No Good Reason

by Cari Hunter

  “You think she’ll actually wake up?”

  “Not straightaway, no, but Sanne’s going to be there…” Meg sighed and left the sentence hanging. It was unlikely that Sanne would expect any kind of miraculous recovery as soon as the drugs were discontinued, but Meg still wanted to be with her when that failed to happen.

  “She’s lucky to have you,” Emily said ambiguously.

  Meg smiled, offered Emily the last Quaver, and waived her own right to ambiguity. “I think I’m luckier to have her.”

  *

  Sanne took a gulp from her plastic cup of machine-dispensed tea. It tasted foul, but it was marginally better than nothing. Eleanor had chosen coffee and was having an even worse experience. There was a murky slick on the drink’s surface that neither of them could identify.

  “I reckon he lives somewhere round here,” Sanne said. “I doubt she would have had the chance to escape unless she’d been left alone for a while. Maybe he’d gone home for supplies, or to sign on for his benefits, or to meet a friend at the pub.”

  Eleanor added another sugar to her coffee and used her pen to stir it. She and Sanne had been bouncing ideas off each other for the last half hour, and this was her second cup. “You think he was trying to establish an alibi?”

  “It’s possible. He’s not an idiot, boss. He could be a complete loner, who nobody missed for the days he held her in that cave, or he could be someone who carried on with his life in between visits to abuse her.”

  “He might be married with kids, for all we know,” Eleanor said. “Look at Paul Farnworth: loving family, new baby, yet he managed to rape and murder three women in six months. I saw his wife on telly again the other week. Even with his confession, she still swears he’s innocent.”

  “I know.” This time it wasn’t the tea that made Sanne wince. The garden shed on Farnworth’s allotment had contained shelves crammed with preserved body parts, and his compost heap had tested positive for human remains. Through the observation mirror of the interview room, she had watched him relax back in his chair as he described each of the murders in explicit detail. She hadn’t slept properly for a month afterward.

  Propping her chin on her clasped hands, she thought about what she had seen at Gillot Tor that morning and tried to reconcile it with her own experience of the moors. One obvious fact stood out above all the others.

  “Y’know, boss, there are easier ways of abducting someone. Farnworth’s methodology was far more typical: two prostitutes to hone his skills on, before he stepped up a gear with the lass from his night school class. I’ve been running on those moors for years. Some days I go past a few people, but more often I don’t see anyone. If I were a perp wanting to find a victim, the hills are the last place I’d try. Why bother with the hassle?”

  “Unless he already knew her,” Eleanor said. “We’re only assuming this is a stranger abduction. Maybe he took her up there on a date—nice walk in the hills—and the next thing she knows, she’s drugged up to her eyeballs in a cave.”

  Sanne nodded and drained the dregs of her tea. It made her teeth feel furry. “Option two is that she’d caught his attention at some point, and he stalked her up there.”

  “Either way, the bastard had it planned. You don’t pack rope, knives, and half a pharmacy’s worth of drugs if you’re heading out for a picnic.”

  They ruminated upon that in silence for a while. Sanne watched the clock tick around to five. “You think he’ll do it again?” she asked quietly.

  Eleanor’s grim expression was an answer in itself. “Without a doubt. Unless we catch the little shit first.”

  The sound of voices outside made Sanne twist in her seat, but the door remained closed. She tapped her foot with mounting impatience. They had been waiting for almost an hour, and still no one was telling them anything. She should be out with the rest of the team, chasing leads, instead of being stuck in an airless box with a crappy cup of tea and nothing useful to do. She was about to text Nelson when there was a knock on the door, followed by Meg poking her head into the room.

  “Hey, Meg, what are you doing here?” Sanne rose to greet her and then remembered that she and Eleanor had never actually met. “Sorry, boss, this is Dr. Fielding. Meg, Detective Inspector Stanhope.”

  Meg stepped forward to shake hands. Sanne held her breath, waiting for her to say something embarrassingly personal, but she was all business.

  “Dr. Maxwell sends his apologies. His theatre list overran, but he’ll be down in five minutes. He asked me to take you through.” Meg ushered Eleanor out of the room ahead of them, before sticking her tongue out at Sanne. “Bet you thought I’d say something dreadful,” she whispered.

  “Not at all,” Sanne said, and gave herself away by tripping over a wheelchair.

  Laughing, Meg tugged her upright again. “I do love her boots, though. Remind me to ask her where she bought them.”

  “I most certainly will not.” With Eleanor a safe distance ahead, Sanne linked her arm through Meg’s. “So, you checking up on your patient or on me?”

  “Well, technically you’re both my patients, and I am nothing if not a very committed doctor.”

  Sanne squeezed her arm and then released it again before the police officer on duty outside room three spotted them. “Either way, I’m glad you’re here.”

  The officer checked their identification and held open the door for them. A familiar wave of fury and sorrow hit Sanne as she walked toward the hospital bed. Hours after leaving the cave, she could still feel its filth crawling on her skin, and she wanted to grab the insensible woman by the shoulders and implore her to get better so they could find the sick fuck who had done this to her.

  Nothing was ever that simple, though. She stopped a short distance from the bed, privately resigned to the fact that, even without the drugs keeping her asleep, it was unlikely the woman would wake up.

  *

  “She’s breathing for herself,” Meg told Sanne in an undertone. “That’s something.”

  Sanne nodded, never taking her eyes off the woman. When the anaesthetic had been discontinued, the woman had instinctively gagged against the tube down her throat, but nothing else had happened since the removal of the ventilator, not even a blip on the monitors.

  “Without the head injury, she might have been expected to regain consciousness quite quickly. As it is”—Meg opened her hands helplessly—“it’s a complete crapshoot.”

  “How long might we be talking about?” Eleanor asked.

  Glancing up from checking the woman’s pupils, Maxwell answered on Meg’s behalf. “How long is a piece of string? It could be minutes, hours, days, or months.”

  “Bloody hell.” Eleanor rubbed the bridge of her nose where her glasses had left a red mark, something Sanne only saw her do when she was under extreme duress. “I need someone in here with her twenty-four seven from now on. I can’t risk missing anything she might say.”

  Maxwell gathered his paperwork. “Providing they stay out of our way, I don’t have a problem with that. I believe you wanted to speak to one of the trauma specialists about her other injuries, too. He’s over by the desk.”

  “Excellent, thank you.” Eleanor picked up her bag. “Sanne, you’re on first watch. Page, text, or call me if anything changes. I’ll send someone over to relieve you at eight.”

  Sanne wrenched her gaze away from the woman’s face. “I can stay a bit later if you want, boss.”

  “Ten, then?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Okay. I’ll leave the uniform posted outside for now, so you can switch out if you want a break. Keep in touch.” The door clicked shut behind her.

  Sanne pulled two chairs up to the bedside. “Déjà vu,” she said.

  “Only with less drool this time,” Meg said, sitting next to her.

  Sanne punched her lightly on the arm. “Shouldn’t you be downstairs getting puked on?”

  “I’ve got half an hour.” Meg lowered her fob watch, her expression turning
serious. “How did it go today?”

  “It was horrible,” Sanne said without hesitation. It was a relief to be able to speak about it. “I showered when we got back, but I still don’t feel clean. The smell…” She shook her head. “I can’t even begin to describe it. It would have been so dark in there, too. It scared me, and I was with other people, and we all had torches.”

  “Do you want to sleep at mine tonight? I’ll be in late, but at least you won’t be on your own all night.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll be fine.” Sanne gave a self-deprecating smile. “I might sleep with the light on, but I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, you’ve got a key if you change your mind.”

  The woman’s assigned nurse entered the room, nodded at them, and began a series of basic checks.

  “I saw my mum this morning,” Meg said as they watched the nurse’s methodical progress.

  “She have her teeth in?”

  “Nope. She’d managed to gum her breakfast, though. Good job it was only scrambled eggs. And she remembered my name.”

  “Excellent. Did you give her my love?” Sanne had been genuinely fond of Meg’s mum throughout her childhood. It was only as an adult that their relationship had turned sour. She suspected Connie blamed her for Meg’s sexuality, as if Meg would have been straight had Sanne not led her astray. It was nonsense, of course, but people always looked for explanations or excuses when their children disappointed them. In Connie’s case, her sense of devastation had overridden any ability to be rational.

  “Of course I did,” Meg said. “Oh, hell, I better get going.” She kissed Sanne’s cheek, causing the nurse to fumble with and then drop an empty IV bag. “Text me if anything changes.”

  “Won’t that muck up the monitors or something? I don’t want to set all the bells and whistles off.”

  “Naw, it’s bullshit. I use my phone in Resus all the time. Haven’t killed anyone yet.” She blew Sanne another kiss and set off down the corridor at a jog.

  The nurse caught the door before it could close. “I’ll be back in a moment to bathe her,” she told Sanne. “Please don’t set any bells or whistles off while I’m gone.”

  Sanne did her utmost to look responsible. “I won’t.”

  The nurse tried to leave the door ajar, but it swung to, leaving Sanne in the glow of a single lamp and surrounded by the room’s artificial sounds. One by one, she studied the switches on the wall, and when she was certain she had identified the dimmer for the lights, she turned it up a notch. She didn’t want to dazzle the woman, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her opening her eyes to darkness.

  “There, that’s better.” The hand she took felt warmer, which she supposed must be encouraging, even though it lay limp and unresponsive to her touch. “You’re safe here,” she said, echoing what she had told the woman on the moors and willing her to show some sign that she was listening. “He can’t hurt you anymore. You’re safe. But we really need you to wake up and help us.”

  *

  Sanne ran the damp cloth between the woman’s fingers, the way the nurse, Alice, had just shown her. She doubted it was approved procedure for police officers to help out in the ITU, but the door was closed, the blinds were drawn, and Alice didn’t seem to mind. Through every stage of the bed bath, Alice had been chatting to the woman, explaining what was happening, reassuring her, but mainly providing a friendly voice to go with impersonal procedures. Sanne found herself doing the same, no longer shy about talking to someone who was comatose.

  “Do you really think there’s a chance she can hear us?” she asked Alice.

  “I think it’s more habit than anything. Every now and again, I’ve had patients tell me they could hear voices while they were anaesthetised, but they can never give specifics, so they were probably just dreaming.”

  Sanne dipped the cloth, wrung it out, and continued scrubbing at the woman’s hand. SOCO had trimmed the fingernails, but the dirt and blood around the nail beds was proving stubborn.

  “My dad was in here once,” she said. “The doctors told us we should talk to him.” Unlike her mum, Sanne had never heeded the advice, not because she felt scared or uncomfortable, but because she hadn’t wanted to do anything that might speed his recovery. When her mum asked him afterward if he’d heard anything, he told her not to be “so fucking stupid.”

  “Did he get better?” Alice asked. Then, with professional curiosity, “What was it, an accident?”

  “He got better, yeah, but it wasn’t an accident. He had varices in his throat, and they ruptured.”

  Alice nodded without comment and then lowered her head. Sanne had seen many people react like that over the years, the polite acknowledgement, the refusal to make eye contact. Any nurse would recognise oesophageal varices to be a complication of chronic alcoholism. Sanne had found her dad collapsed against the bath in a growing pool of his own blood, and when she had tried to help him, she had slipped on the tiles and ended up covered in gore. Even after another gout had poured from his mouth, he had slapped at her and called her a useless bitch. She had been thirteen years old. Since then, he had survived two further, less severe ruptures, and he still drank five litres of cheap cider a day.

  “Are you finished there, love?” Alice had her hand held out for the cloth. Sanne wondered how many times she had asked for it.

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  Soapy water slopped over the side of the washbowl as Alice took it to the sink. “Can I get you a brew?” she said, busy scrubbing her hands.

  “Tea, no sugar, would be great, but only if you’re making one for yourself.”

  Alice folded the damp towels into a pile, balanced the washbowl on top, and carried everything to the door. “I’ll get your young colleague to help me. Let him stretch his legs a bit and work off a few of those biscuits he keeps pinching.”

  Sanne feigned shock. “A copper pinching brews and biccies? I’ve never heard anything so outrageous.”

  Alice grinned at her and let the door swing shut.

  Sanne stayed by the bedside, kicking her feet idly and watching the woman sleep. After a while, she noticed a mark she had missed, and she leaned forward with a scrap of damp paper towel to dab at it. Finding the spot of blood firmly ingrained, she repositioned the woman’s arm so that she could scrub a little harder. Satisfied with her efforts, she was about to reach for a dry cloth, when the woman’s finger suddenly twitched.

  Sanne froze, staring at the hand in hers and trying to convince herself that she hadn’t just imagined the movement.

  “Can you hear me?” she whispered. Then, louder, “You’re in the hospital. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.” She gasped as she felt the faint pressure renewed. When she returned it, the woman’s eyes opened a crack.

  Sanne’s heart was pounding so hard she felt dizzy. She knew she should go and get a doctor or press something to summon Alice, but she was terrified of doing anything that might disrupt this breakthrough.

  “My name’s Sanne,” she said. “I’m a detective with the East Derbyshire Police. Honey, I know you’re scared and hurting, but can you tell me your name?”

  The woman’s eyes opened slightly wider, two flashes of hazel against the deep purple. Her throat worked as she swallowed, and Sanne realised it was probably sore from the tube. There was no convenient glass of water on the bedside table; no one had expected the woman to need it. On the monitor, green changed to amber as her heart rate rose.

  “I’m going to get a nurse,” Sanne said. She had managed to find the light switch earlier, but she didn’t have a clue which button called for help. “Just try and stay awake for me.”

  The grip on her hand tightened.

  “Rachel.” The woman barely managed a whisper. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and her nostrils flared.

  “Rachel? Rachel what? What’s your surname?”

  The woman’s eyes were already closing, tears leaking down her cheeks. The name she repeated was half-buried in a sob. “Rachel.”

&nb
sp; Sanne felt the fingers around hers grow slack and watched the numbers on the monitor climb back down into green. “Fucking hell,” she whispered. The emergency buzzer above the bed was obvious, now that she no longer needed it. She pressed it anyway, and then pulled out her phone. Eleanor answered immediately. Sanne sat down. Her legs were shaking.

  “Boss, I think I have her name.”

  Chapter Ten

  The patter of rain against her bedroom window and the indignant clucking of wet hens greeted Sanne when she woke. She rolled onto her back and draped her forearm across her face until she grew accustomed to the dull morning light. Her head had hit the pillow at midnight, but she had lain awake for at least another hour, tossing and turning and trying to get Rachel’s voice out of her head. She couldn’t remember her dreams, only a vague sense of claustrophobia that made her grateful to have woken up to daylight, however dismal. Her lack of sleep did nothing to curb her anticipation of the day ahead, though. Now that Rachel was conscious, there was a good possibility they would be able to interview her, and—as she was their only real lead—almost anything she could tell them would propel the investigation forward. Eleanor had already asked Sanne to assist with the interview.

  The prospect made her bounce out of bed. After a few stretches to shake off the stiffness of sleep, she opened her window, letting the cool air turn to mist on her face. Drizzly rain and a dip in temperature had chased away the mugginess of the last week, and the hills wore caps of thick cloud. She waved at the bedraggled rooster and closed the window again. She showered and dressed quickly, unplugging her phone from its charger as she headed for the kitchen. Once the kettle was boiling and the bread was in the toaster, she flipped open the phone’s cover and entered her security code.

  “Shit.”

  The phone had been charging all night, which meant its ring tone had been muted, and four messages and two calls had gone unnoticed. The first message was from her mum, its preview showing an invitation for tea. She bypassed it and opened the thread from Meg.