A shaft of bright sunlight found the gap between the misaligned wooden screen and the window frame and lanced across the room. The girl in the bed groaned, shifted onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow. Moments later, she turned back onto her side, clutching her stomach as she fought back the nausea. Tentatively, she opened her eyes, feeling her pupils contract painfully against the light and becoming aware of a dull, persistent pounding in her head and a thumping at her temples.
Little by little, Edie Marsh woke up enough to sincerely regret the amount she had drunk the night before, and to chastise herself, as she had many times before, for not knowing when to stop. Hauling herself into an upright position, she reached out for the glass on the floor by her bed and drank, finishing it all even as she screwed up her face at the water’s stale taste and tepid temperature. Holding her hands to her head in an attempt to calm the throbbing, she shut her eyes and tried to concentrate. Something was wrong.
She dropped her hands to her lap and forced her eyes open again, head still drooping down with the effort of it all. Gazing around the room from corner to corner, scouring all pathetic three square metres of it, she did not see what she was expecting to. There was no one there.
No one but her.
The door was firmly closed – no sign that anyone had got up early for a swim or gone out in search of hangover-curing coffee and paracetamol. Even so, in case her eyes could not be trusted, Edie got up and investigated a couple of piles of discarded clothes, picking garments up and immediately throwing them back down again. She even looked under