No Good Reason (6 page)

“Cheers. No doubt I’ll be seeing you around, if you’re on this case.”

“No doubt about that.” He guided her into a more secluded section of the corridor and spoke in a guarded undertone. “Meg, that girl—she was bound and half-naked when those lads found her. We’re looking at abduction, assault, probably murder if she doesn’t make it.”

She stared at him. From the information on the standby, she had assumed the casualty was the victim of an accidental fall or a suicide attempt.

“Fucking hell,” she said, his demeanour suddenly making a lot more sense. “Out there on the moors? But…who? How?”

“At the moment, we have no idea. Bag everything. Note everything. She’ll need a rape kit, and Scene of Crime Officers will be here for photographs at some point.”

Meg checked her fob watch, her careful plan of approach for her incoming patient thrown into disarray. “You know the drill, Nelson. All that has to wait until she’s stable enough, and that’ll probably be Neuro’s call, not mine.”

“Just don’t want anything getting missed.”

He was a good foot taller than her. She tilted her head and held his gaze.

“I promise you, mate, we won’t miss a damn thing.”

*

As the helicopter gained height, Sanne gripped the arm of her seat. Through the window, she could see the indistinct blobs of red marking the positions of the Mountain Rescue team. If its members had found it strange to be met by a perspiring, muddy, blood-coated detective in running gear, none of them had mentioned it, and they had listened intently to her instructions. At her request, they had spread out, half on the ridge, half on the lower section of the moor where the woman had been found. Until the police arrived, they would prevent anyone broaching the perimeter she had established. She had left the two lads eating the team leader’s sandwiches, and he had promised to see them handed safely into the care of her EDSOP colleagues.

Sanne had never flown before, but the impromptu trip in the helicopter wasn’t the only cause of her edginess. Leaving the scene and travelling with the woman had been her own decision, and although she could have asked the pilot to let her speak to EDSOP first, she had chosen not to. Eventually, she would have to explain her actions to Eleanor Stanhope, not something she ever relished.

The helicopter banked left, breaking into her train of thought and making her lose sight of Laddaw Ridge. At this distance, the hills blurred into an amorphous mass of green and murky brown, broken by the occasional trail where sheep or hikers had ventured, while glints of sunlight marked the cars weaving along the Snake Pass toward Sheffield. Sanne glanced at her watch, calculating their own ETA at Sheffield Royal: approximately nineteen minutes. According to the pilot, they would land in the hospital grounds and cover the short final distance by ambulance.

One of the Mountain Rescue team had loaned Sanne his jacket, and she pulled it closer around her, glad of its warmth and the fact that it would hide her injured arm from Meg. The abraded skin stung furiously as the cloth rubbed against it, but she could cope with that. From texts they had exchanged earlier that morning, she knew Meg was working in Resus that day and would have enough on her plate without worrying about her.

Sanne turned from the window to study the woman lying insensible on the narrow stretcher. The ventilator and monitor were drowned out by the helicopter’s din, so Sanne had to take her cues from the body language of the medics. The strain was evident on both of their faces. When she tapped the doctor on his shoulder and mimed writing, he handed her a spare clipboard and an observation chart before saying something to his colleague, who hurriedly drew a clear drug into a syringe and injected it into one of the IV lines. She nodded her thanks, even though the doctor was too busy to acknowledge it, and flipped the paper onto its blank side. Keen to keep herself occupied, she began to bullet-point the information she would need for her preliminary report.

The approaching siren sounded agitated, its tone changing frequently as the paramedic tried to harry drivers out of the way. Meg had enough experience of waiting in the ambulance bay to recognise a bad job when she heard one.

“Let the crew get her out,” she said to Emily. “If we start pressing buttons on the bus or mucking about with the stretcher, we’re only going to fuck something up.”

Emily nodded and scuttled backward as the ambulance raced into the bay, overshot the A&E doors, and had to be reversed again. Its rear doors were flung open by Kathy before the driver had emerged from the cab. “Fucking new starters,” she muttered.

“Might have known it’d be you,” Meg said.

“Sorry, Doc. I know you asked for nice little old grannies.” Kathy, who seemed to be well in the running for Paramedic Shit Magnet of the Month, jumped down from the back and began to work the controls for the tail lift.

“Yeah, you’re sacked.” Meg couldn’t see much of her patient, but judging by the expressions of the Helimed crew, they had had a fraught journey even before they were subjected to the newbie’s driving. It was only when one of the men moved that Meg noticed Sanne sitting on the seat by the bulkhead. She looked pale and shaken, and was dressed in running shorts and a jacket far too large for her. Meg raised an eyebrow at the state of her legs, which looked as if someone had taken a cheese grater to them.

Sanne must have caught her reaction, because she straightened her back and shook her head once, warning Meg not to make a fuss. She took the hand Meg offered, gave it a quick squeeze as she climbed down from the ambulance, and then stepped aside to allow Meg to focus on her patient.

The clatter of the stretcher wheels against the lift prompted Meg to follow her lead. “Shock room please, chaps,” she said, turning to escort the stretcher down the corridor. Her initial visual assessment of the woman had made her hands start sweating in her gloves. With someone in such a critical condition, everything was against the clock.

Due to its helipad and specialist neurosurgery unit, Sheffield Royal had been a designated Trauma Centre for just over a year: ambulances and Helimed routinely bypassed local hospitals and transported the more severely injured patients to the Royal for expert care. Once the woman had been transferred onto the hospital bed, Meg’s team knew to stop what they were doing and listen to the Helimed doctor as he handed his patient over.

He cleared his throat to ensure that his voice carried above the rasp of the vent and the sound of someone moaning in the next bay. “Patient is an unidentified female, found unconscious at the base of a cliff. The exact mechanism of her injuries is unknown…”

Meg scrutinised the woman as she listened, matching the vital signs on the monitors to the physical signs: the rising blood pressure indicating an intracranial bleed; the telltale contusions around her eyes, typical of those caused by a fractured skull; and the slowing pulse and single blown pupil that warned that the woman needed surgery within the next few hours if anything resembling a life were to be salvaged for her. Even though Meg tried to consider the overall picture, the sheer horror implied by the smaller details made them stand out: ligature marks, abrasions around the woman’s lips, torn or missing fingernails, and the filthy underwear that was revealed when the blankets were unwrapped. She was gaunt and dehydrated, with a succession of bruises and track marks over the veins at her inner elbow suggesting repeated injections administered by an inexpert hand. Meg added a toxicology screen to a mental list that was growing longer by the second.

“That’s great, thanks,” she said as the Helimed doctor indicated he had finished speaking. “Sahil, you happy with her airway?”

The anaesthetist nodded. “Tube’s fine, but there’s resistance to the vent, and air entry is poor on her left side.”

“She’s got a lot of bruising on that side of her chest,” Meg said. “Okay, let’s not bugger about waiting for an X-ray series. We’ll get a drain in, see if that improves things, and then get her down for a full CT, ASAP. Any word from Neuro?”

“Thirty minutes,” Liz said, “but that was twenty minutes since. Dr. Maxwell got held up in theatre.”

A clock had been set running at the start of the trauma call. Meg noted its time and added another ten minutes to Liz’s estimate. Neuro were notorious for being late to every party.

“Right.” She rocked back on her heels as she finalised her plan of action. For some reason, the motion always helped her to think. “That gives us a chance to get the drain in, ABG, catheter, and urinalysis. Type and cross for at least six units, and take the usual bloods, including a tox. Shout up if you spot anything Helimed might have missed, and bag everything, please. We have a detective here waiting for the clothing, so remove it in one piece if possible.”

Sanne was at the back of the small room, pressed up against a clinical waste bin and feeling she was taking up too much space even so. When she heard Meg mention her, she stepped forward, arms laden with the evidence bags Nelson had just given her in the corridor. He had offered to do the task himself, but one look at her face had stopped him pushing the issue. The rope she had cut from the woman’s wrists was already sealed and tagged. She set the container where she could keep a close eye on it and opened another large paper bag for the blankets a nurse had collected.

“Fold them inward,” she said, trying to make things easier for the labs. “That’s perfect, cheers.”

She scrunched the top of the bag over, recorded the time and date, and added her signature. As she did so, she heard Meg swear, and she looked up to see blood pouring through the wide plastic tube Meg had just pushed into the side of the woman’s chest.

“Bollocks,” Meg said. “If this doesn’t slow, we’ll need to get Cardiothoracic down here.”

“Her sats are improving, though,” the Asian man standing behind the woman’s head said with more optimism.

It took at least another minute before Meg responded, but a smile gradually spread across her face. “Tapering off at about seven-fifty mils, so that’s a bullet dodged. How are we doing elsewhere?”

Sanne listened to the different voices reporting numbers and procedures. The terminology and the significance of the figures were meaningless to her, but Meg seemed to take it all in her stride, not once asking for clarification or for anyone to repeat themselves. Sanne had never seen her working a major trauma before. Thinking back to the previous night’s curry sauce disaster, she was slightly awed by Meg’s calm command over her team.

“Detective?”

The same nurse who had given Sanne the blankets held out the woman’s underwear gingerly. A pale blue bra went into one evidence bag, and knickers that had once been cheerfully patterned went into another. It was a mismatched set probably chosen at random, the woman never imagining it would be seen by a room full of people fighting to keep her alive.

Sanne closed the bags and rubbed a hand across her eyes, swiping at the tears before they could form properly. It was dangerous to let her guard down and think like that. She couldn’t do her job if she fell into that trap. Grateful for the excuse to drop out of sight, she crouched by the door to annotate the bags.

The door nudged against her thigh as someone pushed it open, and a disembodied voice called across to Meg.

“CT are ready when you are, and Dr. Maxwell is on his way down.”

“Fabulous.” Meg peeled off her gloves and reached for a fresh pair. “Tell Max to meet us at the scanner. We’ll be there in five.”

*

Left behind in the shock room, Sanne gathered up the evidence bags and paused, leaning against the wall. Her ears buzzed, and a dull throb behind her eyes warned of an impending headache. She hadn’t drunk enough, she had barely eaten anything, and she had been functioning under constant stress for hours. Just another day at the office, then, but she’d never experienced a day quite like this one. She cradled her left arm where Meg had gripped it. When she had winced beneath the touch, Meg had quickly released her. “Don’t go anywhere until I’ve taken a look at you,” she had told Sanne in a peremptory tone, before leaving to follow the stretcher to the scanner.

Annoyed at herself for wasting time, Sanne pushed open the door with her backside and carried the bags into the corridor. Two uniformed officers came over to help.

“Thanks,” she said, as they added her bags to the pile already stacked on a wheelchair. “Is Detective Turay around?”

“He just went outside to take a call.”

Sanne glanced at the exit with a degree of uncertainty. She wanted to check in with her partner, but she was reluctant to leave her post. Meg had told her the scan would take at least twenty minutes, though, so she decided to take the risk.

“If I’m not here when they bring her back from CT, come and find me,” she told the officers. Their bemused reaction made her pause, and she shook her head, embarrassed. “Sorry, I’m Detective Jensen.”

“Oh.” The older of the officers flushed to the roots of his auburn hair. “We heard someone had been out on the moors with the vic, but—”

“But you didn’t know to look for a detective in shorts.”

“Exactly.” He smiled, his flush receding a little. “I’ll come and fetch you as soon as she’s back.”

“Ta. Appreciate it.” She was already walking toward the open doors, beyond which Nelson’s voice was just about audible amid the chatter of sparrows nesting beneath the ambulance bay’s canopy. Sanne knew Meg loved those sparrows and regularly flaunted hospital policy by leaving crumbs for them on the bins flanking the doors. As she waited for Nelson to finish on the phone, she found herself scanning the bins for telltale scraps of bread, but all she found were cigarette butts and a discarded piece of gum. She moved closer to the sunshine instead, wishing her day off had turned into anything but this.

“Hey, San.” Nelson spoke quietly so as not to startle her. She hadn’t noticed his approach. He tucked his phone back into his pocket. “Where are we up to?”

“Shouldn’t that be my line?” They walked into a shadier part of the bay, and she lowered the hand that had been shielding her eyes. “Was that the boss?”