Rescue At Cradle Lake. Marion Lennox

moved at once to the child.

      ‘Mummy,’ the little one screamed, every fibre of her body straining toward her mother’s trolley.

      ‘Dr Fergus is looking after your mummy,’ Ginny told her, but the child was past listening. The ambulance officer was looking to Ginny, desperate to hand over responsibility.

      ‘Give her to me.’ Ginny sat on the examination couch and gathered the little girl into her arms.

      Miriam was hauling the crash cart toward the trolley and Ginny thought, Uh-oh.

      Should she swap places with Miriam? She watched for a minute as the child fought her hold. Miriam looked competent and swift. There was already a cardiac monitor set up. The woman’s breathing seemed to be pausing. She was suddenly so limp that Ginny thought, Oh no.

      But Fergus was shaking his head at Miriam, signifying the paddles weren’t needed. There must be a heartbeat but the expression on Fergus’s face as he looked at the monitor…

      Ginny knew what that look meant. She’d worked for three years in ER in a major teaching hospital and she knew it all too well.

      Triage. The child’s feet were bleeding—badly—and her terror was palpable. Unless Fergus said otherwise, Ginny was needed where she was.

      ‘You’ve cut your feet,’ she told the little girl, making her voice sound astonished. She was trying to haul the child’s attention from her mother to her feet. ‘Goodness, what have you been doing?’

      ‘I want Mummy,’ the little girl sobbed, and Ginny’s heart twisted. But this was hopeless. Fergus needed all his concentration if he was to get a good result, and there was no way the little girl could go to her mother.

      So make a break and make it fast.

      ‘Dr Fergus is looking after your mummy and I’m looking after you,’ she told the little one, forcing her voice to sound authoritative, hugging her close but standing and moving toward the door. ‘We need to get bandages for your feet before you can come back and see Mummy.’

      ‘Mummy.’ The child’s voice was a terrified scream.

      Fergus looked up and met her eyes. He gave an imperceptible shake of his head.

      Get her out of here, his body language said. Please.

      ‘Let’s go,’ Ginny said. ‘Bring what I need for stitching and dressing,’ she told the nearest of the ambulance boys. ‘Now.’

      It took almost an hour to get the little girl’s feet dressed. She sobbed and sobbed and in the end Ginny administered a sedative and then simply sat and hugged her close until the child’s sobs subsided. Finally she collapsed into exhausted sleep and Ginny was able to lay her down on the bed in an empty ward and take care of the worst of the damage.

      Some time while she’d hugged, the ambulance officer who’d brought her the dressings she’d needed had disappeared. Soon after he had been replaced by a young male nurse who’d introduced himself as Tony. Tony wasn’t what Ginny was accustomed to in a nurse. Under his obviously hastily donned theatre gown, he was dressed in football gear—filthy shorts, a black and orange jersey, muddy socks and muddy knees. The six-foot-three footballer looked a mile away from a competent nurse, but his concern was genuine and when she started work she couldn’t have asked for anyone better.

      He helped clean the gravel from the worst of the cuts. It was painstaking work. Many of the stones were deeply embedded and when the feet were fully cleaned there were two cuts that needed stitches.

      ‘Do we have any idea what happened?’ Ginny asked as she stitched. Until the child had drifted into exhausted sleep she’d spoken only to her, but now there was space and time to talk to Tony.

      ‘My beeper went off just at the final siren,’ Tony told her. ‘The groundskeeper gave me a ride in and he told me what he knows. The mother seems to have collapsed at the wheel of her car, half a mile or so from the football ground. Any houses close by would be empty. Everyone’s at the footy. Maybe the mother told the kid to get help or maybe the kid figured that the source of noise was the only place to come. But they’ve just resurfaced the road. Gravel over bitumen. By the look of her feet, I’d reckon she must have run the whole way in bare feet.’

      ‘That’s what it looks like,’ Ginny agreed, wincing in sympathy as she applied another piece of dressing over the stitched lacerations. ‘Of all the brave…’ She swallowed and looked down to the tear-stained little face. ‘Do we know what’s wrong with the mother?’

      ‘Cardiomyopathy.’ Fergus’s frame was suddenly filling the open door, his face as bleak as death. ‘And we’ve lost her.’

      ‘Lost…’ Ginny stared at him in consternation. She’d known. She’d seen it in the woman’s face. ‘But…’

      ‘She went into cardiac arrest just as you left,’ he said, and then, interpreting her distress, he put a hand out as if to ward off recriminations. ‘There was nothing you could have done to help. Believe me, I’d have called you back if there was. We’ve been trying to figure out what went wrong and now we know.’

      ‘Cardiomyopathy,’ Ginny whispered, dazed. ‘How on earth?’

      ‘The local police sergeant’s been through the car. There was a full medical history on the back seat. She must have travelled with it accessible—just in case. Plus she travelled with an oxygen supply. Plus enough medication to stock a small dispensary. She was desperately sick.’

      ‘Then why on earth was she travelling?’

      ‘Looking for one Richard Viental.’ He hesitated, his eyes meeting hers and holding. ‘Would that be…your Richard?’

      ‘My Richard?’ Ginny shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

      ‘You think I do?’ Fergus sounded weary, as if he’d taken in too much information for one man to absorb. As maybe he had. He’d lost a patient under his hands less than an hour ago—a young mother who by rights should have lived for another fifty years. No matter how long you were a doctor—did anyone ever get used to it?

      ‘This letter was inserted as the first page of the medical history,’ Fergus said, after a break while they all seemed to have trouble keeping breathing. Tony was winding leftover bandage, but after he finished he automatically started rewinding. Without the spool.

      Fergus was holding a sheet of notepaper—a letter handwritten in a spidery hand that scrawled off the page.

      ‘The police sergeant’s read this,’ he said, sounding apologetic and unsure. ‘I’ve read it, too.’ He sighed and looked down at the bed, where the little girl lay huddled in exhausted sleep. ‘It’s addressed to Richard but maybe you should read it as well,’ he suggested.