Briefly she took in the clothing and make-up: high-heeled black shiny boots, a minuscule red satin skirt barely covering plump bare thighs, and a low-cut black T-shirt under a cream satin jacket. Her initial thought was that the woman had taken a beating, but as Alex examined her closer she could see that she was wrong. Her right elbow was at an impossible angle and her shoulder looked massively swollen. Her finger bones had split through the skin and were bent backwards. Alex ignored the bloody hand; what filled her with most concern was the black mark across the cream jacket, right across the woman’s chest. It was the imprint of a tyre. She pulled out her mobile and called for an ambulance.
Placing her ear near the woman’s mouth she felt warm breath and at the same time saw some rise in the chest. The vein in her neck was distended and pulsating hard. She was breathing, but how well was another matter. If a car had run over her there was the likelihood of multiple rib fractures and injury to the lungs. She undid the single button holding the cream jacket closed and ripped the thin black T-shirt up the middle. The rib cage was misshapen and there was only a feeble rise on the left side of the chest. Alex was dealing with major chest trauma, and knew that without the presence of a surgical team and the right instruments the woman could die soon.
In the boot of her car there was a chest drain kit, chest tubes, scalpels and other equipment that would inflate a lung, but if there was severe vessel damage only blood or large volumes of fluid replacement would keep her heart pumping. But she must think positively. She needed to focus on keeping the woman alive for as long as possible.
A small choking sound alerted her to the woman stirring and she switched her gaze back to the face. She was astonished to see the woman’s eyes open.
‘Hello, you’ve had an accident and I’m helping you,’ she calmly said.
The woman tried to answer but no sound passed her moving lips.
‘I’m a doctor. An ambulance is on the way.’
Alex felt faint hope. If the woman was conscious, maybe she wasn’t internally haemorrhaging. She definitely had a collapsed lung, but Alex could fix that. She needed to keep the woman breathing, that was all that mattered, because if her heart stopped beating Alex would be compressing broken ribs into a possibly damaged heart and lungs.
A small spray of blood was coughed up and some of it showered the woman’s face. Using her fingertips Alex carefully wiped it from her eyelids, urgently praying for the ambulance to hurry up. This woman was about to bleed out!
Then the woman spoke. And the low-pitched bubbling sound warned Alex she was drowning: ‘Wants to play doctors .?.?. save me .?.?.’
She coughed again, and with blood-coated teeth she smiled gruesomely. ‘Some doctor .?.?.’
When the blood flooded the woman’s mouth Alex used the bandages, the woman’s clothing, and then as much as she could of her own clothing to mop it away. Only when her heart stopped pumping did the blood stop coming.
The ambulance crew arrived to find both women bathed in blood from head to toe, and initially thought them both injured. Later, when interviewed by the police, they described finding Dr Taylor looking like a crazed woman kneeling over the dead body. ‘She looked like Carrie in the movie, her hair and face dripping with blood, and her eyes staring,’ one of them said. ‘Like bloody Carrie.’
Chapter sixteen
Four police cars and a transit van surrounded the area where the dead woman lay. The ambulance crew had come and gone, and a dozen police officers had taken their place. The occupants of the apartments, who were beginning to return from work, were told to park elsewhere. The area was a crime scene and no other vehicles would be allowed in for several days at least. Alex shivered in the back seat of one of the police vehicles. She had not been allowed to go up to her flat and change; the blood on her clothes and hands had dried and black crusts were buried beneath her nails.
She had seen Laura Best and another officer walk around her newly washed bottle-green Mini several times. They had gone down on their bellies and inspected it underneath. A female officer had asked her to blow into a mouthpiece, and Alex was grateful for having resisted alcohol for the last few days. She was a suspect in a crime. Not necessarily the prime one, but a suspect all the same. She had given a brief statement to the first officer on the scene and was told that she would be questioned again later. It was more than four hours since she had arrived home from her Christmas shopping trip, and even though the hours were filled with so much going on around her, they were the longest hours she had ever lived.
Maybe if she just got out of the police car and walked across the car park to the lift, she would escape to her apartment unseen. She could have a bath, cook some dinner .?.?.
The sobs, when they came, robbed her of breath. She was unaware of the car door opening or of hands reaching in to help her out. She was unaware of being escorted up to her apartment, a throw being put around her shoulders and a warm mug being placed in her hands. It was only when the warmth of sweetened tea hit her stomach that she became aware of her surroundings.
Greg Turner stood a few feet away, watching her with troubled eyes. The rain had flattened his wavy hair and the shoulders of his leather jacket were damp, and for the first time he didn’t seem so forbidding.
‘I’m sorry about this. I’ll have words with them later. I think they forgot they’d put you in the back of one of the cars.’
Alex shivered as warmth penetrated her frozen limbs. It was always cold in the underground car park, and sitting there for several hours had made her numb. ‘I couldn’t save her,’ she whispered. ‘It was like a war zone. Her blood just kept coming and there was nothing I could do.’
‘The ambulance crew said she had massive injuries. I don’t think there was much anybody could have done in the circumstances.’
‘But I’m a doctor,’ she cried. ‘That’s what I do. I save lives. I should have done more. I should have acted quicker. Got a chest drain in. Got in an airway before she drowned in her own blood!’
‘I’m sure you did all you could,’ he said soothingly. Then: ‘We’ll need you to give a full statement. The sooner the better.’
With her hands cradled round the warm mug, Alex saw the dried blood caking her fingernails and could smell its metallic odour as she thawed out.
‘Could I have a bath first?’
He hesitated and then relented. ‘Sure. But we’ll need the clothes you’re wearing.’
‘I’m a suspect, aren’t I? They think I drove over her, don’t they?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s procedure. There might be transferred evidence on your clothes. She was a small-time prostitute. Known as “Lunchtime Lilly”.’
Alex stared at him disdainfully.
He raised his hands, suggesting this was not his name for her. ‘Lillian Armstrong. Known to her friends and by us as Lilly. She earned the nickname because she usually only worked daytime hours on account of her children being at school and having no husband to mind them at night.’
Alex had guessed what she was, but didn’t want to say. She had met many women like Lilly over the years and knew they all had their reasons for doing what they did. She never judged them when they turned up at A & E instead of attending the sexual health clinic for their creams and antibiotics. And often she would be the one to give them tea after they had been patched up from the beatings they often got. It was a sick world, and her job was to treat the sick.