Peter James: Dead Man's Grip

They’d delivered this particular lady, who was a sweetie, into the care of Accident and Emergency at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and were now on standby, waiting for the next call. That was the thing Phil Davidson most liked about this job, you never knew what was going to happen. The siren would sound inside the ambulance and trip that squirt of adrenalin inside him. Was it going to be a routine job or the one he would remember for years? The job’s category of emergency, ranging from A to C would appear on the screen on the console, together with the location and known facts, which would then be updated as further information came in.

He glanced down at the screen now, as if willing the next job to appear. A rainy rush hour like today often produced accidents, particularly traffic collisions , as they were now known. They were not called accidents any more, because it was always someone’s fault; they were known as Road Traffic Collisions.

Phil liked attending trauma cases best. The ambulance’s lockers were packed with the latest trauma technology. Critical haemorrhage kits, Israeli military dressings, a combat application tourniquet, an ACS – Asherman Chest Seal – standard equipment for the British and US military. The benefits of war, he often thought cynically. Little did some victims of terrible accidents, who recovered thanks to the paramedics’ work at the scene, realize they owed their lives to the medical advances that came out of battlegrounds.

Vicky nipped out to have a quick pee in the Starbucks just beside them. She’d learned always to grab the opportunity to use a loo, because in this job you never knew when you were going to get busy and there might not be another chance for hours.

As she climbed back behind the wheel, her crewmate for the day was talking on his phone to his wife. This was only her second time out with Phil and she had enjoyed working with him a lot the last time. A lean wiry man in his late thirties, with his hair shaven to stubble, long sideburns and several days’ growth of beard, he had the air of a movie bad guy about him, although he was anything but. He was a big-hearted softy who doted on his family. He had a reassuring manner, a kind word for everyone he treated and a true passion for this work, which she shared with him.

Finishing his call, he looked down at the screen again.

‘Unusually quiet, so far.’

‘Not for long, I don’t expect.’

They sat in silence for a moment as the rain pattered down. During her time with the ambulance service, she’d discovered that every paramedic had his or her own particular favourite field of work and seemed by some quirk of fate to attract that particular call-out. One of her colleagues always got mentally ill patients. She herself had delivered fifteen babies over the past three years, while Phil, in all his career, had yet to deliver one.

However, in her two years since qualifying, Vicky had only attended one serious road accident, and that had been on her first ever shift, when a couple of teenage boys had accepted a lift home in Brighton from a drunk driver. He’d hit a parked car, at 80mph in the centre of town. One boy had been killed outright and another had died at the roadside. Despite the horror of that incident, she found her work incredibly rewarding.

‘You know, Phil,’ she said. ‘It’s strange, but I haven’t been to a road fatality in almost two years.’

He unscrewed the cap from a bottle of water. ‘Stay with this job long enough and you will. In time you get everything.’

‘You’ve never had to deliver a baby.’

He smiled sardonically at her. ‘One day-’

He was interrupted by the high-pitched whup-whup-whup siren inside the ambulance. It was a sound that could dement you sometimes, especially during the quiet of the night. The sound of a call-out.

Instantly he looked down at the screen mounted between their seats and read the Incident Review information:

Emergency Inc: 00521. CatB Emergency

Portland Road, Hove.

Gender unknown.

Three vehicle RTC. Bicycle involved.

He tapped the button to acknowledge the call. It automatically loaded the address into the satnav system.

The target response time for a CatB was eighteen minutes – ten minutes longer than for a CatA, but it still called for emergency action. Vicky started the engine, switched on the blue lights and siren, and pushed her way carefully out over a red traffic light. She turned right and accelerated up the hill, past St Nicholas’s Church, pulling out into the right-hand lane and forcing oncoming traffic to brake. She switched between the four different tones of the ambulance’s sirens to get maximum attention from the vehicles and pedestrians ahead.

Moments later, peering hard at the incident screen, Phil updated her. ‘Situation confused,’ he read out. ‘Several calls. Upgraded to CatA. A car crashed into a shop. Oh shit, cyclist in collision with a lorry. Control not sure of situation, backup requested.’

He leaned through the bulkhead for his fluorescent jacket and Vicky felt a tightening in her gullet.

Screaming down towards the clogged-up Seven Dials roundabout, concentrating hard on her driving, she said nothing. A taxi driver sensibly pulled over on to the pavement to let them through. Fuck me, Phil thought, a cabbie who was actually awake! He unclipped his seat belt, hoping Vicky didn’t choose this moment to crash, and began wriggling into his jacket. At the same time he continued watching the screen keenly.

‘Age unknown, gender unknown,’ he updated her. ‘Breathing status unknown. Unknown number of patients involved. Oh shit – high mechanism. SIMCAS en route.’

That meant the Accident and Emergency doctor had been summoned from the hospital to the scene.

Which meant the status of the incident was worsening by the minute.

That was confirmed by the next update on the screen. ‘Limb amputation,’ Phil read out. ‘Ouch! Bad day for someone.’ Then he turned to her and said, ‘Sounds like you might be getting your wish.’

Hospitals gave Roy Grace the heebie-jeebies and particularly this one. The Royal Sussex County Hospital was where both his parents, at a few years’ interval, had spent most of the last days of their life. His father had died first, at just fifty-five, from bowel cancer. Two years later, when she was only fifty-six, his mother had succumbed to secondaries following breast cancer.

The front façade, a grand Victorian neoclassical edifice with an ugly black metal and glass portico, used to give him the impression of an asylum whose portals you entered once, never to leave.

Stretching out beside it, and up the hill behind the front entrance, was a massive, messy complex of buildings, new and old, low- and high-rise, joined by a seemingly never-ending labyrinth of corridors.

His stomach knotted, he drove his unmarked silver police Ford Focus estate up the hill to the east of the complex and turned into the small parking and turning area for ambulances. Strictly speaking, this area was for emergency vehicles and taxis only, but at this moment he did not care. He pulled the car up to one side, where he wasn’t causing an obstruction, and climbed out into the rain.

He used to pray as a child, but since his late teens Roy had never had any religious convictions. But he found himself praying now, silently, that his darling Cleo and their unborn child were OK.

He ran past a couple of ambulances backed up to the entrance to Accident and Emergency, nodding greetings to a paramedic he knew who was standing beside a NO SMOKING IN HOSPITAL GROUNDS sign, grabbing a cigarette under the awning. Then, bypassing the public entrance, he went in via the paramedics’ emergency doors.