He plunged in and disappeared, just like Isabel. There was only me left. The water was as black as oil. There were a few pieces of broken ice floating on the top, but I couldn’t see anything beyond the surface. And it was still, there was no movement, nothing to betray the fact that my sister and the fireman were under there. It was as if they had been swallowed by a void.
    ‘I expected that I would be sucked in next. I sat there on the ladder and waited for it to happen, something like a huge vacuum cleaner to pop up out of the blackness and suck me into it. It may have been only a second or two but in my memory it was a space beyond time. It was as if everything had stopped. I didn’t expect to hear sound again or see anything move or feel warmth. It was as if I was suspended there, as if the world had stopped at that moment and nothing would ever happen again. That that would be the end, that suspension. I imagined my parents at home, similarly suspended: Mummy over a baking tray and Daddy about to strike a Swan Vesta to light his pipe.
    ‘And it was all broken up by bubbles. Huge bubbles coming to the surface of the black water and bursting. Isabel came out of the hole like a rocket. She only had one wellie on and the fireman’s arms were holding her clear of the icy water. He plonked her down on the ladder next to me. I saw his face and it was blue. I mean really blue, not just a faint blueness about the gills. His face was dark blue, violet-blue. He shouted something and the men on the other end started pulling the ladder in to the bank.
    ‘Isabel was still. She wasn’t crying any more. I didn’t touch her. I held tightly to the ladder and waited until they got us back to dry land.
    ‘They bundled us both into an ambulance and took us to the hospital. Isabel had nearly drowned, of course, and they were worried she’d die. And we were both in shock. At the end of the day Isabel rallied around better than me and we were allowed to go home together after a few days.’
    She looked over her shoulder as if she could see. ‘And that’s it,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been on ice since without having some kind of panic attack. Isabel and me, we didn’t talk about it much, but she was the same. Ice skating was never a possibility; I’d rather go hang-gliding.’
    ‘Thanks,’ he said.
    ‘Any clues in there? You think it’ll help us find out why a psychologist wants to kill me?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Sam said. ‘He could decide to talk. They usually do. If he doesn’t, you might have to reconcile