Riot Act

Twenty-two

I took Sean to Jacob and Clare’s. Under pressure, it was the only place I could think of that was secluded enough to hide him.

Besides, Jacob’s work means he has a tendency to be highly security conscious. As well as a sophisticated alarm system, a couple of sensors hidden on the driveway link direct to a buzzer in the house. At least we would have fair warning of unexpected visitors.

When I rumbled the Patrol to a jerky standstill on their moss-covered forecourt, the whole place looked dark and quiet, lying as it did under the shadow of the trees, but I knew Jacob would be watching the strange vehicle warily from somewhere. I cut the engine, suddenly aware of a fatigue so overwhelming it made me want to weep. I twisted in my seat.

“Sean?”

For a moment there was silence and all manner of nasty scenarios slithered past my eyes, but then I heard the quiet rustle of clothing as he moved.

“Yeah.” His voice was clogged and raspy. “I’m still with it.”

I climbed out and, once they’d seen my face, both Jacob and Clare came hurrying out of the front door. The orange glow of the hall light flooded out after them, and threw elongated shadows onto the stone sets.

“My God, Charlie, what the hell’s happened?” Jacob demanded, limping forwards as I yanked the passenger door open and Sean’s bloodied figure all but fell out into my arms.

“He’s been shot and he needs help,” I said bluntly, staggering under the weight. I caught their instant withdrawal, their hesitation, and swung to face them.

“I know I’m pushing my luck coming here, but I didn’t know where else to take him,” I said, speaking fast and low. “If you want me to go, tell me now, but make your minds up quick, before he bleeds to death.”

That broke them out of it. Jacob came forwards to help me then. If he hadn’t, I never would have got Sean into the house.

Clare went ahead, fluttering anxiously, holding doors open for us and shooing the dogs out of the way. They were taking far too much interest in the state of the new arrival for my liking.

By general consensus, we put him in the kitchen, where at least the blood he was losing could be mopped off the flagged floor. We propped him gently against the kitchen table and Jacob supported him there while I carefully peeled his coat away from the wound.

Underneath it, my makeshift dressing was drenched scarlet. In the strong light it seemed that the front half of his jacket was stained wet with it. It scared me, the amount he was losing. He couldn’t hope to sustain it.

I took one look at Jacob’s troubled face, and realised he knew it, too.

I clenched my teeth with the effort it took not to cry. You are not going to die on me, Sean . . .

Clare came bustling in then with a big First Aid kit. We broke the seal and found decent-sized sterile dressings inside. I’m not sure they were much more effective than my T-shirt, but at least they looked the part.

Jacob moved away, filled the kettle and shoved it to boil on top of the Aga. Clare had gone again, reappearing with a bundle of ragged towels. “They’re only old,” she said, pale but determined, “but they’ve been washed.”

I nodded gratefully to her, suddenly fiercely proud of my friends. The way they’d taken us in without asking awkward questions. Like who was this guy? And why would anyone want to be shooting at him?

All the time I kept up pressure on the site of the wound, leaning into him, the only way to curb the bleeding. It finally seemed to be slowing up, and at least it gave me the excuse to watch him for a few moments.

Even through the pain and the anger, the times when I’d hated Sean as violently as I’d loved him, I’d never forgotten the beauty of him.

“Sean.” His eyes flickered open at my soft call. There were grim circles round them, shadows etched in deep. “We need to get to that wound, clean it up,” I said. “Are you up to this?”

He nodded once, and eased himself upright. I helped him with the coat, but left as much of his tattered shirt in place as I could. Despite the warmth of the kitchen, he still felt chilled.

“Get him onto the table,” Jacob suggested.

We laid him down flat then, bunching the coat under his head. Clare unfolded some of the towels and laid them over Sean’s torso and legs, trying to keep him warm.

Once the kettle had begun to hum, we ferried hot water in bowls to mop the worst of the blood away. He could still move his fingers, but the front of his shoulder had started to swell, and he didn’t seem to be able to lift his arm much.

At length, I stepped back. “It’s no good, Sean,” I said, dropping another ruined towel into the bowl at my feet. “That bullet’s going to have to come out, and the sooner the better.”

He lifted his head cautiously, body tight with the pain, but his voice seemed detached. “Then you’ll have to do it,” he said.

“You’re joking!” I snapped. “What? Douse you down with whisky and go rooting about in there with a knife and fork? What happened? You in a hurry to die now, soldier?”

He let his head drop back. “What other option is there?” he asked, sounding unbearably tired.

“Let me make a phone call,” I said, throwing a glance as much to Jacob for his permission as to Sean. “Then we’ll see.”

When neither man made any dissent, I moved over to the phone and dialled a number that I didn’t have to look up. While the line rang out at the other end I tried not to pray for the right person to answer. He did.

I didn’t bother with much of a preliminary, and didn’t mention any names, just gave him the bald facts. I asked for his help. It wasn’t easy, but I’d been driven that far before and had come out lucky.

There was what seemed like a long period of silence on the other end of the line. A careful and measured consideration. Not of the possibilities of treating the patient, but of the morality of helping me at all. And all the time I stood there watching Sean across the other side of my friends’ kitchen, and fighting the misery.

“Look,” I said at length, turning away and trying to keep the suppressed rage out of my voice. “If you’re not prepared to come and do this yourself, at least tell me what to expect when I go in there, because one way or another, that bullet’s got to come out of him tonight.” I took a shaky breath, then added, “I just think he’ll have a better chance of surviving if you do it.”

“All right, Charlotte,” said my father, “I’ll come. Keep him warm. Keep him awake if you can, and keep trying to control the bleeding. I’ll need some things, but I should be with you in less than two hours.”

I gave him directions, started to thank him, but I was already speaking into a dead line.

I turned back to Sean as I put the receiver back on its cradle. “Help’s on the way. Just you keep breathing until it gets here or my name’s going to be lower than shit.”

It was not much of a joke and, correspondingly, it raised not much of a smile, but under the circumstances it was the best any of us could muster.

“Thank you, Charlie,” Sean said quietly.

I swallowed. I couldn’t cope with him when he was being anything other than a cold and clinical bastard. “Don’t thank me,” I said bluntly. “We’re nowhere near out of this yet.”

***

Even though we were expecting it, the squawk of the drive alarm made me jump. I looked at my watch, and saw that it was precisely an hour and forty minutes since my phone call. Nevertheless, Clare quickly drew the kitchen curtains and we waited, tensed like deer, while Jacob went to the door.

When he returned a few moments later, my father was behind him.

My father strode immediately to his patient, only pausing to favour me with one brief reproving glance as he came in. He was dressed as though for a Sunday lunchtime stroll to the village pub, in dark green corduroy trousers and a wool check shirt.

Only the stiff tan leather bag didn’t quite fit. The case he’d always carried, first as a doctor, then as a surgeon, for more than thirty years. When he put that down on one of the kitchen chairs it landed with a solid thump that was unnerving.

He unfolded a pair of expensive gold-framed glasses from his inside jacket pocket, and pulled on latex gloves, moving with a deceptively slow kind of haste. As though he was aware that an outright rush would have caused panic.

“What’s his name?” he asked quietly as he slotted a stethoscope round his neck and pulled an inflatable cuff out of his bag.

“Sean,” I said.

For a moment he frowned, then the memory and the realisation hit almost at the same time, flashing over like a sparking match.

He shot a quick glance at Sean’s supine figure, but this time it wasn’t the concerned gaze of doctor to patient, but something darker, and more impenetrable. He waited until the flame had flared and died before trusting himself to speak again.

“All right, Sean,” he said, more loudly, “I’m just going to check your blood pressure.” By the time he’d done so, he was frowning again. For a moment the only sound in the room was the hiss of air escaping from the cuff as he deflated it.

“How is it?” I demanded, recognising the twin dents between his eyebrows as he peeled the stethoscope out of his ears.

“Only a little low, all things considered, but he’s young and fit, and they’re the worst,” my father said, speaking over the top of Sean like he’d suddenly gone deaf. “They maintain pressure on you right up to the point where they crash, and then they can go in seconds.”

He glanced around at the bloodied towels. “You seem to have done a fair job of stopping the bleeding, but I’d like to get some fluids into him, just to be on the safe side, I think.”

He moved me aside almost with impatience and, having been relieved of my immediate responsibility, I felt the energy and the strength slowly seep out of me. I leaned numbly against the nearest wall, limbs heavy, so that it was Clare who ended up holding Sean’s hand as my father slipped the cannula into his distended vein and taped it down.

He plugged a bag of clear liquid into the line and suspended it from the Welsh dresser to one side, seemingly unfazed by the need to improvise.

“What are you giving him?” I asked.

He flicked me a brief glance. “Hartmann’s solution,” he said shortly. “Something to keep his blood vessels inflated and his pressure up.”

I dredged my memory. “Saline? Don’t you think he needs something more than that?”

“It’s a little better than straight saline, and I’m afraid I didn’t have the time or the access to whole blood, even if I’d had a match for him,” he said, irritated. “This will do quite well, Charlotte. Don’t interfere.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it again. He was already pulling out more bottles from the magic bag, moving neatly, with precision. He used the cannula to deliver morphine, and plenty of it, although with an almost cheerful warning that even with an anti-emetic added it would probably make Sean vomit.

Even so, I watched the kinks flatten out of Sean’s spine as the opiate hit his bloodstream, releasing the pressure, gliding him down.

“All right, young man, now let’s have a look at you,” my father said as he bent over the wound, his voice cool as though this sort of thing happened all the time.

He lifted the dressing and inspected the front of Sean’s shoulder for a few moments, gently manipulating the skin around the entry site. Although his hands moved quietly, their touch sure and delicate like a concert pianist, Sean grimaced, trying not to wince.

My father gave him a hard stare over the top of his glasses. “This is not a trial by ordeal,” he said, his tone vaguely acerbic. “I’m sure it’s all very heroic to stay so silent in the face of what must be considerable discomfort, but if you don’t tell me where the pain is greatest, I’m not going to learn where that bullet lies. I’m not a vet who can work by grunts and squeaks alone. Do you understand me?”

“Yes sir,” Sean said, his face bone-white.

He resumed his inspection, but only briefly. “All right, I think I’ve found it. It’s sitting in the belly of the deltoid muscle, not too deep.”

He glanced at Jacob and Clare. “Normally, I’d prefer to do an exploratory under a general anaesthetic,” he said, adding with grim humour, “I don’t suppose either of you two happens to be a trained anaesthetist, by any chance? No? Ah well, I had to ask.”

Instead, he injected lignocaine close to the wound and we waited a few minutes for the local anaesthetic to take effect. It was like being at the dentist, being sent out into the waiting room to read old copies of the Reader’s Digest until your mouth has gone numb enough not to notice the drill.

While we were waiting he dug into the bag again and laid out more equipment in a precise line on a piece of sterile cloth. A pack of forceps, stainless steel kidney-shaped dishes, black suture, and thin curved needles, like the unsheathed claws of a small but lethal cat.

“The adrenaline with the anaesthetic should help to stop the bleeding when I’ve completed the extraction,” my father said to Jacob, nodding to his array of tools, “but you’ll need to be ready with that swab anyway, just in case.”

He seemed to be ignoring me. I doubt I would have been much use as a scrub nurse, anyway. I didn’t want to watch as he pulled back the skin round the entry site and slid the tips of the forceps into the wound, but I found I couldn’t tear my eyes away. It seemed so barbaric.

Even Sean turned his head, preferring to stare into Clare’s fearful face as she sat on the other side of the table, still clutching his fingers. The knuckles of both their entwined hands had turned white.

The look of concentration on my father’s face as he probed the wound was profound. The time ticked by, but he refused to be hurried, making absolutely sure he had a firm grip on the bullet before he attempted to withdraw it along the same track it had followed on the way in.

When the squat, misshapen round finally emerged in a fresh welter of blood, he dropped it with a clang into the waiting dish that Jacob held out for him. The five of us let out our breath in a collective gush at its successful delivery.

My father dealt with the cleaning out and closing up process with an efficiency born of long practise, leaving a neat line of stitches as the only evidence of his invasion. Then he stood back and nodded once, as if pleased with his own handiwork.

While he taped a dressing in place over the stitches I picked the bloodied bullet out of the dish and turned it round in my fingers. The copper outer jacket of the slug had compressed to less than half its original length, mushrooming slightly. It was deformed from the initial contact with whatever had deflected its path, sent it spinning into Sean’s body.

I glanced up, found him watching me, and held the bullet up so he could see it. “It’s a nine millimetre,” I said, and the significance of that wasn’t lost on him.

It rang no bells with my father, though. He unhooked the now-empty bag of saline and withdrew the cannula. “Perhaps there’s somewhere a little more comfortable where we can move the patient to rest?” he asked Jacob.

Jacob suggested the living room, where there was a fire burning and the sofa was large enough to sleep on. Clare jumped up again and went in search of spare pillows and bedding. Between the rest of us we managed to get Sean on his feet and half-walk, half-carry him the short distance to the living room.

“He’s had enough morphine to keep him quiet tonight,” my father said, “but you’ll need to watch him fairly carefully. I’d like to think I’ve cleaned the wound out completely, but there’s always the chance that any clothing debris pulled into it will lead to infection. I’ll leave you a course of antibiotics, but if he starts showing any signs, you’re going to have to get him to a hospital, whatever the consequences. Do you understand me?”

It was my turn to say, stiffly, “Yes sir.”

Clare offered to sit with Sean for a while and Jacob, recognising that there were things that needed to be said, went to keep her company, quietly closing the door behind him.

My father moved back through to the kitchen, peeling off his gloves as he went. When I followed he was scrubbing his hands thoroughly at the butler’s sink. I watched him without speaking until he was done.

“So, Charlotte, are you going to tell me what happened?” he said carefully then, wiping his hands on a towel with vigorous efficiency.

“It’s a long story,” I said wearily.

There was a pause as he waited for me to continue. I didn’t.

He turned. “Did you shoot him?”

I couldn’t work out if I should be flattered or affronted by the question. “If I had done, he’d be dead,” I said, matter of fact, without bravado. “No, I didn’t shoot him.”

He raised a dubious eyebrow at that. “Really? I would have thought Sean Meyer was a prime candidate for it.”

“Why?”

He made an impatient gesture. “He ruined you, Charlotte, in more ways than one,” he said. It should have sounded ridiculously old-fashioned, but from him somehow it didn’t. What did surprise me was the vehemence in his tone.

“I never knew you cared,” I said lightly.

His face tightened at that, the only outward display. “Of course we cared – and still care – about you. Your mother and I had to stand by and watch you go through the torments of hell twice over because of that man.”

“I knew having a fling with Sean when he was my instructor was against the rules, and it was stupid, with hindsight, but it was my choice,” I argued. “But it wasn’t his fault that I was attacked. He wasn’t even on camp when it happened.”

“Has it never occurred to you that perhaps the very reason you were singled out as a victim by the men who raped you,” my father demanded now, “was because they found out about your relationship with Meyer?”

I tried not to flinch. He may have seen it anyway, because his voice softened slightly. “I know you weren’t allowed to say much about it, but you were doing well at your course, weren’t you? Better than most of the men you were training alongside, as I recall.”

“The marks I scored were on my own merits,” I said, suddenly defensive. Sean had been famously tough as an instructor, and not just on me. They said that if he didn’t lose a few trainees from every intake on medical grounds, he was a disappointed man.

He had seemed to know instinctively where everyone’s own personal breaking point lay, just so he could drive you up to and beyond it.

“I’m not suggesting for a moment that you received any sort of preferential treatment,” my father commented. He folded the towel neatly, put it on the draining board. “But what better salve to their wounded egos than to imagine that it wasn’t talent drawing you ahead, but good old-fashioned sex? And what better way for them to reassert their male superiority than the somewhat violent method they chose?”

I shook my head. “Sean didn’t betray me,” I said, “but then, you already knew that, didn’t you?”

He’d been gathering the soiled equipment he’d used, stowing it into his bag, and his momentary stillness told me what I needed to know. The last vital piece of the jigsaw dropped into place, and the picture suddenly became painfully, blindingly clear.

“After I was – after it happened,” I said, annoyed at the way I faltered, “it was my mother who rang camp asking for Sean, wasn’t it? Who else would have wanted to accuse him of letting harm come to me, of not standing up for me at the court martial? But he’d been posted before any of it happened and he didn’t know.”

I met his eyes steadily, and pressed on. “Whoever she spoke to put two and two together. It was only afterwards that she must have realised what she’d done, when they paraded the information at the civil trial. That’s why she didn’t support my appeal, isn’t it? In case it all came out that she’d been disloyal to her own daughter.”

It was a long speech, and it was greeted by a wary silence. My father sank down onto the kitchen chair next to him, suddenly looking every year of his age, defeated.

He sighed, heavily, before he went on. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I know. She went through hell wanting to confess, but your relationship was so bad by that time that she didn’t see it would help. I persuaded her not to tell you.” He looked up at me, as though resigned to accusations, and bitter rhetoric. “What do you propose to do now, Charlotte?”

I shrugged. “Nothing,” I said, tired myself, like we’d been physically sparring. “What would it solve? It wouldn’t make me feel any better to confront her now, and it certainly wouldn’t do her any good. What’s the point?”

He nodded a little at that, turning it over in his mind. “But it doesn’t explain why Meyer didn’t come forwards and speak up for you afterwards. At the time you felt that the amount of detail exposed could only have come from him. That pressure had been brought to bear from a higher authority and he’d capitulated in order to preserve his own career.”

“It wouldn’t have been so difficult for them to piece it together, not once they knew what they were looking for,” I said. “Besides, like I said, they posted him. Sean didn’t know what happened to me, nobody saw fit to tell him, and he still doesn’t know.” I pinned my father with the same kind of hard stare he so often used himself, keeping my chin up. “I want to keep it that way.”

“Why?” There was no anger in the question, only curiosity.

“For the same reason I won’t say anything to my mother,” I said, my voice neutral. “It wouldn’t do anyone any good now to open up old wounds. They didn’t give Sean an easy time of it afterwards, either, and for a while he blamed me for that without knowing why. I think I’m beginning to earn his respect again. I don’t want that to change to pity.”

My father nodded again. “That’s very – noble – of you,” he said. He stood, straightened up, and the authority he’d always carried was back, and the arrogance.

He snapped the catches shut on his bag, lifted it, and moved towards the door. “I know you think we’ve treated you poorly over this, Charlotte,” he said, with the faintest trace of a smile playing round his mouth, “but looking at the way you’ve turned out your mother and I must have done something right, somewhere along the line while you were growing up, don’t you think?”