The box was eight short.
I counted it three times, because the first time you assume you've got it wrong, and the second time you assume you're tired, and the third time you stand there with a glass ampoule in each hand like you're about to serve somebody a very small drink.
It was ten past eight on Sunday night. Owen had gone ten minutes before, with his keys in his teeth and a bag of satsumas Frank had refused on principle. I'd had Saturday night off and spent it asleep on my own settee under a cat that wasn't mine, and on Sunday morning the car had come out of her clamp for a hundred and fifty pounds of Frank's twenties, which is a sentence I never thought I'd say. I'd come up that lane almost whistling. At the door Owen had said he'd done the sheet in pen, and done his zip up twice, which he does when he's pleased with himself, and I'd told him he was a saint.
The sheet said seventeen. The box said nine.
I added the sheet up with my finger, twice. Every ampoule out of that box since Bev restocked it on Friday had a time and a name next to it, and they came to eight more than I was holding.
Here's who could have. Frank, who'd watched me press the code with his chin on his chest, like a safe-cracker's apprentice. Gareth, who had a key to every door in the place and, I'd have said, the face for it. Rosie, no. Bev, no; Bev had counted twenty in front of Rosie on Friday and signed it with her tongue out. And Owen, who'd had the code since Saturday morning, but Owen wrote up every dose he gave in blue biro with a ruled line under it.
I got as far as the hall. Bev's number is on the fridge, under the Whitby magnet, and the cordless phone lives on a stand by the coats, and I stood there with my thumb on the first digit for about the length of a hymn. Through the door Frank coughed, and said, to nobody, "Hm." I put the phone back on its stand.
Here's what happens if I say so. I ring the hospice line. The hospice line rings the drugs officer, who rings the police, because eight isn't a number you can lose. Gareth hears missing morphine and night nurse in the same sentence, and I know which of us he looks at, because he's been looking at me like that for a week without any morphine at all. Carol already has my name in a file marked wellbeing, and I'm two months behind on a landlord who keeps a list. By breakfast I'm in my car at the bottom of the lane, and the only clock I've got is ticking in a room I'm not allowed in.
The sheet has a column for the count and a column for your name. Above my line it ran down the page in Bev's capitals, Owen's ruled blue, and my own round hand going back to Monday, a long tidy column of people agreeing. In the first I wrote seventeen. After it I wrote checked, per handover, the words for when you've been told it's right and you've taken somebody's word. Then I signed it, with the loop on the K.
My pen didn't shake. I looked afterwards to see.
In my own notebook, the little one with the ladybird on that lives in my tunic pocket with the pen torch, I wrote nine, and the date, and ruled a line under it.
"Everything all right, Nurse?" said Frank, from the bed.
"Spot on," I said.
He went back to his crossword.
At one his breathing got tight, so I gave him the extra. He watched my thumb go over the four numbers. I wrote it on the sheet, sixteen, and in the ladybird book, eight. It was easier the second time.
Round midnight Frank put the crossword down and asked how many I thought would come to his funeral. I said forty, with a buffet. He said ninety, and the buffet would be Gareth's idea of one. I said he'd only be going for the fig rolls. He said that wasn't the worst way to be remembered, and I said he'd want a cremation, he was all lung, and he laughed, the proper laugh, which ended in a cough, and I got him forward and rubbed his back until it let go of him. Over his shoulder the box sat on its cabinet with the lid down. I didn't look at it.
"Sit down, Nurse," he'd said at five to, from his pillows. "You'll wear a groove in my rug." He'd said it every night since Monday. Tonight I said, "Don't mind if I do," and he opened one eye and shut it again.
At three I sat down.
He'd told me on Thursday that night nurses sleep, they all do, and he didn't hold it against us. So I thought I'd give him one.
The chair by his bed is a wingback in a brown that went out with Margaret Thatcher, and I'd stood beside it for a week like a heron. I sat in it. I put my head back. I let my mouth go slack, and then I shut my eyes, and then I wished I hadn't, because there turns out to be a lot behind your eyelids, and all of it wanted a word.
The cushion gave under me like a lap. My knee started going. I put my hand on it. My heart was going so hard I thought he'd hear it over the oxygen, and I did the only thing I could think of, which was my dad's snore, the one he did in front of the Grand National, long and ripping with a whistle at the end. I did it nicely. I did it for what felt like an hour and was eleven minutes by the carriage clock on the mantel, when I let one eye come open a slit.
The lamp was low. Frank lay on his back with his head turned towards me and his eyes shut. I shut mine again and counted his breathing. Sixteen. Fourteen.
At ten to four the blanket moved.
His left hand came out. It wasn't quick. It went across the bed rail to the syringe driver in its little holster and it sat down on top of it, flat, as you'd lay a hand on a sleeping dog. The driver's got a lid with a lock. The key was round my neck on a bootlace, cold as a coin against my chest. He had nothing to press. He just kept his hand there.
I had my feet under me. That was the plan, such as it was: if he found a way, I'd be up before he'd finished finding it. All week I'd wanted him to do something so I'd know, and now he was doing something, or very nearly, and I lay there with my mouth open and every muscle I owned screaming to jump, and I didn't, because the plan was to be asleep, and the plan was rubbish, and I was in it.
He kept it there so long I forgot to snore.
Then the clock struck four, four small silver notes, and the hand lifted, and went home to the blanket.
I'd planned to wake up with a snort, so it would look natural. What came out was, "Were you going to?"
Frank didn't open his eyes. "Thinking about it."
"And?"
"The lock's rather good."
"I've got the key."
"I know where you keep it." He turned his head and looked at me, quite awake. He'd been awake the whole time. "You snore like a dock worker, Nurse. It's very convincing."
"I was going for restful."
"You were going for a walrus."
I sat up. Every bit of me hurt, as if I'd been somewhere and been made to carry it back.
"There's eight ampoules gone out of that box," I said. "Did you take them?"
He held his hands up into the lamplight. Big, spotted, the knuckles like walnuts, the right one shaking from the elbow.
"With these?" said Frank. "I can't get into the fig roll tin without ringing for you."
It was true. I'd opened it for him that evening.
"Somebody did."
"Then it's as well you counted," said Frank.
"I did. It's all correct."
"So I saw."
I put my hand in my tunic pocket for the pen torch, and found the other thing instead. It had been in there since Saturday morning, folded in four, soft as cloth now from my thumb: a single sheet with my father's name at the top and the word terminated a bit lower down. I'd had a week of him being delightful at me and I'd run out of delightful. I took it out and threw it on his blanket. It was a rubbish throw. Paper doesn't go anywhere. It sort of arrived.
"Is this it?" I said. "My dad nicked diesel, so you're having me killed?"
He didn't pick it up straight away. He looked at it lying there on his chest, and then at me, and I watched his face do something I'd been waiting a week for and couldn't name when it came. Nothing happened in it at all. It was just very still.
He took the letter. He held it at arm's length, tipping it to the lamp, because his glasses were in his pocket, and he read the whole of it with his lips moving a bit, and when he'd finished he folded it again along my folds.
"Terry Mulvaney," said Frank. "Your father made a fool of me in front of my men. I don't forgive fools."
I waited.
That was the whole of it. He put the letter on the blanket, flat, and rested his hand on top of it, and looked at me with his big kind face, and I could have waited till the sun came up and it wasn't going to get any longer.
And I laughed.
I didn't mean to. My knees went and I sat down on the end of his bed and laughed till I had to put my fist in my mouth. It was my dad. It was only ever my dad. I'd gone through every kind man in Sallowford, the Esso and Mister Patel and a bald man with a flask, I'd put my own lodger on the list and taken him off again, and all the time it was Terry Mulvaney, eleven years in the ground, who could still get a woman murdered from a bookie's in Halifax over a tank of diesel and not even have the decency to be there when the bill came.
It wasn't me. It went through me like warm water.
"He's been dead eleven years," I said, when I could. "He sold a caravan twice. He's not going to say sorry."
"No," said Frank. "That is rather the difficulty."
I laughed again, smaller, the hiccuping kind, and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. He waited it out with his hands folded.
"Better?"
"A bit."
"Good." He closed his eyes. "You'll want to see your mother."
I stood up. I did his mouth with a sponge, for something to do with my hands, and smoothed his blanket, and did the rest of the night on my feet, by the window, with the dark going grey over the moor and my back to the bed. At six I turned him and did his heels, and he let me and said nothing, which on Frank is a speech. Twice I took out the ladybird notebook and looked at the nine, and put it back. A sheep stood at the wall and looked at the house with its torchlight eyes, though there wasn't any torch, and I told it I knew, and it went on looking.
Owen came up the lane at eight with a carrier bag of rolls. The frost had come in the night, white on the barn roof and the bonnet of the van, and he stood in the yard rubbing his hands and said he'd had a rubbish one himself, couldn't settle. I said join the club. I gave him the handover out there, in the cold, and told him Frank had had a quiet night, which was true if you didn't count the middle of it. He asked if I was all right. I said I was grand. He said I looked like a woman who'd seen something, and I said it was the lighting, and he laughed, and let me go.
I didn't go home.
My mother lives six streets and a roundabout from nowhere on the Moorside estate, and when I came in at her back door the kitchen hit me, the oven on, the radio on with a man singing about his truck, a smell of ammonia and Pledge, and she was at the sink in the plastic cap, vaping at the window. She turned round with her mouth open to say something about my face.
I put the letter on her kitchen table, flat, and smoothed it with the side of my hand.
"Mum," I said. "Did you know?"
She looked at the letter. She didn't pick it up. She didn't say, what letter. She took the vape out of her mouth and looked at it, and then she looked at the oven.