Andrea asked: ‘Could they have come from the motorbike?’
Having no answer, the nurse said, ‘I worry about meningitis with a floppy child like this. No mark on the skin?’
‘I looked, but we rushed here,’ said Andrea.
‘A mark on the leg here …’
‘A dog bite two years ago.’
‘The legs, the arms, the bottom?’
‘We didn’t—’
‘Could you take her to Exeter?’
Both parents shouted, wild-eyed. ‘No! No, please, there must be someone here …’
A minute later, the child was in front of a consultant orthopaedic surgeon who gave his name so fast neither Gabriel nor Andrea heard it. ‘I normally do broken things, so you have slightly landed me in the soup, young lady,’ he said, sitting her heavily on the edge of the bed in his consulting room and now trying to hold her upright. He was a lean man in his sixties with a high forehead and kind eyes. Andrea sat next to Nina on the green coverlet.
‘She’ll fall if we don’t hold her,’ said the consultant. As he said the words he pointed a penlight into Nina’s right eye, then the left, holding the lids open each time. ‘Dad,’ he said toGabriel, ‘I think you might need to keep her head upright for me. Foaming, you said? At the mouth?’
‘A little,’ said Andrea, starting to sob, panic rising again.
Gabriel was fishing in his pocket for the freezer bag but gave up, his other hand steadying Nina’s head. ‘There was a crash yesterday in Sidmouth. On the promenade. We were there, he spilt some little capsules on the floor apparently. From his pannier, I don’t know. Nina ate one of the capsules.’
‘Two,’ said Andrea.
‘One at the restaurant, and then she said she ate one in the night, thinking they were sweets.’
The doctor exclaimed, ‘What?’ He stared at the small bag.
‘I kept two. They were in her room.’
‘Support her weight if you can,’ said the consultant urgently, carefully easing his grip on the little girl and slowly standing up. ‘It’s not meningitis. No temperature. If anything she has a lower temperature than I’d expect. She may simply be in shock. I saw the news. It was an inferno by the end in that place and it’s a miracle no one died.’
‘The poor man on the bike did,’ said Andrea, suddenly weeping, her daughter’s tiny hand trembling slightly within her own. She squeezed it, her throat tight. ‘That poor man. And my poor daughter. Will she die?’
The consultant breathed in quickly. He was pointing the penlight into the child’s mouth, holding the jaw open, but he kept glancing down at the capsules in the bag being held by Gabriel.
‘There is some red at the back of the mouth. We should rule out anything poisonous in those capsules, just to be safe.’
Gabriel pushed them towards the doctor, who took the freezer bag and held it away from him, towards the window, as if fascinated by what it might contain. The light flooded in and illuminated the capsules.
‘Little bullets,’ said the consultant, stepping closer, taking off his glasses and bringing his face right up to the bag. ‘Might benothing.’ He twisted his mouth. ‘Then again.’ The morning sunlight shone through the ampoules and put two yellow dots on the right side of his face, just below his eye, dancing like sniper’s marks. ‘Right. You need to go to Exeter. We need to be sure of what we’re dealing with here.’
‘Okay,’ said Gabriel, standing and gathering their things as fast as he could. ‘Okay, I will drive us.’
‘No, young man.’ The doctor stood, his movements now filled with intent. ‘There’s no time for that. We’re going to blue-light you in an ambulance.’
Chapter Fifteen
When Edward Temmis looked at his phone, he wondered how he had seen only the text messages. There were a dozen emails, all sent in the last two hours, and fifteen missed calls.
He rang Aspinall first.
‘Where … the hell … have you been?’
‘I was in the north, away with a—’ Edward did not want to spell it out. Aspinall might not react well to the name Wendy Wrigley.
