My mother put her car keys down the front of her nightie, which is where she has kept everything she means to hang on to since nineteen eighty-nine, and stood in her own hall with her arms folded over them and her back against the door.
"No," she said.
Owen had rung at six. He'd said he's going, and if you want to be here, and the line had gone before he could tell me whose idea that was.
"Mum. Who's doing his mouth?"
She didn't answer that. Nobody ever can.
So I went to the front-room window and got the sandwich bag off the sill, the five little necks lying all one way in it, and I came back and put it in her hand and folded her fingers round it with mine.
"If I'm not back by the morning, you give that to Sharma. Not Gareth. Not the Co-op. Sharma. Don't open it and don't touch the glass."
She looked at it in her fist, with the spoon still under her arm, and her chin went, and then it stopped going, and she did the face she does at the hatch when a big lad says he's had no dinner.
"And if you're not back by the morning?"
"Then you'll have something to do."
She didn't give me the keys. She gave me her gloves, both of them, and then she took one back, because I'd only the one hand, and put it on herself, and stood there in the hall in one glove holding a bag of morphine. Then she got the big rubber torch from under the sink and put that in my good hand instead.
"Ring me."
"There's no signal up there."
"Then stick your head out of the roof and ring me," said my mother. "I don't care how you do it."
It's twenty-five minutes from my mother's to Albion Street on foot, in snow, with a cast on. The snow had stopped and left everything new, and the close was so quiet I could hear the cast creak. It's heavier than you'd think, a cast, about a bag of sugar, and the cold gets into the plaster and stays, and by the bypass my fingers at the end of it had stopped being mine. My house was dark. The cat was in the front window, looking at me as if I'd forgotten its tea, which I had.
My car was under a duvet. I got the windscreen clear with my sleeve. She started first time, which she does now only when it's a bad idea.
I drove the four miles in second, because second's the one I can reach with my elbow, behind a gritter that flung salt at me like corn at hens, and then on my own past the turn where the gritter didn't go. The hedges had gone. The road was just a white place between two whiter ones. At the bottom of the lane, where it tips up, she went sideways very slowly into the ditch with great dignity, like a duchess getting into a bath, and lay there on her side with her wipers going.
I got out of the uphill door, harder than it sounds, and nobody saw.
Then the lane. A mile of it, up, in the dark, in snow to the knee and over the knee where it had drifted against the walls. I held the cast against my chest and the torch low in front of me so I could see where my feet were going to go before they went. The sheep had all gone somewhere sensible. I fell once, forward, and put my good hand out, and it went in to the elbow, and I knelt there in the snow with my heart going and thought about how I'd get up without the bad arm, and then I did it with the bad arm, and I won't tell you what I said. Halfway up the cold stopped hurting, which is when it starts to matter. I said the names of the bones in the hand out loud, all of them, to keep my mouth going, and got stuck on the trapezoid, and went on anyway.
The house came up out of the white with one window lit, low and yellow, not electric. There was somebody standing in it.
I knew who.
He had the back door open before I'd got across the yard. He stood in it in his fleece with a candle behind him on the kitchen table, and his face was in the dark, and the snow went past him into the house.
"You came," said Owen.
I stood on the step. I could have turned round. There was a mile of lane behind me with my own tracks in it, and the Biscuit in a ditch, and my mother in one glove.
"Get your boots off," he said. "You'll lose a toe."
He knelt and did the laces for me, on the step, because I couldn't, and I stood with my good hand on the door frame and looked down at the top of his head, the crown of it, where his hair goes round, and his hands on my boots were quick and warm and kind.
"He said you knew," said Owen, to my boots.
"I do."
He stayed down there a moment. Then he stood up with my boots in his hand and set them by the Aga, side by side.
"He said tonight."
"Then you'd better let me get to him," I said, and went past him into the hall.
The parlour was a candle on a saucer and the window open six inches, with snow on the sill and the little fan on the table going like a bluebottle against a window. The concentrator stood dead in the corner with its curtain looped back. He was sat up on all the pillows in the house with his arms on the over-bed table, as you sit a man to give his chest a chance, and his head had gone forward and his mouth was open, and his breath was going in at the top of him in little pieces, like somebody taking the stairs one at a time.
I put the clip on his finger. Seventy-one. I took his pulse at the wrist, which was thready and quick and then not quick, and I put the back of my hand to his cheek, and he smelled of it already, faintly, under the soap and the candle. It's not a bad smell. It's like a room that's been shut up.
He hadn't got till morning.
There was a cup on the table with a sponge in it, and when I picked it up to do his mouth it smelled of something else.
"Is this yours?" I said.
Owen was in the doorway.
"It was."
Frank opened his eyes. It took him a while to find me, and when he had me he kept me.
"Nurse," he said. "I've had vodka. Very cheap vodka. Your lad's been most generous."
I looked at Owen. Owen looked at the candle.
I tipped the cup out of the window into the snow and rinsed it from the jug and did Frank's mouth with water, and he let me, and I hummed, I don't know what, something with no words. Then I knelt down on his rug by the bed, because my legs had decided, and got my mother's phone out of my coat.
I didn't think about it. I'd thought about it for two days and come to nothing. I just knelt there with the phone in my good hand and found the button with the red dot on, and pressed it, and the little numbers started going.
"My name is Kathleen Mulvaney," I said. "I'm a nurse. It's Friday the twenty-seventh of November and it's about nine o'clock at night, and I'm at High Royd, above Sallowford, with Frank Ashdown, who's dying."
His eyes were open. He was looking at me over the table, over the fan.
"In November two thousand and seventeen I was the agency night nurse for Ellen Hirst in Harrogate. On the night she died I gave her a dose at one o'clock and I left the key in the box. Then I sat down in the chair and I went to sleep."
The fan hummed. His breath went in, and in, and out.
"At half past three Frank Ashdown came in and put what was in that box through her pump. He's told me so. I was a yard away and I didn't wake up. In the morning they asked me about the count, and I said I'd miscounted, and I signed her death as expected. I've said nothing for nine years."
I had to stop. I held the phone still and let the numbers go on without me for a bit.
"She'd stopped asking to die by then. She had a solicitor coming on the Thursday."
Then I turned my head and looked at the doorway.
"Frank Ashdown has paid Owen Rudd to kill me when his heart stops."
Owen didn't move. He was three steps from me, with the candle behind him, and I was on my knees with one arm in plaster and a phone held up in the other. He could have had it out of my hand before I'd closed my fingers. He stood in the doorway with his hands down by his sides, and his hands did nothing at all.
Frank said nothing. His eyes stayed open.
I pressed the button again, and the numbers stopped at two minutes and fifty seconds.
Then I put my thumb in behind the phone for Sharma's card, where it lives, and found plastic. It wasn't my phone. Sharma's card was in a police bag in Calderbank with my mother in a sombrero.
I'd got the letter in my coat, though, folded small, with the Review's email address in small print at the bottom. And I'd got June's note, with Daniel Lister on it in fountain pen. And I'd got a file on a phone in a house with no signal, and a file is no good to anybody until it's somewhere else.
I got up. It took me two goes. Owen put his hand out to help and I didn't take it.
"I'll hold the ladder," he said.
I went up the stairs in the dark with the torch, and he came behind me, one stair down, the whole way, breathing. At the top I went right, to the back bedroom. The cupboard was open and the ladder was already down, waiting in the dark, and he stood back from it.
You can't go up a loft ladder with a torch and a phone and a cast. I put the phone in my teeth. I put the torch in my coat, lit, so it shone up out of my collar at the rafters like something in a church. And I went up a rung at a time with my good hand, and the cast hooked over each rung after it like a walking stick, and the phone in my teeth tasting of my mother's vape. The rungs were dry under my hand, every one. Over the top one hung the blue tea towel off the Aga rail, folded in half, wet through and gone stiff with the cold.
At the top the horse looked at me with its one eye.
Owen came up behind me. The ladder took his weight.
The skylight had been opened already tonight. The ice was broken off round the frame in little pieces on the boards, and the boards under it were dark and wet where the snow had come in and melted. I put my shoulder to it and it went up all at once, and the cold came down on me like a bucket, and above me the sky was enormous and black and clear right to the edges, with the snow on the slates going away from my face blue in the starlight, and the whole valley under it white, with not a single light in it. Sallowford had gone. There was nobody down there at all.
I went up into it. Head, shoulders, my good arm, out on to the roof, with the cast braced across the frame and my chest on the cold edge and my feet still on the top rung of the ladder. I took the phone out of my teeth and held it up at the sky.
No bars.
I held it higher. My arm shook.
His hand closed round my ankle.
Just above the heel, where the sock was wet through, a big warm hand all the way round, the thumb on the bone. Not hard. Not soft. Holding. I couldn't see him. There was only the hand, and the roof, and the drop down the slates in front of my face to the gutter and the yard and the dark.
If he pulled, I'd come down that ladder backwards on to the boards with the phone under me. If he pushed, I'd go the other way.
"Come down, Kit," said Owen, below me.
One bar.
I'd started the email on Thursday, at my kitchen table. It was still there in the drafts. Dear Mr Lister, I was the nurse. I put the Review's address in with my thumb, letter by letter, and I pressed the paperclip, and found the recording, and the bar went, and came back.
"When it's gone," I said.
I pressed send.
A little line came up under my thumb and began to go along. It went along very slowly. The bar went and the little line stopped. I held the phone up higher, until my shoulder sang, and the bar came back, and the line went on. If I die on this roof, I thought, my mother is going to have to tell the whole of the Co-op that I fell off a farmhouse sending an email.
His hand didn't move. I could feel his thumb on my ankle bone, and every time the bar went, it pressed, and every time it came back, it let go a bit.
The line got to the end.
It said sent. It said it in small grey letters, like a thing of no importance.
I lay there on the roof with my cheek on the frame and the phone against the snow, and I said it to the slates, because I couldn't turn round.
"There's no letter, Owen."
The hand stayed where it was.
"There's no letter with Malcolm. There never was. He'd never put his name on a bit of paper next to yours." I breathed. "And that's gone. It's gone to June's solicitor and to the Review. They'll be fighting over his will for years. Nobody's paying you out of it."
I stopped there. I didn't have anything else.
For a while nothing happened. The snow on the slates in front of my face had my breath on it.
Then his hand went from my ankle to the back of my knee, and up, flat, to my back, and he brought me down off that roof on to the top of the ladder like a man getting a cat out of a tree, with my cast held in against me under his other arm. In the dark of the attic his face was a few inches from mine. He didn't smell of anything but cold.
He shut the skylight. He went down the ladder first, and held it, and I came down after him.
Frank's breathing had changed while we'd been gone. You could hear it from the landing. There were gaps in it now, long ones, where everything stopped and waited, and then a big breath came in from the bottom of him with a catch at the top, and then little ones, and then another gap.
I went in and did his mouth.
Owen didn't come in. He sat down on the bottom stair in the hall, where he could see through the door, with his back against the banister and his hands hanging between his knees.
The fan's battery went at about eleven. It slowed and it stopped, and the parlour was suddenly very quiet, and I picked his crossword up off the floor and folded it in half and fanned him with it, slowly, in front of his face, so that the air moved for him. Outside it had started to snow again, small and hard, coming sideways off the tops and in at the open window on to the sill. The crossword was Thursday's. He'd done most of it. There was one left, in the bottom corner, and I read it out to him, the clue, and gave him an answer so wrong he'd have sat up in bed to put me right.
He didn't sit up.
I put the crossword down and took his hand, the big one, the knuckles like walnuts. It was cool at the fingers and warm in the palm. I sat in the chair with it. I don't know how long. The candle got shorter. In the hall Owen didn't move.
Some time after midnight Frank opened his eyes.
He didn't look for me. He knew where I was. His head was on one side on the pillow, and his eyes came round the last little way and found my face, clearer than they'd been all night, and stayed.
"Were you asleep?" said Frank.
I held his hand.
"Not tonight," I said.
He looked at me a while longer. Then he closed his eyes.
His breathing went on for a time after that, the gaps getting longer and the breaths between them smaller, and I counted them, because I can't not. At twenty to one the big breath came in from the bottom of him, with the catch at the top, and went out. And I waited, and the next one didn't come.
I had my fingers on his wrist when it went. It went thin, and far off, and then it wasn't there, and I sat with my fingers where it had been.
Owen came past me so fast the candle went flat. He was in from the hall and across the rug and up on the bed on his knees before I'd got out of the chair, and I thought, this is it, this is the arrangement, and then his hands came down, one on top of the other, in the middle of Frank's chest.
He pushed. The whole of his weight, straight down. The bed gave under them both and he pushed again, and something went in Frank's chest with a small green crack, like a branch, and he didn't stop. He was counting under his breath. One and two and three and four. He was counting softly, as if for a child on a swing.
"Owen."
He didn't hear me. Thirteen and fourteen and fifteen.
I got up. I put my good hand flat on top of his two, on the old man's chest, and kept it there, and his hands went down under mine and came up, and went down.
"He's DNR," I said.
Twenty-two, twenty-three.
"It's on the fridge, Owen. He's DNR."
His hands stopped. They stayed where they were, under mine, on Frank's breastbone. Then he took them away and sat back on his heels on the bed and looked at them, as if somebody had handed them to him.
The pump went on ticking in its holster, feeding morphine into a man who didn't need it any more.
I put Frank's arms down by his sides. I took the pillows out from behind him one at a time and laid him back flat, and straightened his head, and closed his mouth with a rolled-up flannel under his chin, and closed his eyes with my thumb, and folded the top of the blanket down over his chest, a hand's width, and smoothed it.
When I looked up, Owen was off the bed and standing at the end of it, and he was looking at me.
There was nobody else for four miles.
"Kit," he said.
"Go and get your daughter," I said.
He stood there.
Then he went out into the hall, and the bolts on the front door went back, the top one and the bottom one, and the door scraped over the flags. The cold came through the house from the front to the back and went out of the open window over the bed. I didn't hear him go down the step. In snow you don't.
I'm not allowed to say a man has died any more, so I didn't. I sat back down in the chair and took his hand again.
The clock on the mantel did one, and two, and three, and I stayed where I was.
At ten past three a crew on its way back from somewhere else got a four-by-four up the lane behind a farmer's tractor, and a paramedic with a beard and snow on his eyebrows knelt by the bed and listened, and looked at his watch, and wrote down the time.
"Your front door's open, love," he said.
I went out into the hall. It was. It had been open all that time. The snow had come in over the step and halfway up the flags to the foot of the stairs, smooth and blue, and I stood in it in my socks.
In the crew's headlights, his prints went down the step and away along the front of the house towards the lane. Near the door they were still the shape of his boots, with new snow sitting in the bottom of each one. Further off they were only soft dents, one after another, going down. By the gate they were anybody's, and past the gate the snow had them.