No Good Reason

by Cari Hunter

  “I’m sorry,” Sanne whispered, arriving at a compromise that still made her feel like a ghoul. Using her phone, she took a series of photographs—close-up shots to record the woman’s position, her injuries, and the way in which she was bound—and then switched to video for a wider shot that would give context to the scene.

  As soon as Sanne was confident she had documented everything, she shouted to the boys to throw her their knife. She scrambled through the grass to collect it from where it landed, picking up one of their abandoned sleeping bags on her way back.

  Ensuring that the knot was preserved, she sliced through the ropes at the woman’s wrists. The bindings were tight, and there were shreds of flesh stuck to the orange strands when she was finally able to unwind them. She set the rope aside and tucked the sleeping bag around the woman.

  “You’re okay,” she said, her voice breaking, belying her words. “You’re safe now. We’re going to get you to the hospital. You’re safe now.” She wrapped a clean bandage around the bloodiest part of the woman’s scalp, not even sure where the wound was but hoping for the best. There was blood everywhere, clotted and cool and reeking of metal. She knew she should be doing something: questioning the two boys or working out a way to protect the immediate area. Instead, she crouched by the woman’s side and put a hand on her arm, listening to the guttural snore of her breathing and watching her chest lurch with the effort it was taking to stay alive.

  “We’ll have you out of here in no time.” Sanne looked up, searching the sky as she spoke, but all she saw was blue with dabs of white. The colours blurred. She wiped her nose and eyes with the back of her hand. “I promise they’ll be here soon. Just keep breathing.”

  Chapter Three

  The two lads had been sitting in quiet consultation, their heads bowed over a small scrap of paper, since Sanne had asked them to provide their details and an account of what they had been doing on their camping trip, but they sprang to their feet when they heard the distant thrum of a helicopter. They looked at her in unison, as if seeking her permission, and she smiled back, having recognised the bright yellow bodywork of Helimed. They began to yell and run around the survival bag, releasing their pent-up tension by waving their jackets one-handed, like fans on a football terrace.

  She knew exactly how they felt. Her own pulse quickened as the helicopter circled overhead. She hadn’t expected the woman to make it to this point. Fifteen minutes ago, the woman’s breathing had faltered, becoming a harsh stop-start staccato as blood frothed at her lips, and with a sense of profound hopelessness Sanne had tilted her chin, preparing to do CPR. Somehow that slight adjustment had alleviated the crisis, however, and Sanne had been frozen in the same position ever since, holding the woman’s head in place, terrified of moving in case she made anything worse. Beneath her hands, the woman’s jaw churned as she continued to strain and gasp for air, but she had shown no further signs of deterioration.

  “The medics are here, and we’re going to get you to the hospital in just a few minutes,” Sanne said, acutely aware of the cramping in her fingers and arms and how badly her back ached. She leaned forward, sheltering the woman from the helicopter’s downdraught. When she looked up again, two men laden with kit were jogging toward her. From the way they slowed and approached in single file, it was apparent they had been briefed about their patient and the condition in which she had been found.

  “Detective Jensen?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t move.

  The patches on the speaker’s jumpsuit identified him as a doctor. He carefully prised her hands free. “You can let go now,” he said. “We’ve got her.”

  She shuffled aside but stayed close. With no medical training to speak of, she had not been able to do much for the woman, yet she felt uneasy about handing her over to strangers.

  “I think she came off the rocks,” she said, watching the doctor and paramedic unravel monitoring equipment and set up an oxygen tank. “But before that…” She shook her head. “Before that, I don’t know. You can see she was already hurt. Someone had hurt her.”

  Her words were as simplistic as any layperson’s, but she knew that all the finer details would come as soon as she got a pen and paper in front of her. The medics were barely listening to her anyway. The paramedic had uncovered the woman and was swearing beneath his breath at the damage he revealed. He bowed his head for a second to compose himself and then began to run his hands over and under her body, checking his gloves at intervals for what Sanne assumed was fresh blood. His report to the doctor was concise.

  “Her left femur’s a mess, but I can’t see anything else major.”

  Keeping one eye on the monitors, the doctor was laying out a pack of sterile equipment. “Airway’s lousy,” he said. “Sats are only eighty-eight. She’ll need tubing before we move her. We’ll get her immobilised, get IV access, Kendrick splint on her leg, and run with her. Her golden hour is long gone.”

  The paramedic, already occupied with an IV line, murmured his agreement. Not for the first time, Sanne wished Meg were there to provide a translation, to explain what the hell the doctor was injecting into the line and why it had just stopped the woman’s breathing.

  “Shit,” Sanne hissed. When no one else seemed to react, she lunged forward to intervene, but the paramedic stopped her.

  “It’s okay, Detective. We’ve anaesthetised her so we can breathe for her.”

  “Oh.” Sanne put a hand to her chest, realising that she wasn’t doing much breathing herself. “You might’ve warned me.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that.” He smiled wryly as he secured the tube the doctor had just slid into the woman’s throat. “Her oxygen levels are climbing now. See?”

  On the monitor, the figure he indicated gradually increased from eighty-eight to ninety-seven, and the woman’s chest rose and fell as the doctor worked the ventilation bag. It was strangely peaceful, yet eerie at the same time. Sanne had sat with her mum and watched a similar machine breathe for her dad once. It was the quietest she had ever seen him. He couldn’t yell at them with a tube sticking out of his mouth. It hadn’t lasted, though. He had got better, the tube had been removed, and they had let him come back home. The day before he was due to be discharged, Sanne remembered, she had hidden under her bed and cried herself hoarse—

  “Detective, I need you to take over for me, here.”

  She blinked at the doctor’s instruction, shaking her head when she worked out what he was asking of her.

  “I don’t think—”

  He raised a hand to dismiss her protest. “Squeeze, release. Pause. Then repeat. Nothing to it. Come on.”

  He couldn’t have known it, but Sanne had always responded well to authority. She took the bag from him, allowing him to wrap his hands around hers and demonstrate the process.

  “Good. Keep that up.”

  He left her then, turning his back to help the paramedic with a complicated-looking splint. With her heartbeat thumping in her ears, Sanne did as he had instructed, trying not to feel overwhelmed by the responsibility so casually assigned to her. She could feel the oxygen rushing through the tube, and the reading on the monitor remained reassuringly stable. The woman’s face was no longer quite so ashen, a pallid pink replacing the blue tinge to her lips. Sanne counted soundlessly, keeping to an exact rate. She was still counting when a flash of red-clad figures appeared on the horizon: a Mountain Rescue team approaching on foot.

  “Thank fuck for that,” she said, factoring them into an equation she had been struggling to solve. “Perfect bloody timing.”

  *

  The Bat Phone rang just as Meg was chewing a bite of toast. She groaned, washed the bread down with a gulp from the first brew she had managed to snatch in hours, and dragged her feet off the staffroom’s coffee table. Sometimes she heard that phone in her dreams. It had an unmistakably shrill tone, setting it apart from the myriad other phones in the department, and its job was to link the A&E to incoming ambulance crews and Helimed. Red St
andbys (cardiac arrests, major trauma, unmanageable airways, or catastrophic haemorrhage) and Amber Standbys (patients who were poorly but not yet at death’s door) were all called through, to pre-warn the hospital staff. Often the crews were mere minutes away, and their patients would invariably go straight into Resus.

  Chancing her luck, Meg stayed where she was, hunched forward with her mug clasped in her hand. When nothing happened, she risked another sip of tea, wondering whether someone had decided the call was the result of an overly cautious ambulance protocol, and that the patient could bypass Resus and be seen in Majors.

  “Do not pass Go.” She licked melted fake butter from her fingers. “Do not take up one of my beds.” Her trainers had just hit the table again when she heard the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. “Ah, bugger.”

  The staffroom door opened a crack, and a hand appeared around it, waving a sheet of paper like a flag of truce. “Don’t shoot the messenger,” a voice called from the safety of the corridor. Meg recognised the broad West Riding accent of Liz, the staff nurse currently working with her in Resus.

  “ETA?” she asked.

  “Twenty. It’s coming via Helimed.”

  “Is it dead?”

  Liz poked her head around the door. “No, but it sounds nasty.” She consulted the paper. “Female, mid to late twenties. Fall from rocks. GCS three. Possible base of skull. Midshaft femur.”

  “Shit.” Meg got up so abruptly she sent her toast flying. “Fast bleep Neuro and Anaesthetics, and get as many hands on deck as you can.”

  Liz nodded. “Um, Meg?”

  Halfway to the door, Meg hesitated. “What?”

  “Got a bit of butter on your chin.”

  Meg rubbed her palm across her mouth and grinned, the prospect of a time-critical case kicking her weariness into touch. Genuine life-or-death traumas were a rarity, and any A&E doctor who claimed not to get a thrill out of them was a liar.

  “How’s that?”

  “Still a bit smeary, but you’ll do.”

  “Fab. Has Mrs. Jones gone up to Surgical Assessment yet?”

  “Yep. The shock room is all yours. That nice F1 is in there, getting things sorted.”

  They darted around an elderly man, who was failing to steer a wheelchair containing an equally elderly woman into a toilet cubicle.

  “Easier if you pull that, love,” Meg called. He raised his hand in acknowledgement and rolled the chair into the wall again, prompting a loud tirade from his passenger. Meg only caught the opening salvo of, “You’re a bloody useless bugger,” before she rounded the corner and the row faded.

  “Oh, hello, Eds Up,” she said, spotting a familiar figure waiting outside the shock room. She only knew Nelson Turay because he was Sanne’s partner, but Sanne chatted about him so much that he felt like an old friend.

  On hearing his department’s traditional nickname, he turned and gave her a crisp salute. “Dr. Fielding. Just the person I wanted to speak to.” Despite the lightness in his tone, his expression was serious. A colleague of his, a man she didn’t recognise, nodded politely at her.

  She closed the gap between them to avoid shouting across the corridor. “You cop for one on Sanne’s day off? That’s bad luck, fella.”

  “Uh, yeah.” Nelson leaned back against the wall. “San sort of copped for it first, though. She’s on her way in now with the chopper.”

  For a few seconds, the logic wouldn’t connect. Then Meg felt her knees weaken as her mind leapt to a conclusion. Her face must have given her away, because Nelson gripped her arm and kept her upright.

  “Meg, it’s not Sanne,” he said. “She’s okay.”

  “She’s okay,” she repeated, slowly realising that Sanne wasn’t the “female, mid to late twenties, fall from rocks, GCS three.” She stepped out of his hold. “What the hell is going on, Nelson?”

  “Two lads out camping below Laddaw Ridge came across a young lass unconscious at the bottom of the rocks. Do you know where I mean?”

  She nodded. She had been up there hiking with Sanne and suffered vertigo just peeking over the edge. “Yes, I know Laddaw. Jesus.”

  “Sanne was on the ridge and heard the lads signalling for help. She managed to call it in and then scramble down to them.”

  “She scrambled down? What the fuck was she thinking? I’ll bloody kill her when she gets here.” Meg only remembered the need for discretion when she realised she was yelling. She let out a long, shuddery breath. “Is she really all right? Have you spoken to her?”

  Nelson smiled at her seamless transition from infuriation to concern. “The boss spoke to her briefly, said she sounded fine, but you know Sanne.”

  “Yeah. She wouldn’t tell you if her leg was hanging off.” An ambulance crew appeared, pulling a stretcher toward them, and Meg hesitated, waiting out the squeak of its wheels. “I’ve got to go and get ready for this call coming in. Make San a brew when she gets here, and keep an eye on her, will you?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “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 st
ung 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.

  Chapter Four

  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.