No Good Reason (9 page)

As Eleanor finished dividing up the workload, Sanne caught Nelson crossing his eyes at her, and she had to hide a smile behind her hand. If Carlyle was the team bully, she and Nelson were the kids who hid his lunchbox in revenge and stole all his pens when he was away from his desk. She had once overheard him refer to them as “the dyke and the darkie.” She had never dared to repeat that to Nelson, but concocting covert ways to torment Carlyle was the only form of insubordination in which she ever participated.

Back at her desk, she and Nelson pored over Ordnance Survey maps and local guidebooks, trying to find farm buildings or shelters within the area Eleanor had identified. There was nothing. The dearth of roads and accessible tracks made it unfeasible for anyone to live so far from civilisation.

“You could get a four-wheel-drive up here, but it only goes to these grouse butts.” Sanne traced a line demarcating an unmade road. “Then where would he go? Did he carry her, or maybe force her to walk?”

Nelson angled the map so that he could look at it without tilting his head. “These are hiking trails, right?”

“Yep. All of the dotted green lines are some sort of footpath.” She pointed to a bolder pattern of green diamonds. “That’s the Pennine Way. It goes right up to the Scottish border, and it’s a busy route, especially in good weather. If he’d planned to abduct a hiker, he’s more likely to have gone off the beaten track. It’s open country, so people can go anywhere. They don’t have to stick to the paths.”

“Needle in a haystack,” Nelson muttered. He wasn’t good with maps and usually relied on Sanne for navigation while he drove.

“Let’s hope the rangers will come up with some ideas. In the meantime, have one of these for bedtime reading.” She arranged the four guidebooks in a row and let him take first pick.

The buzz of her mobile interrupted his offer of a brew. She flipped it open, saw Meg’s name, and answered immediately.

Meg didn’t bother with a greeting. “She made it through the operation. Max is ‘cautiously optimistic’ about her chances.”

“Bloody hell,” Sanne whispered. That was the last thing she had been expecting to hear. “What happens now?”

“She’s in an induced coma, to try to control the swelling to her brain. When Max is happy with her progress, he’ll wake her up. We won’t know much more until he does that. The tox screen found traces of diazepam, ketamine, and flunitrazepam—that last one’s Rohypnol—so even if she does come through this, the chances are she won’t be able to remember what happened.”

The toxicology results were no surprise to Sanne. Ever since Meg told her about the track marks, she had been trying to predict what the perpetrator might have used. All three of those drugs—reasonably easy to obtain, for someone who knew where to look—had been on her list. She looked across the room, to where enlarged copies of her photographs had been displayed sequentially on a whiteboard. Beyond the board, the window framed wisps of cloud, tinged pink by the setting sun.

“You’re working late,” she said.

“Yes, I am.” The exhaustion in Meg’s reply was almost palpable.

Sanne closed her eyes, wanting nothing more than to climb into Meg’s bed and hold on to her until they both fell asleep. She sighed. “Thanks for letting me know, love.”

“No problem. Max is phoning your boss. Drive safe, San.”

“You too. I’ll see you soon.” Sanne ended the call, stared at the screen of her mobile until it went blank, and then gathered her books.

Nelson had obviously overheard most of the conversation, because he picked up her keys and held them out to her. At the last second, however, he kept hold of her car key and looked at her sternly.

“You should get yourself home.” He knew her too well. The concern in his voice showed he had sussed out her intention not to do anything of the sort.

“I will. I just…” She shook her head, unable to explain.

He nodded his understanding anyway and spread his fingers to release the key ring. “Okay. I’ll see you in the morning.”

His compliance, together with the relief that Meg’s news had brought, lifted her mood immeasurably. “I know you’re going to be tempted tomorrow, mate,” she said, “but stop and think of me when you open your wardrobe.”

“‘Think of you?’ What the hell does that mean?”

She grinned at his confusion. “It means please don’t wear shorts.”

Sanne held her badge in front of the tiny fish-eye lens and informed the disembodied voice that she was a detective. She didn’t need to say anything else. The light beside the buzzer turned green, and a subtle snick of the lock told her that the door was open.

Beyond the door, the corridor was deserted, with only a rack of advice leaflets and a cage full of medical supplies giving any hint as to what lay farther along. Twenty years had passed since Sanne’s dad had been brought here, but as she reached the open-plan section of the Intensive Therapy Unit, she couldn’t stop herself glancing into the second bay, the one where her hopes had been raised and then dashed so completely.

The unit smelled and sounded the same as it had that week. It was always hushed, the whispers of machines and voices broken only by the occasional wail of an alarm. The patients were passive bodies, largely silent, too ill or sedated to object to the tubes and wires and invasive procedures. Their relatives would sit vigil, holding the patients’ hands, rubbing their feet, sometimes weeping, but they too seemed governed by some unspoken rule, and everything they did was quiet and tentative. It was like being in church, except that the odours of sickness replaced those of incense and musty hymnbooks, and that no one would ever have dared to sing. For long stretches of time, very little happened, improvement and deterioration being for the most part gradual processes. It was no wonder, then, that a buzz of excitement surrounded the unit’s newest patient. Sanne spotted a group of nurses chatting in low tones to two Scene of Crime officers they appeared to have waylaid en masse.

One of the officers took his elbows off the ledge around the nurses’ station and nodded to Sanne as she approached.

“We’ve just finished.” He sounded defensive, as if she might reprimand him for slacking on the job.

“I’m not here officially,” she said, choosing not to go into detail. “Which room is she in?”

“Three. Bottom of the unit, on the left.”

She was tempted to ask what his examination had found and how long the labs would take to process the trace evidence, but that could wait until tomorrow. There was nothing she would be able to do with the information now.

“Am I okay to go through?” She didn’t aim her question at anyone in particular, but a young nurse with a cute dimple pointed her in the right direction.

Outside room three, Sanne squirted a blob of sanitising gel onto her hands and swore as it seeped into the broken skin on her palms.

“You kiss your mum with that mouth?”

Sanne smiled at the familiar voice and pushed the door open fully, not at all fazed to find that she would have company. She crossed the small room and kissed the top of Meg’s head.

“So much for going home, eh?” she said.

“Yeah, so much for that.”

“Any change?” She sank into an empty chair and tried to answer her own question by examining the woman. There weren’t many differences. Her face was slightly cleaner, but the swelling around her eyes was far more pronounced than Sanne remembered, the bruising now such a livid purple that it was almost black. Bandages swathed her head, and there was a piece of sticky tape across one section of her skull bearing the warning
NO BONE
. Various tubes hydrated her and carried away her waste, and a mess of colourful wires put numbers on the monitors. The ventilator presided over it all, as if aware that without its input everything was lost.

“Her blood pressure has stabilised,” Meg said.

The interruption made Sanne blink. She rubbed her eyes, trying to erase the number 63 that was still vivid in red on her retina.

“The head injury was making it rise, but they’ve got it under control now.” Meg turned the woman’s hand over and gently straightened the fingers, each marked with ink. “SOCO were in here when I arrived. Why hasn’t anyone missed her? Some of her injuries were almost healed, so he must have taken her a few days ago.”

“We don’t know that they haven’t,” Sanne said. “Hopefully, something will come up on the database.”

Meg was still holding the woman’s hand. “I spoke to the specialist from St. Margaret’s. The rape kit was negative.”

Sanne wanted to say “that’s good” or “thank fuck for that,” but all she managed was a nod.

Meg waited a moment before asking, “You okay, San?”

A shake of the head this time. “I told another lie. To my boss.” Sanne heaved in a breath that made her dizzy. “Well, not a lie, not really, but I didn’t tell her the whole truth.”

“About what?”

The room was dimly lit, leaving Meg no more than a silhouette in her peripheral vision. If the ITU was a sort of church, maybe this was confession.

“About why I left the moors. I could have stayed behind at the scene, but I got into the chopper instead. I told the boss I’d been preserving the chain of evidence, but that didn’t even occur to me until we were in the air. The only thing I was thinking was that I couldn’t leave her with strangers. When we were in here with my dad, they told us that unconscious people can sometimes hear your voice, and I’d been talking to her and reassuring her, and I didn’t want her to think that I’d abandoned her. It was bloody stupid, because once we were in the helicopter no one could hear a damn thing anyway.” She plucked up enough courage to look at Meg. Green and blue from the monitors were flashing across her face, giving Sanne something to focus on. “The boss reckons I did the right thing, but it was just luck, not judgement, and I can’t tell that to anyone, not even Nelson.”

Meg cupped her cheek. “I won’t say a word.”

“Because we’re supposed to keep everything at arm’s length and not get involved.”

“Yeah. Sometimes it just doesn’t work like that.”

Sanne hummed low in her throat as Meg caressed her face. “No, it doesn’t,” she said. “Sometimes stuff sneaks up on you and bites you on the arse.”

“I know what you mean. It’s been a proper shitty day.” Meg sounded as heartsick as Sanne felt.

Some unspoken cue made them lean back in their chairs. They sat in silence for a few minutes, lulled into stillness by the regularity of everything around them: falling drops of saline, a breath every five seconds, the pattern of spikes on the monitor.

After a while, Sanne put her hand on the woman’s arm, the first time she had touched her since the moors.

“I wonder what her name is,” she said.

*

“Come on, sleepyhead. Bedtime.”

The insistence in the voice was reinforced by hands unwrapping Sanne’s blanket. She screwed up her face. If it was bedtime, why wasn’t she being left to sleep?

“Five more minutes,” she mumbled, and heard Meg chuckle.

“You can have five more hours, sweetheart, but I think they’d be better spent in a bed, don’t you?”

That gave Sanne pause, and she cracked open an eye. “Aw, fuck.” The back of her neck burned as she lifted her head from the chair’s headrest. She ran her tongue around her dry mouth and wiped the drool from her cheek. “What time is it?”

Meg liberated the blanket and folded it up. “Just gone nine. I gave you an hour. I didn’t think you’d make it past twenty minutes in one of these things, but I’d overlooked your ability to fall asleep on a clothesline.”

“Hmm. How is she?” Sanne squinted at the monitors surrounding the woman’s bed, but couldn’t remember what their original readings had been.

“She’s stable.” With one arm shoved beneath Sanne’s, Meg hoisted her to her feet. “You, on the other hand, look like crap.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re coming to mine tonight, so I can keep an eye on you.”

“No, I’m fine,” Sanne protested. “I’ll go home.” Her heart wasn’t really in it, though, and one stern glance from Meg made her capitulate.

“I’ll drop you back here in good time tomorrow and get your neighbour to feed your hens,” Meg said. “I’ve told security that you’re leaving your car. Okay?”

“Okay.” Sanne stood and tried to pat her hair into some semblance of style.

“Don’t know why you’re bothering with that. Half the department has been in and out of here while you were snoring.”

“Terrific.”

“At least you slept through the ridicule.”

“Oh, very droll.”

They shared a quick grin, but as they reached the door Meg’s expression sobered.

“I asked a nurse to call me if anything happens,” she said quietly.

That was better than nothing, but as Sanne left the unit she still felt she was letting the woman down.

Meg put her arm around Sanne and fell into step with her. “You’ll be no good to her if you don’t take care of yourself, San.”

“I feel like I should be doing more. Hell, I’ve barely done
anything
.”

“You saved her life.”

That would have been a comfort, had Sanne been able to look beyond the woman’s dire prognosis. Was any kind of life better than no life at all? Her mum, with her lapsed Catholic sensibilities, might have had an answer to that one, but Sanne was too tired to consider the debate. She allowed herself to be steered into Meg’s car, felt the seatbelt latch into place, and didn’t open her eyes again until Meg was driving past the
Welcome to Rowlee Village
sign.

“Bugger.” Sanne repeated the neck-stretching, drool-removing process.

Meg sniggered and then swerved wildly to avoid a duck dozing in the road. “Damn, I wish they wouldn’t do that.” She didn’t appear to be troubled by the close encounter. “Food, bath, and bed for you,” she said without missing a beat.

Sanne groaned and dug her fingers into the muscles of her back, which were clenched round her spine like a vice. “Can’t I skip the first two and just go to bed?”

“Will you promise to eat a proper breakfast and change my sheets in the morning?”

It was a fair question. Sanne still had a day’s worth of muck and blood clinging to her. She had never been a Brownie Guide, but she flashed Meg an improvised version of their salute. “I’ll sort out your sheets, and I promise to eat breakfast, if you promise to let me make it.”