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
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
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
