‘Tora Guthrie?’ he asked, stopping two yards away and looking down at the huge, canvas-covered form at my feet.
‘Yes,’ I said, when he’d looked up at me once more. ‘And I think you might be more interested in that one.’ I indicated the hole. The woman was already standing on the edge, staring down. Behind her I watched two more police cars pull into my yard.
The policeman-farmer took two strides to bring himself to the edge of my pit. He looked in and then turned back to me.
‘I’m Detective Inspector Andy Dunn of the Northern Constabulary,’ he said. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Dana Tulloch. She’ll take you inside now.’
‘About six months,’ I said, wondering when I was going to stop shivering.
We were in the kitchen, Detective Sergeant Tulloch and I sitting at the pine table, a WPC standing in the corner of the room. Normally, our kitchen is the warmest room in the house, but it didn’t feel so today. The sergeant had unbuttoned the neck of her coat but hadn’t removed it. I could hardly blame her, but seeing her all bundled up wasn’t exactly making me feel any warmer. The constable, too, had kept her outdoor coat on, but at least she’d made us coffee and the hot mug between my hands helped a little.
Without asking, DS Tulloch had plugged a tiny notebook computer into a socket on the wall and, in between shooting questions at me, had been typing away at a speed that would have impressed a 1950s typing pool.
We’d been inside about thirty minutes. I’d been allowed to change out of my wet clothes. Actually, they’d insisted. Everything I’d been wearing had been taken from me, bagged and carried out to one of the waiting cars. I hadn’t been given a chance to shower, though, and I was very conscious of peat stains on my hands and dark-brown earth under my fingernails. I couldn’t see the field from where I sat but I’d heard several more vehicles pull into the yard.
Three times already, in increasingly tiresome detail, I’d described the events of the last hour. Now, it seemed, it was time for a different line of questioning. ‘Five or six months,’ I repeated. ‘We moved here at the beginning of December last year.’
‘Why?’ she asked. I’d already noticed her soft, sweet east-coast accent. She wasn’t from Shetland.
‘Beautiful scenery and a good quality of life,’ I replied, wondering what it was about her that was annoying me. Nothing specifically to complain of: she had been polite, if a little detached; professional, if a little cold. She was particularly economical with language, not a word escaping her lips that wasn’t strictly necessary. I, on the other hand, was talking too much and getting edgier by the minute. This tiny, pretty woman was making me feel oversized, badly dressed, dirty and – of all things – guilty.
‘And it’s one of the safest places to live in the UK,’ I added, with a mirthless smile. ‘At least, that’s what it said on the job ad.’ I leaned towards her across the table. She just looked at me.
‘I remember thinking it a bit odd,’ I gabbled on. ‘I mean, when you apply for a new job, what are the questions you like to ask? Does it pay well, how many days’ holiday do I get, what are the hours like, how expensive are the local houses and are there good schools in the area? But “Is it safe?” How many people ask that? Almost makes me think you have something to prove up here.’
Detective Sergeant Tulloch had the sort of self-possession I could only dream of. She broke eye contact and looked down at her mug, so far untouched. Then she raised it and sipped carefully before putting it down again. Her lipstick left a faint pink smudge. I never wear lipstick myself and hate to see lipstick stains. They look too personal, somehow, to be left behind like litter; a bit like dropping a tampon wrapper on someone’s lounge carpet.
DS Tulloch was looking at me. There was a glint in her eyes that I couldn’t identify. She was either pissed off or amused.
‘My husband is a ship-broker,’ I said. ‘He used to work at the Baltic Exchange in London. Around the middle of last year he was offered a senior partnership in a business up here. It was too good a deal to turn down.’
‘Bit of an upheaval for you. Long way from the south of England.’
I bowed my head, acknowledging the truth of what she said. I was a long way from the gentle, fertile hills of the English county where I’d grown up; a long way from the dusty, noisy streets of London, where Duncan and I had lived and worked for the past five years; a long way from parents, brothers, friends – if you didn’t count the equine kind. Yes, I was a very long way from home.
‘For me, perhaps,’ I said at last. ‘Duncan is an islander. He was brought up on Unst.’
‘Beautiful island. Do you own this house?’
I nodded. Duncan had found the house and put in an offer on one of several visits he’d made last year to sort out the details of his new business. Thanks to a trust fund he’d come into on his thirtieth birthday, we hadn’t even needed to apply for a mortgage. The first time I’d seen our new home was when it was already ours and we’d followed the removal vans along the A971. I’d seen a large, stone-built house, about a hundred years old. Large sash windows looked out over Tresta Voe at the front and the hills of Weisdale at the back. When the sun shone (which, I grant you, it sometimes did), the views were stunning. There was plenty of land outside for our horses; plenty of room inside for the two of us and anyone else who might happen to come along.
‘Who did you buy it from?’
Realizing the significance of the question, I came out of my little daydream. ‘I’m not really sure,’ I admitted.
She said nothing, just raised her eyebrows. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so. I wondered if it was an interrogation technique: say the minimum yourself and let the suspect gabble. That’s when I realized I was a suspect in a murder investigation; and also that it’s possible to feel scared, angry and amused, all at the same time.
‘My husband handled it,’ I said.
Her eyebrows stayed up.
‘I was working out my notice in London,’ I added, not wanting her to think me one of those women who leave all the financial stuff to the menfolk, even though I am. ‘But I do know that no one had lived here for quite some time. The place was in pretty bad shape when we moved in.’
She glanced around my none-too-tidy kitchen, then looked back at me.
‘And the previous owners were some sort of trust. Something to do with the church, I think.’ I’d taken so little interest. I’d been busy at work, completely unenthusiastic about the move and preoccupied with . . . stuff. I’d just nodded at what Duncan told me and signed where he’d asked me.
‘Yes, definitely something to do with the church,’ I said, ‘because we had to sign an undertaking that we’d behave appropriately.’
Her eyes seemed to get darker. ‘Meaning?’
‘Well, daft things, really. We had to promise that we wouldn’t use it as a place of worship of any kind; that we wouldn’t turn it into a drinking or gambling house; and that we wouldn’t practise witchcraft.’
I was used to people being amused when I told them that. DS Tulloch looked bored. ‘Would such a contract be enforceable, legally?’ she asked.
‘Probably not. But as we don’t practise witchcraft, it’s never really been an issue.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said, without a smile. I wondered if I’d offended her and decided I didn’t care. If her sensitivities were that delicate she should have chosen a different profession. The room seemed to be getting colder and my limbs were stiffening up. I stretched, stood up and turned to the window.
Behold the crime scene: more police had arrived, including several wearing jumpsuits that appeared to have been made from white plastic bin-liners. A tent had been erected over my excavations. Red-and-white-striped tape stretched the length of our barbed-wire fence and marked out a narrow pathway from the yard. A uniformed policeman was standing just a little too close to Jamie. As I watched, he flicked cigarette ash on to the canvas that covered him. I turned back.
‘But given the state
of the corpse out there, maybe someone around here dabbles in the black arts.’
She sat up, lost her bored look.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You should wait for the post-mortem. I could be wrong. The pelvic region is my specialty, not the chest. Oh, and could you ask your colleagues to be careful? I was fond of that horse.’
‘I think they have more on their minds than your horse right now, Dr Guthrie.’
‘It’s Miss Hamilton. And they can show some respect.’
‘What do you mean?
‘Respect for my property, my land and my animals. Even the dead ones.’
‘No, what do you mean, “It’s Miss Hamilton”?’
I sighed. ‘I’m a consultant surgeon. We are addressed as Mr or Miss. Not Dr. And Guthrie is my husband’s name. I’m registered under my own.’
‘I’ll try to remember that. In the meantime, we need to do something about that horse.’
She stood up. My heart quickened.
‘We’ll need to get rid of the carcass,’ she went on. ‘As quickly as possible.’
I stared at her.
‘Today,’ she emphasized, when I hadn’t responded.
‘I’ll bury him myself just as soon as you’re done,’ I said, as firmly as I knew how.
She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. The Scientific Support Unit from the mainland will be arriving soon. They’ll need to sweep the entire area. We may be here for weeks. We can’t work around a rotting horse.’
I think it was her choice of words, accurate but insensitive, that caused the tight ball to materialize in my chest, the one that tells me I’m mad as hell and I really, really need to take care what I say for the next few minutes.
‘And, as I’m sure you’re aware, burying your own horse has been illegal for several years,’ she continued. I glared back at her. Of course I was bloody aware: my mother had been running a riding school for the last thirty years. But I was not about to argue with Sergeant Tulloch about the prohibitive cost of having a horse taken away on Shetland. Nor was I going to tell her about my (admittedly very sentimental) need to keep Jamie close.
Tulloch stood up and looked round. She spotted the wall-mounted telephone above the fridge and walked over to it.
‘Would you like to make the arrangements,’ she said, ‘or should I?’
I honestly think I might have hit her at that point; I even started to stride towards her and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the WPC step forward too. Fortunately for us both, before Tulloch could lift the receiver, the phone rang. To my increasing annoyance, she answered it, then held it out. ‘For you,’ she said.
‘You don’t say!’ I made no move to take it from her.
She withdrew her hand. ‘Do you want to take the call or not? Sounds important.’
Giving her my best glare, I grabbed the phone and turned my back on her. A voice I’d never heard before started talking.
‘Miss Hamilton, Kenn Gifford here. We have a twenty-eight-year-old patient. Thirty-six weeks pregnant. She arrived about fifteen minutes ago, haemorrhaging badly. Foetus showing signs of mild distress.’
I willed myself to focus. Who the hell was Kenn Gifford? Couldn’t place him at all; one of the house officers, maybe, or a locum?
‘Who is she?’ I said.
Gifford paused. I could hear paper being shuffled. ‘Janet Kennedy.’
I swore under my breath. I’d been keeping a close eye on Janet. She was about three stone overweight, had a placenta praevia and, to cap it all, was a rhesus negative blood group. She was booked in for a Caesarean six days from now but had gone into labour early. I looked at the clock. It was five-fifteen. I thought for a second.
Placenta praevia means that the placenta has implanted in the lower, rather than the upper, part of the uterus. It blocks the baby’s exit, meaning the little tyke is either stuck where it is – not a good situation – or is forced to dislodge the placenta and interrupt its own blood supply – an even worse situation. Placenta praevia is a major cause of bleeding in the second and third trimesters and of haemorrhage in the final two months.
I took a deep breath. ‘Get her into theatre. We need to anticipate intra-operative bleeding so let the blood bank know. I’ll be twenty minutes.’
The line went dead, just as I remembered that Kenn Gifford was the Chief Consultant Surgeon and Medical Director at the Franklin Stone Hospital, Lerwick. In other words, my boss. He’d been on sabbatical for the past six months, his departure pretty much coinciding with my arrival on Shetland. Although he’d approved my appointment, we’d never met. Now he was about to watch me perform a difficult procedure with a serious possibility the patient might die.
And there I’d been, thinking the day couldn’t possibly get any worse.
2
TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER I was gowned up, scrubbed and heading for Theatre 2 when a house officer stopped me.
‘What?’
‘We don’t have any blood,’ the young Scotsman replied. ‘The bank’s out of AB negative.’
I stared at him. What the hell else was going to go wrong? ‘You’re kidding me,’ I managed.
He wasn’t kidding. ‘It’s a rare group. We had an RTA two days ago. We have one unit, that’s all.’
‘Well, get some more, for God’s sake!’ On top of everything I’d been through already that day, I was sick with nerves about the coming procedure. I’m afraid I don’t do polite in those circumstances.
‘I’m not an idiot, you know. We’ve ordered it. But the helicopter can’t take off at the moment. The wind’s too strong.’
I glared at him and then pushed my way into theatre just as a huge man in airforce-blue cotton scrubs made the final incision into Janet’s uterus.
‘Suction,’ he said. He took a tube from the attendant scrub nurse and inserted it to drain off the amniotic fluid.
In spite of the mask and theatre hat he wore, I could see at once that Kenn Gifford was exceptional-looking; not handsome, quite the opposite in fact, but striking all the same. The skin I could see above the mask was fair, the type that reveals the blood vessels beneath it and looks permanently pink after a certain age. He hadn’t reached that age yet, but the theatre was hot and his colour was high. His eyes were small and deep set, hardly visible from a distance and of an indeterminate colour, even close up. They weren’t blue or brown or green or hazel. Dark rather than light; grey perhaps came the closest, and yet I didn’t look at him and think, grey eyes. Large, half-moon shadows lay beneath them.
He saw me and stepped back, holding his hands at shoulder height and, with his head, gestured me forward. A screen had been set up to shield Janet and her husband from the gorier aspects of the operation. I looked down, determined to think about nothing but the job in hand; certainly not of Gifford, who was standing, uncomfortably close, just behind my left shoulder.
‘I’ll need some fundal pressure,’ I said, and Gifford moved round to face me.
I went through the usual checklist in my head, noting the position of the baby, location of the umbilical cord. I put my hand under the baby’s shoulder and eased gently. Gifford began to push on Janet’s abdomen as my other hand slipped in around the baby’s bottom. My left hand moved upwards to cup the head and neck and then gently, forcing myself to go slowly, I lifted the mucus-covered, blood-smeared little body out of his mother and into his life. I felt that second of sheer emotion – of triumph, elation and misery all at once – that makes my face sting, my eyes water and my voice tremble. It passes quickly. Maybe one day it won’t happen at all; maybe I’ll get so used to bringing new life into the world that it will cease to affect me. I hope not.
The baby began to scream and I allowed myself to smile, to relax for a second, before I handed him to Gifford – who had been watching me very closely – and turned back to Janet to clamp and cut the cord.
‘What is it? It is all right?’ came her voice from behind the screen.
Gifford too
k the baby to the Kennedys, allowing them a few moments to cuddle and greet their son before the weighing and testing would begin. My job was to take care of the mother.
Over at the paediatrician’s table, Gifford was calling out numbers to the midwife, who was recording them on a chart.
‘Two, two, two, one, two.’
He was checking the baby against the Apgar score, a test devised to check the health and fitness of the newborn. Baby Kennedy had scored nine; the test would be repeated twice more but I didn’t need the results. I knew he was pretty much perfect.
I couldn’t say the same for the mother. She’d lost a lot of blood, more than we were able to replace and the bleeding was continuing. Immediately after delivery the anaesthetist had given her Syntocinon, the drug routinely administered to prevent post-partum haemorrhage. In most cases it worked. In a very few it didn’t. This was going to be one of the few. I delivered the placenta and then called my boss over.
‘Mr Gifford.’
He crossed the room and we stood a little back from the Kennedys.
‘How much blood would you say she’s lost?’ I asked. Glancing to the left, my eyes were on a level with his shoulder.
‘Couple of units, maybe more.’
‘We have exactly one unit in stock.’
He cursed under his breath.
‘She’s still haemorrhaging,’ I said. ‘She can’t lose any more.’
He stepped closer to Janet and looked at her. Then at me. He nodded. We walked round the screen and stood facing the Kennedys. John was holding his son, joy beaming out of every muscle in his face. His wife, on the other hand, did not look well.
‘Janet, can you hear me?’
She turned and made eye contact.
‘Janet, you’re losing too much blood. The drug we’ve given you to stop the bleeding hasn’t worked and you’re getting very weak. I need to perform a hysterectomy.’
Her eyes widened in shock.
‘Now?’ her husband said, his face draining pale.
I nodded. ‘Yes, now. As soon as possible.’
He looked at Gifford. ‘Do you agree with this?’
Sacrifice Page 2