A Quiet Death

by Cari Hunter

  “Let’s call it a tie.” Liz proffered two charts. “Pick one. Belly ache with—you’ve guessed it—dysuria in Three, or drunk and doubly incontinent in Six.”

  “Please kill me…”

  Meg was reaching for Six when she heard Asif call her name. She waved him over. “Saved by my favourite F2! Everything okay?” she asked.

  Asif was a Foundation Year Two doctor who would be fully qualified in a matter of months, and he had flourished in A&E once he’d realised that 99.5% of his patients weren’t suddenly going to drop dead on him. His expression was unusually troubled, however, and he ushered Meg farther away from the cubicle he’d just left.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think so, but I don’t really know what to do.”

  She read the cover of his patient’s notes. “Anca Miklos. What’s that? Czech? Polish?”

  “Romanian. Her husband brought her in with scalds to both hands. He claims she dropped a pan of boiling water, but the history seems off, and she’s not saying much at all.”

  “Does she speak English?”

  “If she does, she’s choosing not to. The translation service is swamped, and her husband is pushing for her to be discharged.”

  “Right.” Meg snapped the notes closed. She hated bullies, and a long, frustrating shift had her itching for a battle. “How big is this chap?”

  “About six two and well built. Why?” Asif’s voice rose on the question.

  She clapped him on the shoulder. “Go and grab Security in case he gets feisty, and I’ll see you in there.”

  He went to find help, leaving Meg to enter the cubicle alone. The young woman on the bed tensed as Meg drew back the curtain, while the man at her side continued to eat a bag of crisps, stuffing them in by the fistful and crunching loudly.

  “I’m Dr. Fielding.” She deliberately positioned herself between Anca and her husband. “I’d like to examine your hands, Anca, if that’s all right with you?”

  She might as well have spoken to a statue. Unable to seek guidance or permission, Anca froze, her mouth falling open and her breath coming in rapid pants. She tried to see around Meg, and Meg sensed rather than heard the man get to his feet.

  “We are ready to go,” he said, standing close enough to Meg to make her flinch. Taking that as capitulation, he uttered a stream of Romanian, punctuated by gestures that needed no explanation. Anca nodded quickly, struggling to untie her gown with her bandaged fingers.

  “No.” Meg put a hand on her arm, stilling her efforts, and turned to her husband. “You can go, but Anca stays here. She needs to see a burns specialist. If you interfere with her treatment, I will contact the police. Do you understand me?”

  The man’s nostrils flared, and he clenched his fists. Meg stayed exactly where she was. Fuck him. If he hit her, that would just make it easier for the police to remove him, and it wouldn’t be the first punch she’d ever taken. She managed not to react as his stance gradually relaxed, though the adrenaline coursing through her was making her legs shake.

  Switching to a charm offensive, he smiled, oblivious to the blobs of crisp stuck between his teeth. “No police. Is not necessary. See?” He took Anca’s right hand, presenting it to Meg; if he heard the whimper his touch provoked, he chose to ignore it. “You look. I will go like you say.” Stroking Anca’s cheek with his free hand, he spoke to her in a gentle tone. When Anca responded by nodding, he kissed her in obvious approval and stepped away from the bedside.

  “You take good care,” he told Meg. “One hour. Then I come back for her.”

  Meg checked her watch. “Shut the curtain behind you.” She waited until his footsteps faded. Anca was staring at the gap he had left in the curtain as if expecting him to leap through and grab her by the throat.

  “Hey,” Meg said quietly. “He’s not there. He’s not—” She touched Anca’s chin, encouraging her to make eye contact. “Do you speak any English?”

  “No English,” Anca whispered. “No English.”

  “That’s fine. We can get around that.” Meg took out her mobile and hit the app that had saved the department a small fortune in translator fees over the past few years. She selected Romanian from the drop-down box and typed her first question: May I examine your hands?

  For a long moment she wondered whether Anca could even read, but then a tentative nod gave her the consent she sought. After donning a pair of gloves, she removed the burn dressings. It was immediately apparent why Asif had requested her opinion. Large blisters had formed across the dorsa of both hands, and each finger was red-raw where the skin had sloughed. The palms were just as badly damaged, with no sign of a splash pattern to support the history of a dropped pan. The injuries were more consistent with someone taking Anca’s wrists and forcing her hands into boiling water.

  “Jesus.” Meg ripped off her gloves and flung them in the bin. She wanted to run after the husband and slam his smug face into something hard until it knocked a confession out. Instead she typed: Did someone do this to you? Did someone hurt you?

  “No.” Anca’s denial was instantaneous. “No, no, no.”

  “You’re safe here. Aw, hell…” Meg typed out the reassurance, adding: I promise he won’t hurt you again.

  “No.” Anca closed her eyes, sending tears streaming down her cheeks. “No, no.”

  Meg stuck her head out of the curtain. “Asif, get me an ETA on a translator, and I need Security to stop that bloke from coming back in here.”

  “Okay, I’ll sort it,” Asif said.

  “What pain relief has she had?”

  “Brufen and co-codamol. He wouldn’t let me cannulate her.”

  “Fucking arsehole. Shake down Liz for the drugs key and grab me ten of morphine, will you?” She collected an IV tray and returned to the cubicle, where she typed out another message for Anca: I’m going to put a little needle in your arm and give you a lot of good drugs through it. They’ll take the pain away. Is that okay?

  Anca read the screen carefully. Then she looked at Meg and held out her arm.

  *

  In an attempt to reach the road before dusk, Sanne had pushed the pace hard, almost jogging along an easy paved stretch of the Pennine Way and then cursing as the slabs of stone abruptly switched to wet peat and rocky obstacles. Having found no litter and only two sets of fresh footprints, which probably belonged to the couple who’d discovered the body, she and Nelson hadn’t needed to stop for long.

  On the ridge of the hill, the wind was whipping the vegetation into submission, the slender stems of cottongrass bowed horizontal by the onslaught. Sanne pulled on the woolly hat she knew made her look ridiculous, and watched the final arc of the sun sink below the horizon. She heard the rasp of Nelson’s breath as he caught up with her, and she let him tug her hat straight. The sun had snatched down the scant warmth of day, making him shiver and scan the barren moors as if for some kind of refuge.

  “Our garden faces west,” he said at length, now staring ahead. “Did I tell you I’d put a little pond in at the bottom?”

  “Yes,” Sanne said, unsure where he was going with this but wary of his tone. “You also confessed to pinching frogspawn from the park.”

  “Ah, so I did. Well, Nemy is obsessed with sitting there to watch the sun go down. She says it sets the water on fire.”

  “That’s very poetic for a ten-year-old.”

  His smile was faint, almost an afterthought. “She reads a lot. She has more books than space on her shelves.”

  “Good for her.” Sanne had been the same growing up, and her mum had always found the money for books, even if they were dog-eared second-hand ones from the charity shops. Being sent to her room had never worked as a punishment, as it was merely quiet time away from Keeley and Michael, where her dad couldn’t belt her and she could read to her heart’s content.

  Nelson rubbed a hand across his face, and the troubled gesture jerked her back to the present.

  “What the hell was she doing out here, San?” he said. “Hardly any cloth
es on, and no shoes. She was such a tiny mite, barely bigger than Nemy. How bad must things have been for her that running alone into this was the better option?”

  “I don’t know. Pretty damn awful, at a guess.” Sanne could have kicked herself for not being more mindful of his reaction. Since setting off, she had devoted all her attention to their destination, leaving him to follow in her footsteps. Without needing to concentrate on the route, he had evidently been dwelling on the case. She touched his arm and felt the tension stiffening his body. Neither of them was stupid or naive enough to have overlooked the potential significance of the victim’s missing clothing.

  “Are you going to be all right to work this one?” she asked.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He caught her eye as he answered, and her nod effectively drew a line under the conversation. Returning to practicalities, she indicated a dull grey strip on the opposite hillside, so obviously engineered that it stood prominent even in the failing light. “See that? That’s Old Road.”

  Using the head torches to illuminate the steep descent, they picked their way down the hill and crossed Smithy River at the only bridge. Nelson eyed the remaining steep embankment in the manner of a knackered hero compelled to go mano a mano with the villain of the piece.

  “Who put that there?” he asked in a passable imitation of a teenager’s whine.

  “Wicked, isn’t it?” Sanne tried not to sound too cheerful. Her knees and hips far preferred going up to along or down. “Five minutes, mate, and it’ll be all over. I promise.”

  It was rush hour, according to her watch, but no traffic had passed while they’d had the road in sight, and on reaching it, she felt safe enough to stand in its centre and gather her bearings. Facing back toward the river, she pointed west.

  “The road starts just after Hawdale village, four or five miles from the end of the motorway. There’s a couple of farms thattaway, and a sailing club at Smithy Reservoir. I think there might be another farm somewhere farther east, but nothing else until the road reconnects to the Snake.”

  “No crash barriers or fencing on this stretch,” Nelson said. “I wonder how far it’s open for.”

  “I’m not sure. The council have really let the maintenance slide. Given our vic’s location, I think it’d be sensible to focus on this immediate area, for now at least.” Sanne corrected the angle of her torch and stopped on the verge of teetering into a pothole. “It’d be easier if we could say she definitely used the bridge, but the river’s shallow enough to ford in several places, and her chances of finding the Pennine Way were slim to none if she was running around in the dark.”

  Nelson paced a few steps, his light picking out a crumbling stone wall and forcing a bleat from a startled sheep. “How about we split and try walking twenty minutes in opposite directions?” he suggested. “Factoring in time for a cursory search, we should be able to cover a good half-mile.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Sanne glanced at her mobile. “I’ve got bugger-all signal. Call me on the radio if you find anything.”

  “Or if I trip over my own feet and wind up in a bog?” He didn’t sound at all fazed by the prospect. He put his torch beneath his chin and stuck his tongue out. “I’m going to scare the pants off the locals, aren’t I?”

  “I hope not. Most of the farmers carry shotguns.”

  “Bloody hell.” He instantly lowered his light. “Please come quick if you hear a bang.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine. Just try not to creep up on any more sheep.”

  He gave a cub’s honour salute. “East or west? Do you have a preference?”

  “East? I think it climbs a bit in this direction, and I know your poor legs are tired.”

  “Thank you kindly,” he said, not rising to the bait. “I make it ten past five. Shall we stop and turn back at half-past?”

  “Yep.” Suddenly unsure whether Eleanor would approve of their going-solo strategy, Sanne decided to put some sort of safety measure in place. “Buzz me after ten?”

  “Will do.”

  Her worries assuaged, she started out, the crunch of Nelson’s footsteps muted almost at once by the wind and by the road’s curve. Moving her head slowly from side to side, she used her torch to scan the road and its verges but saw little except rough vegetation, more potholes, and the occasional sheep. The clear sky threatened an early frost, but she didn’t feel cold, just an edgy excitement that combined nerves and anticipation into one jittery package. When her radio vibrated, it sent her pulse rocketing.

  “Checking in as requested,” Nelson said. “Are you having more luck than I am?”

  “Nope.” She kept walking, hoping to burn off the excess adrenaline by tackling the incline in front of her. “I’m probably having less.”

  “Great. See you in a bit.”

  She settled the radio on her belt and dug in for the climb, reaching the top without breaking a sweat. She stopped there to gauge the next stretch of road, which continued level for two hundred yards before hurtling around a hairpin bend. It was the sort of corner that killed bikers on the Snake: a fast approach into a sharp turn that was easy to misjudge. She’d had her fair share of near misses in the years she’d owned her cottage, most of them on her way home from fourteen-hour shifts.

  The rumble of an approaching vehicle forced her off the road and into a thicket of grass and bracken. Keen to avoid being delayed by questions, she extinguished her torch and ducked low, scribbling down the number plate of the Range Rover as it passed. Its driver tore around the corner with a scant touch of the brakes, his confidence suggesting he was local to the area. By the time Sanne reached the bend, his rear lights were a pinprick in the distance, and they disappeared when he turned onto a side road without indicating. She recorded the road’s approximate location and tucked her notebook back into her pocket.

  With five minutes still to go, she adopted a more cautious position, sticking close to the soft verge on the left so as not to get minced by another speeding four-by-four. A sturdy crash barrier protected the opposite side, to prevent drivers from careering toward the river should they skid. Her attention was so focused on the road that she didn’t see the carcass until she slipped in it.

  “Shit!”

  Her left foot slid out at an angle, and she dropped to her other knee to avoid falling onto her arse. Congealed blood and loops of bowel were gathered around her boot. She stared at the gore, unable to fathom its origin for the time it took her brain to kick into gear.

  “Fucking hell,” she whispered, quickly identifying fleece and hooves and a curved horn. “It’s just a fucking sheep.”

  She pushed upright again and followed a faint smear that terminated six inches shy of the road’s dividing line. Two distinct skid marks started twenty yards before the smear, the sharp braking consistent with a driver whipping around the corner and only seeing the hazard once it was too late to swerve.

  Having carefully tracked to the end of the blackened lines, Sanne listened for traffic and then crouched on the tarmac. Orange, white, and blackened glass glittered in her torchlight, while several other fragments of debris, including the remains of the sheep, appeared to have been swept or dragged onto the verge. A metal screw rolled out from beneath her finger when she lifted a large section of silver plastic. Both looked as if they’d come from the vehicle’s bumper, which would have been completely wrecked by such an impact, but she couldn’t find the rest of it.

  “Why would you only take half of it with you?” she murmured, her curiosity piqued. She could understand the driver clearing the road for the sake of other motorists or just to unblock it for themselves, but making the effort to remove a random piece, irreparable and covered in sheep splatter, seemed less logical. She walked along the verge again, pushing the bracken aside with her boots to ensure she wasn’t mistaken. Then she keyed Nelson’s code into her radio.

  “Hey,” she said to his weary greeting. “I might have something here.” As she spoke, an incongruous splash of colo
ur caught her eye. She released the talk button and wrestled a glove onto one hand. The sheep’s entrails slithered apart when she delved into them, allowing her a tenuous hold on the yellow shard of plastic embedded in a soft sliver of organ. She swiped away a blood clot to reveal a “B” and a single straight line at the beginning of the number plate’s second letter. Excitement banished her uncertainty, and she buzzed Nelson again. “I think I know where and how our vic escaped,” she said.

  *

  In the time it took Nelson to reach Sanne’s location, she had formulated a convincing sequence of events and taken the plunge by requesting assistance from SOCO.

  “Hmm.” Nelson had stooped to examine the glass, and he drew the sound out, piling on the agony as she waited for his verdict. He walked back toward her, giving the crash site a wide berth. “How long did SOCO say they’d be?”

  She felt a smile twitch at the corner of her lips. While she didn’t need his validation, she always preferred to have it.

  “At least an hour. They’re still in the process of removing the vic, but Ted’s getting someone to us ASAP.”

  Nelson displayed a cube of glass on the palm of his gloved hand. “Tinted rear window?” He passed it to her, and she turned it in her fingers. Unlike the jagged, random chunks of headlight and indicator glass, it bore the familiar square shape of shattered safety glass, the type often found in the clothing and hair of people involved in side-impact collisions.

  “For argument’s sake, let’s assume the driver’s a bloke,” she said. “He stops to clear up the mess, collecting anything that might ID his car. Meanwhile the vic snatches the opportunity to break a window and run.”

  Nelson picked up the thread. “She heads downhill, toward the river. She might’ve seen the farms they’d passed, or perhaps it’s just instinct to run down and not up.”

  Sanne spun around, picturing the child, unsteady and panicked, barefoot and already freezing as she tried to outrun her captor. “He must’ve heard the window smash and been right behind her.” She swallowed and cleared her throat. Imagining such terror had made her voice catch. “So she crossed the river and went back up onto the moors, where it’s easier to hide. If it was dark, that would’ve helped her to slip out of sight.”