Kate pulled on her jacket. ‘Female, age unknown, possible head trauma and injuries to the pelvis.’ She picked up her helmet. ‘There are signs she’s recently had a baby – her abdomen, bleeding.’
Nadia’s breath caught. ‘Do you think…’
‘No idea,’ said Kate, who knew Nadia was hinting about baby Lena but didn’t have time to pause and discuss it.
The whir of the blades on the helicopter beyond the hangar took Nadia’s breath away. She locked eyes with Archie, and realised she was clasping Giles’s hand too firmly as he began to squirm.
Nadia made a split-second decision. ‘I’m coming with you, Kate.’
Kate stopped in her tracks. ‘You’re what?’
‘Wait for me.’ She dropped Giles’s hand, grabbed the spare jacket, pulled it on and did the same with the helmet. When Frank came in with his toolbox, having been working on one of the rapid response vehicles, she told him to hold the fort.
He gave her a salute. He knew the deal.
Nadia didn’t want Giles to panic so as she did up her helmet, she told Archie, ‘This might take hours. Go to your accommodation; I’ll call you.’ And then she was following Kate.
On board Hilda, she simply said, ‘If it’s the birth mother, I want to be there,’ as if that explained everything. And with no time to waste, Vik confirmed that weight limits and fuel were good to go and they lifted into the skies above Whistlestop River.
‘ETA nine minutes,’ said Brad from his position in the cockpit as the technical crew member.
An update came in from the HEMS desk. Nadia could hear it; they all could over their headsets.
‘Victim. Female. In cardiac arrest. CPR being performed at the scene by an off-duty nurse.’
Nadia had to remind herself to breathe.
Please, please, please let the woman be all right.
Please, please, please don’t let it be Monica.
If it was, this might be the only chance Nadia got to make peace with her sister.
She felt sick. With every whir of the blades that took them closer to the road traffic collision, she felt worse, as if the blades were physically cutting through her.
Flashing lights guided Vik to their landing site on a cricket pavilion near where the accident had happened. And as they were cleared to disembark, HEMS wanted an update of The Skylarks’ ETA to the victim’s side. This meant they were desperately needed, which indicated that the patient must be worsening and might not survive without their specialist care.
‘Nadia!’ Kate shrieked as she and Brad loaded up with all the gear.
Nadia had frozen. Her legs wouldn’t budge.
‘Nadia!’ But Kate didn’t wait. She couldn’t; her job was to get to the victim, not to look after the woman who’d come along with them and couldn’t move.
Nadia sat in the back of the helicopter listening to the updates from the HEMS desk come through one after the other from the road ambulance paramedics and then from her own team as they reached the victim and did everything they could at the scene.
Vik’s job was to wait by the helicopter. He climbed in the back and wrapped a blanket around Nadia’s shoulders. He asked no questions; she offered no explanation.
When a bystander came over to the helicopter, Vik apologised to Nadia before jumping out to talk with them. This happened a lot; people took an interest.
It felt like she’d been sitting there forever and then another update came, this time from Kate, letting everyone on the channel know what the status at the scene was.
‘The patient re-arrested. There was almost forty minutes of prolonged CPR but the patient was pronounced dead at 15.43.’
Nadia leapt out of the helicopter. The blanket dropped from her shoulders. She ran towards the blue lights, she saw the crowd of first responders, the scene calmer than it would’ve been when they first arrived. She saw her crew; Brad came towards her.
‘We tried our best,’ he said.
Nadia’s feet took her the rest of the way, flashbacks of Monica when they were little girls playing schools in the back garden, zipping up and down the pavements on their bikes, making cupcakes and splattering the mixture everywhere except where it was meant to go.
