LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FOUR

      IT MIGHT WELL have been the two cops standing outside a curtained cubicle that attracted his attention as he walked past.

      If he’d had any inclination to analyse it, though, Charles would probably have realised that it was the voice on the other side of the curtain that made him slow down.

      Grace’s voice.

      ‘Looks like we’ve got an entrance wound here. And...an exit wound here. But it’s possible that they’re two entrance wounds. We need an X-ray.’

      One of the cops caught his gaze and responded to the raised eyebrow.

      ‘Drive-by shooting,’ he said. ‘He’s lucky. It was his arm and not his head.’

      With a nod, Charles moved on. Grace clearly had things under control. She always did, whenever he noticed her in the department and that was almost every day now that he had adjusted his hours to fit around nursery school for the twins. More than once a day, too. Not that he went out of his way to make their paths cross or anything. It just seemed to happen.

      Okay, maybe he was choosing to do some necessary paperwork at one side of the unit desk instead of tucked away in his office but that was because he liked to keep half an eye on how the whole department was functioning. He could see the steady movement of people and equipment and hear phone calls being made and the radio link to the ambulance service. If anybody needed urgent assistance, he could be on his feet and moving in an instant.

      It had nothing to do with the fact that Grace would be in this area before too long, checking the X-rays that would arrive digitally on one of the bank of departmental computer screens beside him.

      He had a sheaf of statistics that he needed to review, like the numbers and types of patients that were coming through his department and it was important to see how they stacked up and whether trends were changing. Level one patients were the critical cases that took the most in the way of personnel and resources, but too many level four or five patients could create barriers to meeting target times for treatment and patient flow.

      Grace Forbes certainly wasn’t wasting time with her patients. It was only minutes later that she was logging in to a computer nearby, flanked by two medical students and a junior doctor. As they waited to upload files, she glanced sideways and acknowledged Charles with a smile but then she peered intently at the screen. Her colleagues leaned in as she used the cursor to highlight what she was looking at.

      ‘There... Can you see that?’

      ‘Is it a bone fragment?’

      ‘No. Look how smooth the edges of the humerus are. And this is well away from it.’

      ‘So it’s a bullet fragment?’

      ‘Yes. A very small one.’

      ‘Do we need to get it out?’

      ‘No. It’s not clinically significant. And we were right that it’s only one entrance and an exit wound but it was also right to check.’

      ‘Want me to clean and dress it, then?’ The junior doctor was keen to take over the case. ‘Let the cops take him in to talk to him?’

      ‘Yes. We’ll put him on a broad-spectrum antibiotic as well. And make sure he gets a tetanus shot. Thanks, Danny. You’re in charge now.’ Grace’s attention was swiftly diverted as she saw an incoming stretcher and she straightened and moved smoothly towards the new arrival as if she’d been ready and waiting all along.

      ‘Hi, honey.’ The girl on the stretcher looked very young, very pale and very frightened. ‘My name’s Grace and I’m going to be looking after you.’

      Charles could hear one of the paramedics talking to Grace as they moved past to a vacant cubicle.

      ‘Looks like gastro. Fever of thirty-nine point five and history of vomiting and diarrhoea. Mom called us when she fainted.’

      ‘BP?’

      ‘Eighty systolic. Couldn’t get a diastolic.’

      ‘I’m not surprised she fainted, then...’

      The voices faded but Charles found himself still watching, even after the curtain had twitched into place to protect the new patient’s privacy.

      His attention was well and truly caught this time.

      Because he was puzzled.

      At moments like this, Grace was exactly the person he would have predicted that she would become. Totally on top of her work. Clever, competent and confident. She got along well with all her colleagues, too. Charles had heard more than one report of how great she was to work with and how generous she was with her time for staff members who were here to learn.

      Thanks to the challenge that had been thrown at her within the first minutes of her coming to work here, Charles already knew how good Grace was at her job and how well she coped with difficult circumstances. That ability to think on her feet and adapt was a huge advantage for someone who worked in Emergency and she demonstrated the same kind of attitude in her private life, too, didn’t she—in the way she had jumped on board, under pressure, to take on the dog-sitting offer.

      But...and this was what was puzzling Charles so much...there was something very different about her personality away from work.

      Something that felt off-key.

      A timidity, almost. Lack of confidence, anyway.

      Vulnerability? The way she’d shrunk away from him at the park yesterday. When he’d ventured onto personal ground by asking her about her marriage. He’d been puzzled then and he hadn’t been able to shake it off.

      He didn’t want to shake it off, in fact. It was quite nice having this distraction because it meant he could ignore the background tension he always had at this time of year when he was walking an emotional tightrope between celebrating the joy of the twins’ birth and being swamped by the grief of losing Nina, which was a can of mental worms that included so many other things he felt he should have done better—like protecting his family during the time of that scandal.

      A nurse appeared from behind the curtain, with a handful of glass tubes full of blood that were clearly being rushed off for testing. He caught

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