Prime Time Read Free Page B

you talk?’
    Anne started to cry, softly and silently, salty tears dripping into the receiver.
    ‘I think so.’
    Her reply came out as a gasp.
    ‘… Lousy traffic jams … you out there now?’
    The connection broke up and went fuzzy; Annika’s sentences came out in fragments. Anne Snapphane took a deep breath and felt her pulse slow down.
    ‘I’m not allowed to leave my room in the South Wing. They’ve detained us all and I guess they’ll question us one by one.’
    ‘What’s happened?’
    She swiped away the tears with the back of one hand, clutching her phone in the other hand and pressing it to her ear, her end of a lifeline.
    ‘Michelle,’ she whispered. ‘Michelle’s dead. She was in the OB and the back of her head was blown away.’
    ‘Are there lots of cops around?’
    Anne Snapphane’s heart stopped racing and approached a manageable rate. Annika’s voice represented normality and the real world. Her knees sore, Anne got up and looked out the window.
    ‘I can’t see much from here, just a bridge over a channel and a few archery targets. I’ve heard a few cars and a helicopter landed a while ago.’
    ‘Did you see her?’
    Anne Snapphane shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose while the images flashed past, piercing through her wooziness.
    ‘I saw her. I saw her …’
    ‘Who did it?’
    There was a knock on the door. Anne froze and stared at the door, paralysed. Her lifeline snapped – confusion swallowed her up once more.
    ‘I’ve got to go,’ she whispered into the phone and hung up.
    ‘Anne Snapphane?’
    The voice on the other side of the door was commanding. She tossed the phone under the covers and cleared her throat. Before she had the chance to reply, the door swung open. The officer standing in the doorway was young and obviously nervous.
    ‘Right, you can come along now.’
    She stared at him.
    ‘I’m pretty thirsty,’ she said.
    The policeman didn’t see how unreal she felt, he didn’t see her as a person at all. He looked right through her.
    ‘Go out through the door and to the left. Hurry up.’
    The rainy weather and all the closed doors left the hallway dark. The walls seemed to billow – she wasn’t quite sober yet. In order to gather some physical and emotional support, she walked down the hallway with one hand touching the wall. No other members of the TV team were in sight.
    When the policeman opened the front door, the chill and the damp slapped at her like a wet towel. She gasped, swaying there in the doorway and looking up at the castle. Policemen and police cars were blurred by the curtain of grey rain.
    ‘You wouldn’t happen to have an umbrella, would you?’
    Her guard replied by pointing to the corner of the house. Anne Snapphane hunched up her shoulders and reluctantly walked out on the stone steps. Water seeped inside her collar in no time at all.
    ‘Where am I supposed to go?’
    ‘To the house down by the water. Right now.’
    A cold rivulet ran down her spine and she had water in her eyes. She blinked to get rid of it, started weaving her way down the three steps to the gravel path and followed the boxwood hedge over to the herb garden. She followed the whitewashed wall that led her to the New Wing, passed a small group of enamelled cast-iron furniture items and stopped. The wall encircled a small courtyard: it had arches and was topped with red tile. It wouldn’t be hard to escape from here, she thought.
    ‘Straight ahead, keep moving.’
    Anne Snapphane looked away from the wall and focused on the door.
    The police lieutenant was seated at a table in the large conference room. Right behind him, on the other side of the window, the OB bus was parked. Unconsciously, Anne shrank back, stepping on the guard’s toes. The bus stood out like a cardboard cut-out, white than white and emblazoned with the extremely flashy company logotype.
    I wonder if she’s still in there , she thought. I wonder if she’s gone cold by now.
    ‘Have a