by Joanna Neil
In the morning, though, things looked a little brighter. Outside, the sun was shining, and she thought perhaps the warmth would help to dry out the house. She opened up the windows to let in the fresh air, and she called out an emergency electrician to come and switch on the service.
‘I wonder if you need a plumber in here,’ the electrician said, sucking in his breath as he walked through the living room and glanced at the peeling wallpaper. ‘Do you think you might have sprung a leak, or is it rising damp?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ve only just moved in.’
He connected the electricity supply and then went out, shaking his head. Rebecca decided not to look on the dark side. One thing at a time, that was the way to do it. Wasn’t that what Craig had once said?
She tried not to think about him. Every time his image passed through her mind she saw him with his arm about that vulnerable, fair-haired girl and it was too painful for words. She had to try to move on, to fill her life with activity…anything so that she didn’t have to dwell on what might have been.
She took down the curtains and removed the covers from the settee and chairs and put them all in the washing-machine.
Then she gazed about her at the walls, where the paper was coming away, and there and then she set about scraping it off. Maybe the cottage would dry out in a day or so and then she could splash a lick of paint about to brighten the place up. Heather wouldn’t mind—she guessed her aunt would be happy to have the house renovated.
And she also needed to find herself some transport, so a visit to a garage wouldn’t go amiss.
Back at work in A and E on Monday, she was glad of the hectic pace. ‘We’ve heard from the Royal,’ Dr Bradshaw told her. ‘They say the little girl, Chloe, has made some good headway, and she is ready to be transferred back to us. Would you like to go and pick her up?’
‘I’d love to do that,’ Rebecca said. She glanced about her, wondering whether Craig was going to turn up and accompany her. She hadn’t seen him all morning. ‘Will I be doing this on my own? I’m perfectly happy to do that.’
‘Yes, that will be fine,’ Dr Bradshaw said. ‘Craig’s on call with the helicopter this week, but I’m sure you’ll do very well on your own.’
‘Is he all right?’ she asked. ‘I wondered about the little boy, Declan, who was brought in over the weekend. Craig was very concerned about him but I haven’t had any news, so I don’t know if the child recovered or needed treatment.’
‘They admitted him to the medical ward,’ Dr Bradshaw told her. ‘It was a nasty chest infection, but he’s doing OK. He’s beginning to respond to treatment. Craig’s been up to see him a few times, but the danger period is over.’
Rebecca breathed a sigh of relief. ‘That’s good news.’
She went with the ambulance crew to bring back the baby from the Royal. Chloe was beginning to thrive now, and even after this short time Rebecca could see a difference in her. She was moving her little arms and legs and reaching out for her teddy bear, cuddling it as though even at that young age she recognised a friend.
Helen came and cooed over the cot when Rebecca trundled the baby into the ward. ‘Isn’t she an angel?’ she murmured. ‘She looks so much better than she did when I saw her last.’
‘She does. I’m hoping she’ll grow up to be a strong, healthy girl now that her heart defect has been repaired. Her mother is over the moon with her progress already.’
‘I can imagine.’ Helen smiled. ‘Cheryl was the same when she realised that Declan didn’t have meningitis. She was still worried, of course, but it wasn’t as bad as she thought it might be.’
Rebecca checked the baby’s chart and wrote down the medication schedule. ‘That must have been a relief for Craig, too.’ She handed the chart to the nurse. ‘We need to make sure that her blood pressure remains stable. If there’s any change, I’ll adjust the dosage.’
‘I’ll do half-hourly observations,’ Helen said. She glanced towards the door of the ward. ‘Here comes Craig now. He must have made his trip in double-quick time. I thought he was going over to Yorkshire again, but perhaps there was a change of plan.’
Craig was frowning as he approached them. He glanced at Rebecca and nodded briefly in her direction, before turning to Helen. ‘Hi, Helen,’ he said. ‘Do you think I could use the computer at the nurses’ station for a minute? I need to check up on something before I leave for the mountains.’
‘The mountains?’ Helen echoed. ‘Are you on mountain rescue duty today? I thought you were headed off further south.’
‘No, there was a change of plan.’ He looked at Rebecca once more, and Helen must have sensed something in the atmosphere between them because she started to move away.
‘I need to go and check up on a patient,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a while. Help yourself to the computer,’ she told Craig.
Rebecca sent him an oblique glance. ‘It didn’t take long for you to end up back in the air,’ she murmured. ‘I’d have thought you would have left it for a while…at least until the end of the month. That’s how your rotation works, isn’t it?’
‘Usually, it is, but something cropped up—a colleague was sick, and I volunteered to go in his place. It was easy enough for Dr Bradshaw to alter the schedules here. Besides, I felt that I had to get back up there and face the dragon, so to speak.’
Her eyes widened a fraction. So he wasn’t immune from the worries that everyone else might have after all. It had seemed as though he didn’t have a care in the world, that challenges were simply there to be taken up without any hesitation, and the helicopter crash was just another event to be confronted. Yet he had just admitted to having doubts, hadn’t he?
‘You don’t have to do it,’ she said. ‘You could work in A and E all the time and no one would think any the worse of you.’
‘Except for me.’ His gaze meshed with hers. ‘I would think less of myself if I didn’t face up to my inner demons.’
She studied him for a moment or two, her grey gaze drinking in his strong features. He was everything she wanted in a man. His inner strength was awesome, and yet even he struggled with the trials life threw at him. She felt humbled to be given this glimpse at his true feelings. Had the death of his friend being the starting point for his devil-may-care attitude? If the worst had happened, why would any thing else matter? Was that the way he saw it?
She said quietly, ‘Some demons might just fade away if you ignore them.’
‘Is that what you were doing when you left my house the other night? Did you figure that if you weren’t going to be staying there with me any more, then you didn’t need to talk to me about what was going on in your mind? You could push everything away, as though it had never happened?’
‘Nothing happened. You helped me when I was down, and it was time for me to move on. You were busy with Cheryl and I thought you probably had other more important things on your mind. It seemed like a good time to make the move.’
His mouth made a straight line. ‘So you’ve gone to live at your aunt’s place? From what she told me, it will need quite a bit of work. It hasn’t been lived in for years.’
‘Yes, that’s right. It has been neglected for some time.’
‘Then I wish you well. You obviously value your independence if you’re prepared to put up with hardship for a while. I just hadn’t realised quite how deep that feeling went. I suppose I should have taken heed as well when you said that you wanted to go back to the island. That’s the only place where you will be happy again, isn’t it? I suppose, once you get back to Islay, you’ll have everything just as you want it. You’ll be able to be near to your aunt, and you’ll have the job that you were dreaming of.’
She nodded. ‘It shouldn’t be too long now before I have some news about the post. This job was only meant to last for a few weeks while Dr Bradshaw advertised for someone who would take up a permanent staff position here, so I’ve had to keep that in mind all along.’
‘And I dare say they
’ll do their best to find your aunt a rehabilitation centre somewhere on Islay. That will make things easier all round, won’t it?’
‘Yes.’ The word came out as a husky whisper.
He started to turn away from her. ‘I have to go. The pilot’s preparing for take-off, but I just wanted to get an idea of the lie of the land before we head out to the mountains. A group of climbers have landed themselves in trouble and need to be brought down. One of them probably has a broken ankle, and it sounds as though another has fractured his arm.’
‘That sounds bad.’ She hesitated. ‘Good luck.’
He nodded, but after that he didn’t look back. Rebecca felt numb inside, because he had studied her with such a cool, distant expression, as though he was no longer part of her life, and all the warmth and affection that had once been an integral part of their relationship had been doused with ice water, so that it dissolved and would never again return.
She went back to work and tried not to think about how things would be in the future. When this job finished, she would go to her island home, as he had pointed out, and she would probably never see him again. It hurt to think that they would be so near and yet so far apart.
In her lunch-break, she went to see how Heather was getting on. Her aunt was standing by a tubular frame, letting it support her weight while a nurse waited by her side in case of trouble.
‘My word, you’re doing well,’ Rebecca said. ‘You’re managing to stand on both feet…that’s wonderful.’
‘She’s coming along really nicely,’ the nurse agreed. ‘But then, she’s a determined woman is Heather. A little thing like a stroke isn’t going to keep her down for very long.’
‘That’s my aunt,’ Rebecca said with a smile. ‘She was always a go-getter.’
The nurse helped Heather back into her chair. ‘That does it for this morning, I think. The physio will probably be in to see you later on this afternoon.’
‘Aye, she said she would.’
The nurse left the room and Rebecca went to sit next to her aunt. ‘Have they said how long you might be staying here?’ she asked. ‘It’s just that Craig brought the subject up and I wondered if they had any thoughts about moving you to a rehabilitation centre for a few weeks. I suppose that would be better for you, because you would be in a place that is specially designed to help you recover your movement.’
‘The doctor did say something about it, and I mentioned it to Craig when he came to see me.’ Heather frowned, trying to make her words understood. ‘Actually, he seemed to be more bothered about what you were doing. Didn’t you tell him you were going to move into the cottage?’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘He was preoccupied with something else, and I thought it would be easier to just go.’
‘He seemed put out.’
‘He’ll get over it.’ Rebecca didn’t want to talk about Craig. It brought the knot back into her stomach and made her feel queasy all over again. ‘I thought I would do up the place for you. I could decorate and put in a new boiler, and fix up the garden, if you like. It will give me something to do over the next week or so.’
Heather gave her a shrewd look. ‘You want to keep busy,’ she said. ‘Do what you like with it, Becky. I haven’t seen the cottage in years.’
Rebecca stayed with her aunt for a while longer, telling her about her plans to renovate the cottage and planning what she would do with the garden. For all Heather said that she wasn’t bothered, it was her property, and Rebecca didn’t want to step out of line.
When she went back to work in A and E, time passed quickly. She treated a child who had a broken collar-bone, and then helped to resuscitate a baby who had been suffering from convulsions.
‘She’ll be all right now, I believe,’ she told the mother. ‘We’ve managed to bring her temperature down, and we’ll give her medicine to clear up the infection. If she does have any more convulsions, you need to see your GP right away, but I doubt this is something that will be ongoing.’
The mother was relieved. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You’ve been so good with her. You made me feel confident that she was in the right hands.’
Rebecca went to find Helen, so that she could explain anything that the mother needed to know before her child was discharged. ‘I’ve made out the prescription for the girl’s medication,’ she told her. ‘She’ll just need advice on how to handle any other convulsions if they occur.’
‘I’ll go and talk to her now,’ Helen said.
She was frowning, looking a little distracted, and Rebecca said, ‘Is something wrong? Do you want me to explain about the medication? I know the dosages can be a bit tricky sometimes.’
‘No, it isn’t that.’ Helen looked at her, her mouth trembling slightly. ‘It’s Craig—we received a message from the mountain rescue service just a few minutes ago. He was winched down a gorge so that he could treat a man who was stranded on a ledge. Craig had sent one injured man up to the helicopter and he was talking to the pilot by radio, telling him something about a rockfall, and then suddenly the contact was broken.’
She dragged in a shaky breath. ‘They haven’t been able to re-establish communications yet, and we don’t know whether Craig has been hurt. The copilot said he saw the beginnings of a landslide from the overhanging crag. They tried another rescue attempt, but the wind was getting up, and the pilot had to make the decision to pull back. He’s going back to Base to wait out the storm.’
Rebecca felt the blood wash out of her face. She couldn’t bear the thought that anything had happened to Craig. She had to be with him.
‘Where is the rescue base? Is it far from here?’ A feeling of dread had invaded her, sweeping through her body from head to toe.
‘It’s about five miles away, I think. The address is on the notice-board in the doctors’ lounge, along with the phone number. They came out here to pick Craig up from the helipad, but they won’t be coming back here unless they have patients on board. Why? What are you thinking?’
‘I need to be there to make sure that he’s all right. He was the only doctor on board, wasn’t he, so if I offer my services, they’re not likely to refuse, are they? They take volunteers and they’re always looking for medically trained people. If Craig has been injured, they’ll need someone to tend to him. I can do that, and I can deal with any other casualties, as well. I’m going to go over there.’
‘But, Rebecca, you’ve already been through one bad experience…how can you put yourself through this?’
‘I’m going. I have to go.’ Rebecca looked at the watch on her wrist. ‘My shift is due to end in just a few minutes. I’ve written up all my notes—everything is in order, so I can hand over without any problem.’
‘Rebecca, you can’t do this. They won’t let you. You’ve never…’
Rebecca wasn’t listening. She was already hurrying towards the doctors’ lounge. After that, she stopped to have a few hurried words with the doctor who was coming on duty to take her place, and then she went out to the car park, thankful that she’d made the decision to buy herself the smart little runabout.
If she put her foot down, she could make the journey to the rescue base in no time at all.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘ARE you sure that you’re up to this?’ The pilot gave Rebecca a doubtful look. ‘I mean, I understand that you’re medically qualified, and that’s great news, but this is different from anything that you’ve done before, isn’t it? Have you ever been up in a helicopter before this?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Rebecca told him. She even managed a brief smile. ‘That’s no problem. I’m familiar with the equipment on board, and I’ll make myself useful, you’ll see. You’ve no need to worry at all.’
She turned her grey eyes on him, using her feminine wiles shamelessly. ‘You won’t regret it, I promise, and I really would be the best person to go along on this mission.’
‘Hmm. We would have to winch you down to them. They’re in a gully, trapped on a ledge—we don’t even know that the
y haven’t toppled even further down, and that would mean their chances of survival are less than good. It was impossible to see what was happening under the weather conditions at the time. These storms blow up so quickly, and visibility drops to almost zero.’
Rebecca kept a tight hold on her emotions. She wouldn’t admit to the possibility that Craig might not be alive. Neither would she allow fear to take hold of her. This was Craig who was in danger, and she would get to him come what may.
‘You’ll put me in a harness, won’t you? And you’ll show me how to rig up the stretcher and connect it to the winch?’
He nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Then I’ll be fine. When do you plan on setting out?’ A couple of hours had already passed, and she was chafing at the bit, anxious to get to the mountain.
He checked the weather conditions on the monitor. ‘It shouldn’t be too long now. It looks as though the storm’s clearing, and we should have a window of opportunity when we can sneak in before nightfall. There’s time enough for me to show you how to handle the equipment. We’re short-handed right now, with summer vacations and people off sick, so you’ve turned up at just the right time.’
Rebecca almost whooped with triumph. She had won half the battle. He was agreeing to take her along with him and it wouldn’t be long now before she was able to go in search of Craig. He had to be alive and safe…the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
Some half an hour later they were airborne. Rebecca looked out over the landscape passing beneath her, but she wasn’t taking it in. All she could think about was that she needed to find Craig and make sure that he wasn’t hurt.
‘OK, this is it.’ The copilot indicated that she should ready herself by the door of the helicopter. ‘Are you ready to do this?’ he asked.
‘I’m ready.’ She pulled in a deep breath. The harness was fixed securely around her and after a moment or two she was lowered down out of the helicopter. She didn’t look at the mountain landscape beneath her. Instead, she closed her eyes briefly and waited for the winch rope to steady. She could do this. Of course she could do this.