tried to grab at his shirt, to stop him from leaving. She mouthed as if to speak but nothing came out.
‘I won’t be a second. I’m coming back, I promise.’
He stood and walked over to the woman holding the phone.
‘Can I ask you not to share that video until we have had a chance to identify the woman and inform her family. It would be horrible to find out something like this from a video on the internet, wouldn’t it?’
‘Oh, I wasn’t going to share it,’ she said, her cheeks flushing.
‘My colleagues will be here any second to take all of your names. Please just wait here.’
‘I got you these blankets; they are my kids’ blankets; it’s all I had. Sorry.’
‘Thank you.’
Adrian took the blankets and walked back to the lady on the ground. He was starting to feel cold himself. He was thankful that the area was poorly lit, so at least the video would be poor quality. He covered her with the kitten-patterned blankets and waited for the ambulance; the sirens were getting closer.
In the back of the ambulance, Adrian stayed with the woman. It felt wrong to leave her at this point. She must have been terrified and hopefully, she knew she could trust Adrian by now. The paramedics had cut off her wet jeans and covered her in a thermal blanket to help bring her temperature back up.
‘What happened?’ one of the paramedics said.
‘Some kids found her; I just pulled her out. I’m hoping the doc can tell us more about what’s happened to her.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘I don’t know,’ Adrian said, realising she hadn’t answered him when he had asked her before.
‘What’s your name, love?’ the paramedic asked the woman, leaning down to hear better.
The woman winced and closed her eyes as the ambulance went over a pothole. She squeezed Adrian’s hand weakly.
They pulled up outside the hospital and Adrian saw that Dr Hadley was waiting outside the emergency department’s bay doors. Adrian had texted her to come and meet them. Dr Hadley had worked with the police on numerous occasions and Adrian knew she specialised in women’s cases, especially where sexual assault was a probability. The clothes the victim was wearing were intact when he found her, which was unusual in cases of sexual assault. But whatever had happened to her, this was a horrific attack that she wasn’t going to be getting over anytime soon. If she made it, that is.
‘I’m going to go now, but I will be back.’
‘Please don’t go,’ the woman said.
‘This is my friend Dr Hadley and she is going to look after you, OK? I’ll be back before you know it,’ Adrian told her.
The woman nodded.
‘Thank you, DS Miles. I’ll give you a call after I’ve done a thorough examination,’ Dr Hadley said with a heavy sigh as she appraised the woman’s condition.
Adrian watched as they wheeled the trolley into the hospital through the emergency doors, two uniformed officers following behind. The ambulance doors closed and the vehicle drove out of the bay.
Pulling his phone from his pocket, DS Miles texted Imogen to come and pick him up. Still covered in mud, his clothes still damp, Adrian needed to get changed before the last half an hour got a chance to creep under his skin. Someone had hurt this woman and discarded her. He was going to find out who.
Imogen put a towel down on the passenger seat of her car before Adrian sat down. He had that look in his eye, that angry, determined look he got when he was well into a case and it wasn’t going their way. Whatever he had seen had obviously affected him; he seemed anxious and slightly haunted.
‘What happened? I only saw you a couple of hours ago,’ she asked.
‘That woman I found. She was completely fucked up, thrown away like rubbish. It was awful. I thought she was dead. She looked dead.’
‘You found her in time, though. You got her to the hospital.’
‘Who does that to another person? Sometimes I feel like we are swimming against the tide with this job, I really do. Every day it’s something else; it never stops.’
Imogen knew that this was about more than the woman he had rescued today – it was about the woman he grew up with, about his parents. Adrian rarely talked about his mother, but Imogen knew that his father had been violent and that Adrian struggled to accept aggression towards women on any level. She knew what it was like to grow up in challenging circumstances, but not a day went by when she wasn’t grateful that there was no kind of abuse in her own childhood; she had seen what it had done to friends. Working in the police, she knew how demoralising an abusive childhood was and how massively it impacted who people became.
‘You’ll feel better after you get cleaned up,’ she said. ‘We can go straight back to the hospital as soon as you’ve showered.’
‘What if she dies?’
‘Whatever comes next, we are going to find out what happened to her. She’s not going to die. I know it. You saved her, Adrian.’
Imogen parked the car near Adrian’s house and he jumped out immediately. He didn’t want to hang around, she could tell. He unlocked his door and went inside, leaving it open for her to follow.
Imogen made herself comfortable on the sofa and waited for Adrian to return. She was at home in his house now, maybe even more at home here than in her own place.
There was an old cookery show on TV; it was one she hadn’t seen since her mum was alive and she felt a pang of sadness as thoughts of her mother crossed her mind. They used to watch Keith Floyd together regularly; her mother loved his vibrancy and authenticity. She would wink and say that she had met him once, and Imogen wondered if it was code, a clue that he was her biological father. The mythical bio-dad who was everything from a prince to a crack addict – it seemed silly now to think that she thought this TV celebrity might be her father. There again, her mother had a way of doing the unexpected, so it wasn’t completely out of the question.
It had been almost a year since her mother had died and she had barely allowed herself time to think about her. Once she gave herself that permission, there would be no stopping it and so she preferred not to start. Imogen had always felt as though crying was a weakness in some way and so she was loath to succumb. She switched channels until she found something less emotionally challenging.
Her eyes became heavy as she focused on the screen, the Northern accents a refreshing change from the Devonshire twang that she was used to.
Adrian’s lips woke her, pressing against hers gently; she wondered what she must look like and hoped she wasn’t drooling.
‘I forgot to say thanks,’ he said before kissing her again.
She
