‘Can we get those photos and check the car now?’ she asked, when he looked up then moved guiltily away from the shiny stream of paper issuing from the machine.
‘I suppose so,’ he replied, though he glanced back as if he’d prefer to watch the fax arrive.
‘It will only take a couple of minutes,’ Sarah pointed out. ‘You’ve got the keys.’
He nodded his agreement and led her out of the room, but as he paused to put on his raincoat, more as protection against the icy wind now the rain had eased, she saw a figure standing at the door of the surgery.
‘Oh, no! It looks as if I’ve got a patient. I’d better go,’ she told him. ‘You get the photos and check the temperature-control setting in the car. If it was on, it’ll make a difference to the time of death and Barry will want to know as soon as he gets back.’
She walked away, then remembered Rowena.
‘Sorry, Nick, but when you’re done, could you call at the café and let Rowena know where I am? She can bring a sandwich and coffee back to work for me.’
‘Easier said than done,’ Rowena told Nick when he joined her a little later. ‘Both the coffee and sandwich are already cooling fast—they’ll be terrible before I get them to her.’
Nick dropped into the chair meant for Sarah and grinned at Rowena.
‘How about I have these and you order more for the doctor? That way these don’t go to waste, and hers’ll be hot.’
He spooned sugar into the coffee as he made the suggestion, and started on the sandwich before Rowena could object.
She ordered more, to take away this time.
‘So, what’s happening? What did you find out? Was the heater on?’
Nick continued to eat but a slight downward movement of his head suggested assent.
‘I don’t suppose you checked the fuel gauge. If it was on empty we’d know the heater kept running until the fuel ran out.’
‘I’d have had to turn the key on to check the gauge and Barry’s got the car keys. I could see the temperature controls through the window now it’s not raining so much.’
Rowena nodded, but although Sarah had been anxious to know about the heater, she didn’t see what difference the time of death would make, given it had been the kind of night when no one in their right mind would have been out and about to witness nefarious deeds.
And David wouldn’t accept her alibi!
Where was he now? Still out at the farm?
Being with him, the way things were, wasn’t much fun, but it was worse not being with him, she decided.
‘You paying for all of this?’ Joan Mathers, the coffee-shop proprietor, put the paper cup of coffee and the wrapped sandwiches down on the table.
‘I guess so,’ Rowena told her.
‘No, I’ll pay for mine!’ Nick objected, and he dug his hand into his pocket, pulling out first the photos he’d collected from the autopsy room, then a clatter of loose change.
‘Don’t be silly—it’s on me,’ Rowena told him. Afraid Joan might ask about the photos, she thrust a note into the woman’s hand. ‘Keep the change!’
Joan moved away so swiftly Rowena realised she must have grossly overpaid her, but right now tip size was irrelevant. Right now, clearing David’s name was uppermost in her mind.
She flicked at the photos with one finger, idly separating them out as she thought about David, then she looked more closely.
‘That’s wrong,’ she said, stabbing a finger at the one showing the unclothed body stretched out on the stainless-steel table. ‘Look—look at the legs. Why didn’t we think of it yesterday?’
Nick peered dubiously at the photo she’d indicated.
‘What about the legs?’
A gust of wind flipped the photo over, and they both turned towards the door, Rowena’s heart accelerating when she realised who’d walked in.
‘I was looking for Sarah,’ David said. ‘I’ve brought her things back from my place. Yours as well. I didn’t want to take the liberty of going into your house so I’ve left them at the surgery.’
His face was so controlled she could read nothing in it—no emotion, but none of the coldness he’d been directing at her either.
‘Isn’t Sarah there?’ Nick asked. ‘She was certainly heading that way when I left her.’
‘She must have been called out to someone,’ Rowena suggested. ‘Was my car gone?’
‘I didn’t look,’ David said.
He hovered uneasily just inside the door, the mask slipping to reveal an uncertainty so unusual in him she ached to hold him in her arms and offer comfort—whether he wanted it or not.
Failing that, she could, once again, offer a hot drink and food.
‘Here!’ she said. ‘Sit down and eat this sandwich. I ordered it and the coffee for Sarah but as she’s gone…’
He still looked uncertain and, guessing unhappily that it was her presence holding him back, she stood up.
‘I’ll go back and mind the surgery. There’s probably a note from Sarah somewhere on my desk, saying where she’s gone and when she’ll be back.’
They passed midway between the door and the table and although Rowena felt the tug of emotion this momentary closeness caused, she stifled it. It was bad enough having to accept that their passionate interlude had been nothing more than a release of tension for David, without making a fool of herself by showing her heartbreak.
There was no note from Sarah but, then, the new doctor hadn’t worked with them long enough to know it was David’s habit to always leave word of where he’d be. Rowena studied the appointment book, mentally working out which patients might come in this afternoon now the wild weather was easing.
Mrs Stable was unlikely to come—it would still be blowing, and possibly raining, up her end of the island, and she hated driving at the best of times. Ned Grimes was the following appointment, presumably coming to check Sarah out—well, unless she got back soon he’d be disappointed. Then—
A noise rocked the building, or had the earth shifted with whatever had caused the explosion?
Rowena dropped the book and raced outside, joining shopkeepers up and down the street.
Thick black smoke billowed up from behind the hospital. The school!
The thought had barely registered before Rowena took off, running swiftly towards the school.
David, coming from the café, fell in beside her. Nick, with longer legs, and youth on his side, streaked ahead. It seemed to Rowena as if the whole town was running, all the women converging on the cluster of buildings where the island’s children between the ages of five and fifteen would be gathered—most of the men heading for the volunteer fire station where they’d break out the fire equipment. Again!
‘It’s on an upper storey. Perhaps the science lab in the junior high school building,’ someone said as they reached the schoolyard.
Rowena felt relief thud in her heart as she saw the smaller children all being shepherded safely towards the fence. Behind them, the bigger primary kids were moving in a less orderly fashion, but still well out of the danger.
‘Stay here and check the little ones for shock,’ David told her, but the cries from the block beyond the primary school kept her moving. Teachers could treat shock.
The heat from the fire bit through her clothes as she came closer, and the scene, of staff and pupils staggering out of the burning building, helping others where they could, made her wince.
She whipped off her coat and wrapped it around a teenage boy whose blazer was smouldering dangerously. She sat him down and looked up in time to see David disappear into the building.
Paralysed with fear for him, she stood and watched as smoke enveloped his figure, hiding him from view. Then the cries of those who’d got out reminded her of her training and she began to function again.
‘Annie, are you OK?’
The young sports mistress nodded.
‘Good! How about you scoot over to the hospital and rustle up as many blankets as you can? Take a couple of pupils with
you—doing something will take their minds off the shock.’
She wasn’t certain if, medically, that was good or bad, but as Annie gathered a group of teenagers and they all trotted off together, she decided it couldn’t be too bad. Now she moved among the onlookers, asking for coats, entrusting each person with a youngster.
‘Wrap him in your coat and get him to sit down,’ she explained, passing a young lad who was sobbing with either fear or relief to old Bert from the butcher’s. ‘Once he’s settled down a bit, check him for burns—ask if he’s hurting anywhere.’
‘Just when we need rain, there is none,’ someone muttered, and Rowena looked up to see the still gale-force wind whipping the last of the clouds from the sky.
The ambulance arrived, closely followed by the fire-engine. The volunteer fire-fighters joined school staff who were already playing water on the flames. Resolutely ignoring her need to know David was safe, Rowena continued to check the casualties, loading a lass whose asthma had been triggered by the smoke into the ambulance, then a youth with a badly burned hand.
‘Get them both hooked up to oxygen then take them back to the hospital,’ she told the attendant. ‘Jane will have called Jackie in, and they’ll do what they can until one of the doctors can get there.’
Slowly the story of what had happened came together. A chemistry experiment requiring heat and what must have been a faulty gas canister exploding.
‘But all gas canisters have to be tested regularly,’ she protested, as she sent a couple of students with minor burns across to the hospital by foot—their minders by their sides.
‘The school ones are tested oftener than regular ones,’ Annie told her, returning with blankets so helpers could retrieve their coats and wrap blankets around their charges. ‘It’s the kind of thing that should never happen, but maybe it was a leak from a connection.’
Her voice trembled as she spoke, alerting Rowena to her fragility.
‘Sit down yourself,’ she told the younger woman. ‘And wrap one of those blankets around your shoulders.’
Annie slumped to the ground.
‘I’m OK,’ she whispered, but Rowena knew she wasn’t.
She knelt down and put her arms around the trembling teacher.
‘It’s Shaun—he’s the chemistry teacher—he’d have been right there when it went up.’
Rowena felt the pain as her heart squeezed tight. David’s in there as well, she wanted to wail, but that wouldn’t comfort Annie and certainly wouldn’t help her own anxiety.
‘Let’s not think the worst just yet,’ she murmured. ‘Explosions are funny things. The impact might have shot him to safety, you don’t know.’
A cry from the crowd made them both look up—in time to see the roof collapse onto the upper storey.
Annie’s anguish escalated, and all Rowena could do was hold her tightly and hope people would think the tears streaming down her cheeks were for Annie and Shaun.
‘They’ve got everyone out!’
The whisper went through the crowd like a prayer, confirmation coming from Darlene, the headmistress of the junior high school, who had been ticking off staff and pupils from a roll.
‘Shaun’s unconscious but David thinks he’ll be all right,’ Darlene added, squatting down beside Annie and relieving Rowena’s anxiety at the same time.
‘Will you stay with Annie?’ she asked Darlene. Once assured, she set off herself, seeking the man she loved.
Needing to see for herself that he was all right.
He was bent over a stretcher at the back of the ambulance, helping the attendant find a vein for a catheter for Shaun. On a second stretcher, the slight form of a badly burned young lad made Rowena wince.
As if sensing her presence, David looked up, and a white smile flashed in the sooty blackness of his face.
‘Can you go over to the hospital? Call the mainland and ask for an air ambulance to airlift these two out. Tell them there could be as many as four to go. It’s going to depend what we find when we start looking more closely at the injuries. Check the latest wind speed before you phone so you can let emergency services know. I doubt one will be able to land before morning, but we’ve got to try.’
‘I’ll go across there in a minute,’ Rowena told him. ‘Right after I’ve checked you out.’
Her voice defied him to argue, but he shook his head and said, ‘I’ve a few minor burns, love, that’s all. I grabbed a hose before I went in and doused myself. Wet wool might smoulder but it doesn’t burn too easily.’
Love! He called me love!
The word sang in Rowena’s heart as she headed for the hospital, detouring via the back of the police station to check the wind speed on the display box of the computerised weather station.
It was probably stress, she warned the bits of herself which were celebrating this miracle. It didn’t mean anything!
But the warmth of pleasure persisted, so even the news that a plane wouldn’t be able to land on the island’s wind-swept strip before morning failed to dim her happiness.
‘We’ll manage,’ she said to Jane, who was trying to work out how many beds they could rustle up if some of the minor burns and shock cases needed to be kept in overnight.
‘Maybe!’ Jane replied. ‘And only till tomorrow if the people David’s bringing in need one-to-one attention.’
David!
‘What can I do—where do you want me to start?’ Rowena asked, ignoring the warmth the mention of his name had caused and focussing solely on the immediate crisis.
‘With the group on the front veranda, if you could,’ Jane suggested. ‘First- and second-degree burns on arms and hands. I’ve set up buckets and basins of water out there and have them all soaking their burns, but I haven’t had time to really classify the injuries. There’s a jug of a glucose drink I made up and glasses there as well—make them all drink. And if you take some dry dressings and cover anything that needs covering, those that are OK can go home.’
Rowena made her way out to the veranda where seven students were laughing and joking as they dunked their arms in the water.
‘You lot look like malingerers,’ she told them. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’
As she worked her way down the line, drying the area around the burns, wrapping wounds in dry gauze, she pieced together the story of the explosion. The experiment had been set up in what was supposedly a fire- and shock-resistant chimney but perhaps a blockage in the chimney had blown the flames outward instead of sucking them upward. Most of the pupils burnt had been injured trying to pull the teacher, who’d been knocked unconscious by the explosion, away from the flames, or by tentative attempts to douse the fire.
Rowena suspected a lot of the levity in their description of the event was the result of shock, and was glad to see parents arriving from all over the island. She’d warn those with injured children to watch for delayed reactions.
‘You’re Toby Warren, aren’t you?’ she asked the quietest of the group, right at the end of the line.
‘That’s right,’ he murmured, carefully cradling his injured wrist in his good hand.
The pale skin was an angry red, and the burn spread around his arm like a wide bracelet.
‘My shirtsleeve caught on fire but I didn’t know,’ he explained.
‘I think we’d better have the doctor take a look at this,’ Rowena said gently. ‘The rest of you, stay here until one of your parents turns up to take you home and tell whoever it is I want to see them before they go.’
The teenagers all nodded. She acted as school nurse when required and also gave them relationship lectures, so they were willing to accept her as an authority figure.
‘Come on, Toby. Inside with you.’
The lad was shivering and Rowena grabbed a discarded blanket to wrap around his shoulders.
Jackie was in the single ward, bent over the young asthmatic.
‘If you want a bed, try the outpatients room. Jane’s set up some temporary accommodation in there.�
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Rowena led Toby through the ward, past the casualty room where David, with a white coat over his sooty trousers, was bent over Shaun Riley, and into the outpatients room, now fitted out with hastily put-together beds.
‘I hate to think how musty some of these mattresses must be,’ the aide in charge muttered to her as she waved Rowena and the new patient to a spare bed in the corner.
Rowena sat Toby on the bed, then went in search of a drink for him. With the body’s defences all marshalled to fight the effects of the burn, fluid depletion was a real threat.
Once he was settled, she walked through to Casualty where David and Jane were now working on the badly injured student.
‘Tell me what to do while you go and have a shower,’ she told David. ‘You’re hardly sterile and that’s of prime importance in burns.’
He looked up at her as if bemused to hear someone giving orders, then his eyes gleamed momentarily and he smiled.
‘Perhaps some day soon things will return to normal and I can tell you why I got Sarah over here in the first place. There are sterile, treated dressings in those packs—just put them over the burned areas. Don’t attempt to peel off any clothing that’s stuck to skin.’
Rowena nodded, too delighted by the smile—the gleam—to do more. Then she remembered Toby.
‘I put a lad with burns right around his wrist in Outpatients—you might take a look at it on your way.’
‘Of course,’ David said, then he looked around as if puzzled by what—or whom—he saw. ‘Did you find Sarah? The entire island population has heard about the fire, so how come she’s not here?’
‘She may be at the surgery. She could have been driving back from somewhere and missed the excitement so doesn’t know what’s happened.’
David seemed to accept this explanation, for he departed, promising to be back within minutes. Rowena donned a coat and gloves and began unpacking dressings to lay across the burns.
‘Once this is done, we’ll make you more comfortable,’ she told the teenager, though she guessed the pain relief, dripping into his veins with the fluid, was already having that effect.
Rowena and Jane worked steadily, knowing they lacked facilities to do more than stabilise the patients and hopefully keep the wounds free of infection. Shaun Riley remained unconscious, X-rays showing a hairline fracture of his skull but so far no sign of a haematoma developing.
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