He was absolutely the last person she’d expected to see walking into the staffroom at Penhally Bay Surgery at that time of day. She’d been certain that it would be safe…that he would still have been out doing home visits…and her instant reaction to those deep blue eyes had been as visceral as ever.
She still didn’t know whether she was horrified that she might have to deal with him on occasion while he was a locum in the practice, if she was called out to help one of his patients, or whether she was delighted that he had reappeared in her life again.
What she did know was that every breath she’d taken in his vicinity had drawn in the unique mixture of soap and man that she’d never been able to forget, and what was worse, when he’d leaned towards her she’d been able to feel his breath on her cheek and even ruffling the hairs of her new, much shorter hairstyle.
‘There’s a gateway just a bit further on. I take it that’s the one we’re looking for?’ Mike said as he indicated and swung the vehicle to a stop just beyond where they’d halted a short while ago. ‘Can you—?’ he began, but Maggie had anticipated his request and was already out of her seat, racing to open the gate.
‘Are there any beasts in the field?’ he called. ‘Anything that could get out on the road and cause even more problems?’
‘Nothing that I can see,’ Maggie replied as she swung the gate wide and found the loose rock that the farmer had obviously left ready for use as a prop. ‘But if you swing wide, we can use the headlights to make certain. Then I can leave this open.’
The wide swathe of light not only confirmed that the field was empty of any sheep or cows but also flashed across the jumble of bikes behind a sturdy growth of gorse.
‘Yes! They’re still there!’ Maggie called. ‘Did you see them?’ She hurried across the short-cropped turf, pausing just long enough to count how many bikes there were.
‘How many are there?’ Adam asked, his deep voice startling her as she hadn’t heard him following her across the grass.
‘Five, all about the same size so, as Kate said, they’re probably all around the same age. But where’s the mine?’ she demanded, turning in a complete circle. ‘That end of the field is a complete jumble of hills and rocks, a bit like a mini-tor, but there’s no ruined building with a tall chimney anywhere near here.’
‘Well, if it isn’t in this field then it must be in one near here, or they wouldn’t have left their bikes,’ Adam pointed out, and swiftly set off up the steep slope of the field towards the rough ground, his long legs making short work of the distance as he called back, ‘I’ll climb up there and see if there’s anything visible over the next wall.’
‘Here,’ Mike said as he caught up with them. ‘I brought torches and emergency packs, just in case.’
Maggie grabbed a torch and one of the bags, cross with herself that she’d completely forgotten about their equipment. She’d only jumped out of the cab to open the gate, then had got carried away with the hunt for evidence of the children.
She was hurrying to keep up with the men’s far longer legs when she tripped over something near a stray gorse bush.
With a muttered imprecation she bent to see what it was. Probably a broken branch from the last storm, or perhaps from hungry cattle taking advantage of the fact that gorse was one of the few native plants that grew and flowered right through the year. But it wasn’t gorse. It was a piece of a weathered old sawn plank with a very fresh break at one end.
Maggie swung her torch around, wondering where the other piece had gone, and what a stray plank was doing up here in the first place. There certainly weren’t any buildings that she could see, only the rocky formation in front of her, with the sprawl of dense gorse growing at its foot.
The beam caught a glimpse of the colour change on several branches that had been scuffed. One had been recently broken, as though some animal had tried to force a way into the bush.
‘Not a very hospitable place to want to go,’ she muttered as she peered through the density of the plant’s prickly canopy, but there was definitely nothing there but a big dark shadow. The bushes were thick and vigorous but certainly weren’t anywhere near big enough to hide five youngsters, let alone the ruin of an engine house for a mine.
‘Can you see anything?’ she called up to Mike and Adam, marvelling that she had no difficulty discerning which was which even though it was now nearly dark. Mike had the broader, more muscular shoulders, thanks to his regular attendance at a gym, but was several inches shorter than Adam’s leaner, more naturally athletic body.
‘Can’t see anything that looks like a mine,’ Mike called back down. ‘We must have the wrong bikes for a different set of kids. Perhaps someone’s been stealing them and stockpiling them up here, and is going to collect their stash at some time.’
‘Where do you think we should look next?’ Adam said as he leapt lightly from one rock to another until he landed almost at her feet, apparently unhampered by the second awkward bag of equipment he’d taken from Mike.
‘I have absolutely no…’ Maggie paused and turned her head from side to side. ‘Shh! Did you hear that?’
‘What?’ Mike’s footwear was clattering on the granite as he completed his descent to join them by the gorse bushes. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘There it is again,’ Maggie insisted, and turned the beam of her torch towards the bush. ‘It sounded almost as if a kitten’s caught in that gorse.’
Except it hadn’t sounded exactly like that, because the noise was fainter and seemed much further away. Perhaps it was nothing more than the weak bleat of an early lamb in a nearby field. Perhaps…
‘Perhaps it’s the kids?’ Mike suggested. ‘Perhaps they’re somewhere nearby and they can see the light from our torches and the flashes on our uniforms. Hey!’ he shouted loudly, startling Maggie for a second. ‘Is there anybody there?’
This time there was no mistaking the sound they heard because it was louder, as though someone was shouting with renewed energy now that there was someone listening.
‘We’re here!’ called a distant childish voice that definitely came from the middle of the gorse bush.
‘But I looked there and couldn’t see anything,’ Maggie protested as Adam dropped to his knees beside her.
‘Neither can I,’ she heard him mutter, then stifle a curse when there was the unmistakable sound of ripping cloth as he tried to force a path through the sturdy stems and branches. ‘Unless…Got it!’ he exclaimed, and she and Mike heard the sound of splintering timber.
‘What have you found?’ Maggie demanded as she dropped to her knees behind him, grateful for the sturdy fabric of her uniform.
‘I think it’s the entrance to an adit,’ Adam said tersely, then there was the sound of more splintering timber and a muttered, ‘Ouch!’
‘What’s an adit?’ Maggie demanded, even as she wondered what he’d done to hurt himself.
‘It’s a mining term for a horizontal—or nearly horizontal—shaft into a mine,’ Mike explained distractedly as he took the broken pieces of wood Adam was passing back to him and stacked them aside. ‘It was used for access or drainage, if I remember what my grandfather told me. He was a born and bred tin miner before the bottom dropped out of the international price of tin.’
‘Yes! It is an adit!’ Adam exclaimed over the screeching sound of rusty nails being dragged out of wood. ‘It was obviously boarded up some time ago, either when the yield became uneconomic for the man hours needed to extract it or when the price of tin took that tumble. I certainly don’t remember it ever being worked.’
‘Is there anybody there?’ called a young voice from the depths of the entrance Adam had uncovered.
‘Yes!’ Adam called back, his head stuck into the hole he’d enlarged by tearing the board away. ‘I’m a doctor. Who are you and where are you?’
There was the sound of other voices far in the distance, but the one closest to them shouted back to his companions with a swift, ‘Shut up, you lot! I won�
��t be able to hear what they’re saying with you making that racket!’
‘One at a time, please,’ Adam roared, and everything went quiet.
‘There are five of us,’ the young voice came again, and Maggie was impressed by how calm and controlled he sounded. If she’d been in the same situation…well, there was no chance of that. Her claustrophobia was a very good reason to steer clear of anything in the least bit mine-like. ‘We’re mostly all right,’ continued the young voice, ‘except Tel. He fell on the stope and then some rocks fell down and he’s stuck under them…And there’s wet on the floor under him, so we think he’s bleeding, but we dropped our torch and the bulb broke so we can’t see.’
‘And who are you?’ Adam asked, while Maggie itched to get the talking over and get those kids out of there. They’d been missing for over an hour now and…
‘My name’s Jem…Jeremiah Althorp, and my mum’s…She used to work at the doctors surgery.’
‘Kate!’ Maggie exclaimed, suddenly remembering that the poor woman was waiting for news of her son.
Well, she thought as she speed-dialled the surgery, the number still in her phone from when her mother had been so ill, they might not know the full extent of everybody’s injuries yet but, apart from an understandable tremor in his voice, Kate’s son at least seemed to be relatively safe.
‘Penhally Bay Surgery,’ said the familiar reassuring voice of Hazel Furse. ‘Can I help—?’
‘Hazel, it’s Maggie…Maggie Pascoe. Will you tell Kate that we’ve found the boys and that we’ve been talking to her son?’
‘Oh, thank God!’ Hazel exclaimed, then obviously pulled the receiver away from her ear to call across the reception area, ‘They’ve found them!’
Maggie smiled when she heard the sudden hubbub and cheering at the other end, then Hazel was back on the line.
‘Kate wants to know if you’re coming straight back to Penhally with them…well, with Jem,’ she added in a quieter voice.
‘We won’t be back for a bit, Hazel,’ Maggie confessed. ‘I wanted you all to know as soon as possible that we’ve located the lads, but we haven’t got them out yet. I didn’t want everyone to think that we were still looking for the right mine.’
‘OK.’ Hazel’s tone was more subdued this time. ‘So where are you and how difficult is it going to be to get them out? Are you going to need other emergency services to help? How many of the kids are injured and how badly?’
‘We’re on the road out of the valley, past the junction between Bridge Street and Dunheved Road, on the way to St Piran Hospital,’ Maggie explained, trying to make the directions as simple and as clear as possible. ‘There’s a field on the left, just past a little lay-by, with the gate propped wide open. The ambulance is parked just inside the field facing towards some piles of rocks, with Dr Donnelly’s car beside it. We’re probably going to need a fire crew with ropes and ladders—oh, and another ambulance in case any of the lads need to travel on backboards. Apart from that, we won’t really know until we can get close enough to them to see what we’re dealing with.’
She shuddered at the thought of getting any closer to that mine entrance than she was now. Just the idea of going into that dark, dank opening was enough to make her claustrophobia send her pulse sky high and double her respiration rate.
‘I’ll pass all that on,’ Hazel promised. ‘Keep in touch, Maggie.’
‘Will do,’ she promised.
‘Hey, Maggie, we need you here,’ Mike called over his shoulder before she’d even cut the call.
‘OK. Which set of equipment do you need?’ she said as she squatted beside the prickly bushes that looked as if they were devouring the two men whole. All she could see of Mike was his legs and Adam was nothing more than two obviously male feet clad in a totally inappropriate pair of polished leather shoes.
Even as she watched, that pair of feet started to squirm backwards out of the gorse bush towards her and she could see that his smart suit trousers were already stained and snagged and probably damaged beyond any hope of repair.
‘We’re not ready for our boxes of tricks yet,’ Mike was saying as Adam straightened up and walked the two paces that put him right in front of her.
Pride made her stand her ground, even though the man’s presence had a disastrous effect on her nervous system, and she forced herself to look him straight in the eye.
‘Maggie…’ he began, then it seemed as if he couldn’t hold her gaze any more and he paused so long that she just knew she wasn’t going to like what came next. ‘Look, I know what I’m asking will be…very hard for you but…The thing is, the entrance to the mine is almost completely blocked by debris—loose rocks and suchlike—and neither Mike nor I will fit through it until it’s been excavated.’
‘Well, I’ve just been in contact with Hazel at the surgery,’ she told him hastily, not liking the direction that her vivid imagination was taking her. ‘She’s going to let the emergency services know exactly where we are so they shouldn’t be long. Then we’ll have all the equipment and manpower we need to—’
‘Maggie,’ he interrupted gently. ‘I managed to shine a torch far enough along the adit for Jem to be able to see it reflected off the walls, so he’s absolutely certain that we’re here. Didn’t you hear him tell me that there’s a puddle of blood under one of the lads…the one trapped by the rockfall? From what he said, I don’t think that boy can afford to wait for anyone else to turn up because we don’t know whether he’s bleeding out, or heading for crush syndrome, or what. It’s entirely probable that his only chance of staying alive is for one of us to go down there and take care of him. Mike and I are just too bulky to get through that gap, so that just leaves you.’
‘Me? But I can’t!’ she squeaked as panic tightened its grip around her throat. ‘Adam, you know I can’t. Y-you know that I’m—’
‘Maggie, stop! You’re hyperventilating. Take a breath!’ he ordered, his voice sharp even though it was barely above a whisper in the quiet of the Cornish countryside. He held both her shoulders in warm, firm hands, his thumbs stroking her soothingly through the sturdy fabric of her uniform and sending a shower of shivers through her body. ‘You can do it.’
‘No! I—’
‘Shh!’ he soothed. ‘I know the whole idea freaks you out, but you’ve done it before. Remember?’
‘Remember? Of course I remember!’ she snapped. ‘I didn’t sleep properly for months after that nightmare of an afternoon. You can’t ask me to go in there when you know how bad—’
‘Maggie, I’m not asking you to do it for me,’ he reminded her, with a little shake of her shoulders. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about that lad trapped by the rocks.’
That stopped her in her tracks.
She’d been part of the medical profession long enough to respect her colleagues’ intuition about a situation. Often it flew in the face of logic, but it was uncanny how often it was right, so if Adam had a bad feeling about Tel’s condition…
‘How bad do you think it is?’
‘Well, we all know that youngsters like to exaggerate the gorier things in life but, from what Jem said, I’m almost certain that his friend’s leg has been badly broken by the rocks, and you know as well as I do that he’s likely to lose the leg altogether if he isn’t released soon. But it’s the blood loss that I’m most concerned about,’ he stressed, knowing she would understand the significance of such a situation. ‘There’s far too much of it, if Jem’s description is accurate, and I’m wondering if the bone was splintered by the impact and has done some major venous or arterial damage.’
‘So you think there’s a serious chance that he might be bleeding out?’ she whispered, suddenly understanding that there was something worse than being asked to face one of her worst fears. Being claustrophobic and having to go underground was nothing compared with the prospect of bleeding to death trapped under a pile of rocks. Then there was the prospect of the youngster developing crush syndrome, which could be equally fata
l when the pressure was finally removed.
For just a second, as she pictured herself crawling through into that awful darkness, she was certain that she couldn’t do it, but then she realised something more important. If she didn’t do it, and the lad died, she would never be able to forgive herself. The fact that the young woman she’d tended under the underground train had survived and was slowly getting on with her life had been one of the few things that had made all the nightmares worthwhile.
‘Adam, promise me you’ll stay close,’ she begged, the words already hovering in the chilly air between them before she’d realised she was going to say anything, her breath swirling around them like tortured wraiths.
‘Of course I’ll be here for you, Maggie. Like I was last time,’ he promised, and she knew that whatever else had gone wrong between them, he wouldn’t break his word to her.
‘So,’ she said, trying desperately to sound brisk but very conscious that her teeth were starting to chatter at the imminent prospect of climbing into the mine, ‘how are we going to do this? What do you want me to do?’
‘To put it at its most basic, you need to get in far enough to find out what’s happened to those kids. Start with basic triage, the way you would with every callout. Find out how many are injured and how badly and prioritise how you need to deal with them.’
‘Until I’m in there I’m not going to know how much kit I can take with me,’ Maggie pointed out, concerned that she might not have the right equipment to hand when she reached the boys. ‘A lot of our stuff is in portable boxes or bags because we often have to start work on a patient away from the ambulance. But if I’m the only one going in and I’m going to be climbing or…or squeezing through small spaces…’ She swallowed hard, her imagination already far too vivid for peace of mind.
‘Prioritise,’ he repeated firmly. ‘Most of all, we need to find out what we can do for the one who’s trapped. See if it’s possible to release him or will he just have to be stabilised as best you can until we can get some muscle or some serious machinery in there to free him and get him out?’
Brides of Penhally Bay - Vol 1 Page 35
