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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘HE’S not doing very well at all, is he?’ The young woman’s voice was choked with emotion, and her eyes filled with tears as she looked at Amber. ‘Isn’t there something more that you can do for him? Nothing seems to be happening.’

      Amber removed the printed trace from her patient’s heart monitor and taped the paper strip into his file. The readings were erratic, showing a dangerous, uncoordinated rhythm. ‘I know this must be a very difficult time for you,’ she said in a quiet voice, turning towards the girl, ‘but I want you to know that we’re doing everything we can for your father. I’ve given him an injection to take away the pain, and he’s receiving medication through a drip in his arm to try to prevent things from getting any worse.’ There was a defibrillator on standby in case his condition deteriorated, but she wasn’t going to point that out to her patient’s anxious daughter.

      The girl pulled in a shaky breath. ‘He looks so dreadfully ill. I know he hasn’t been well these last few months, but this has come as such a shock. As soon as I saw him, I knew it was bad. His secretary called me at the university to say that he was unwell and that they’d called for an ambulance…I was in the middle of a lecture, and I rushed over there as quickly as I could.’

      She gulped, sending a worried glance towards her father. ‘She said he had been in his office, trying to get through a backlog of work, when he suddenly felt nauseous and short of breath. At first he thought he was suffering from a bad attack of indigestion, but then things got worse and he felt this awful pain in his chest…a crushing, vice-like pain.’

      She broke off and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. ‘By the time I arrived at the office, he had collapsed and the paramedics were there. It all seemed to have happened so quickly.’

      ‘The paramedics gave him emergency treatment before they brought him here,’ Amber told her. ‘They did everything that was possible to make sure he arrived here safely.’

      Martyn Wyndham Brookes had been conscious when he’d arrived at A and E but, despite his pain and discomfort, his one thought had been for his daughter. ‘She’s very young,’ he had managed to say, ‘and she’s a long way from home…studying at university. She always wanted to come to London.’ His face had been haggard with pain, but his concern for his daughter had been obvious as he’d looked anxiously at Amber, and she had hurried to reassure him.

      ‘We’ll look after her, I promise,’ she’d told him gently. ‘I’ll have a nurse take care of her…but right now we need to concentrate on making you feel better.’ She had taken to him straight away…such a strong, warm-hearted man.

      Now, after he had lapsed into a drowsy, semi-conscious state, she felt it was time to explain to his daughter what had happened. ‘I suspect he’s had a heart attack,’ she said, ‘and that there’s a blood clot blocking an artery somewhere and causing problems with his circulation.’

      Tears trickled down Caitlin Wyndham Brookes’s cheeks. ‘That’s what the paramedic said…but that’s bad, isn’t it?’

      ‘It’s something we’re used to dealing with,’ Amber said. She studied the girl’s pale features. ‘Is there anyone we can call for you…someone who might come and be with you?’

      Caitlin shook her head. ‘My mother died some years ago, and there’s no one over here…just my friends at university.’ She gazed at Amber in an agitated fashion. ‘Isn’t there something more you can do for him? What if you have to go off and deal with other patients? I know you have others to see, and it’s so busy here. There are so many patients being brought in…I want somebody to be with him all the time, someone in a senior position.’

      The flow of words stopped suddenly, as though she was taking stock of what she had said. ‘It’s not that I’m doubting your ability,’ Caitlin tried to explain, ‘but he’s just lying there, looking so frail…It isn’t like him at all…he’s always been so tough, so busy, on the move all the time.’ Distress caused her voice to waver, and Amber hurried to soothe her once more.

      ‘We’ll know much more about what’s happened to him when we’ve done all the necessary tests. It will take a little while for all the results to come back, though. In the meantime, we’re taking good care of him. He’s receiving oxygen through a face-mask, and his condition is being observed the whole time with the aid of the heart monitor and various other machines. If I’m called away to attend to another patient, I’ll still know what’s going on, because the nurses will alert me to any change as soon as it happens.’

      She frowned as she ran the stethoscope over her patient’s chest. Initially, his heart rate had been alarmingly fast, while his pulse had been barely discernible, but now the heart rhythm was becoming chaotic and everything about the man told her that he was gravely ill.

      ‘Unfortunately, we don’t have any records for him, over here in the U.K.,’ Amber said, turning to look at the girl once more. Caitlin Wyndham Brookes was twenty or so years old, a slender young woman with

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