S Bolton - Sacrifice

I selected the print field and pressed the print command. There was definitely a problem with the electricity. Without my noticing, the lights had gone out completely and my room was a mass of shadows. From the printer at the other side of the room came a shrill, persistent beeping sound. Great: as invariably happens when it's important, it was out of paper. I started to get up and couldn't. I just about managed to push the keyboard out of the way before my head hit the desk.

The next thing I remember was my mobile ringing, somewhere in the distance. I raised my head and gasped out loud: there were demons in my skull, beating a tattoo on my brain. And someone had broken my spine; nothing less could cause this amount of pain. As nausea reared up I closed my eyes and counted to ten. Then risked opening them again. I was still at my desk; the room was in almost total darkness. My computer screen was blank but its low- pitched buzzing told me it was still switched on.

Without moving I managed to locate the ringing. My mobile was in the pocket of my jacket, which was hanging behind the door. I got up – oh my, it hurt – and crossed the room. I found the phone and looked at the screen. It was Dana. I switched the phone off. Heading back to my desk I found even walking was an effort, as though every limb had suddenly grown three times as heavy. What the hell was wrong with me?

By the time I reached my desk I felt slightly better. Just the simple act of moving had loosened me up a little. Then I remembered what I'd been doing. I pressed a key and the screen sprang to life. There was nothing there. I was looking at the screen saver. I grabbed the mouse and flicked round the screen, in case I'd accidentally minimized the dental records somewhere. They couldn't have just disappeared.

Except they had. I clicked again on the dental department's section of the site and once again it requested a password. I typed in Terminator.

Access denied.

I tried it again.

Access denied.

I looked round my office, as though the answer might lie on my walls, my desk. The room was tidy, nothing out of place. Except…

My desk was never that tidy. Papers were stacked up neatly. The cup I'd been drinking from was over by the sink. It had been rinsed out, as had the coffee pot. I hadn't done that. I crossed to the light switch and flicked. The lights flickered and flashed and then were fully on. Functioning normally. Which was a whole lot more than could be said for me.

I staggered to the sink and poured a cup of water. In my bag I found some of the painkillers Gifford had given me the other day and I swallowed two gratefully. I leaned against the sink, waiting for the pain in my head to subside, which it didn't, and for the aching in my limbs to fade, which, gradually, it did.

The hospital was silent. Downstairs, in and around the wards, there would be people and movement, noise and bustle; up here, just the faint electronic buzz of the lights and my computer. My watch said 04.26. I'd been asleep, or something, for over four hours.

I started to walk back to my desk and a flashing button on the printer caught my eye. Paper tray empty said the message on the small display. Without really thinking about it, I bent down, took a few sheets of paper from the cupboard beneath it and slid them into the paper tray.

The machine whirred into life and started sending out printed sheets. I picked the first one up. It was an X-ray of the upper left quadrant and the second molar had been crowned.

Stop it, Tora, enough is enough.

I picked up the next sheet. It showed the central and lateral incisors. The placement looked right. I picked up the next sheet. Then the next. I counted the teeth. Then, for the first time, I looked at the patient's name at the top of the page. I reached out and touched it, whispering it softly as I did so.

'Melissa Gair.'

I wanted to weep. I wanted to jump on my desk and scream my triumph to the rooftops. At the same time, I don't think I've ever felt calmer in my life.

I flicked through the print-outs that followed. I saw her birth date and calculated her age: thirty-two. I saw that she'd been married and that she'd lived in Lerwick, not two miles from where I was sitting. I saw that she'd attended the dentist regularly; appointments roughly every six months going back ten years or so, with hygienist's appointments in between. Her last appointment had been just before Christmas in the year 2003.

Which, of course, didn't quite fit. My head started to hurt more as I struggled to work out what was bothering me. The woman in my field was Melissa Gair. The records matched exactly. Yet why would a woman who attended her dentist religiously suddenly stop a good eighteen months before her death? Unless she'd left the islands temporarily, coming back only to meet an untimely end.

If that were the case, then her name might not be on my list of women who had given birth on the islands. I grabbed it and scanned as quickly as I could. No, Melissa Gair had not given birth here. She'd had her baby off the islands and then returned less than two weeks afterwards. Most women are not up for major upheaval in their lives two weeks after having a baby. Something in her motives would surely give us a clue as to why she'd been killed.

I needed sleep very badly, but first I had to find Dana. I picked up the phone and dialled her mobile number but got an unobtainable tone. I almost stood up, but thought of one more thing I could check. It would help Dana, surely, to have as much information on Melissa Gair as possible.

I turned back to my computer and went into the main hospital records. I put Melissa's name into the search facility and waited for a few seconds, not really expecting to find anything. She'd been a healthy young woman and might never have been admitted.

Her name appeared. I opened the file, read it through once, then again, checking and double-checking the dates. My headache was back with a vengeance and I think only the certain knowledge that I was a split-second from throwing up kept me motionless in my seat. Had I moved, it would have been to ram my fist directly into the computer screen.

I SAW NO OTHER TRAFFIC ON THE WAY OVER TO DANA'S HOUSE, which was a good thing, because I'd probably have collided with it. I hit the kerb twice and scraped the paintwork leaving the hospital.

I parked, checked the address and climbed out of the car. There was no sign of Dana's car in the car park that I'd assumed would be closest to her house. I staggered like a drunk through the stone archway, down a flight of steps and a steep, cobbled slope. It was an hour or so before dawn and the sky in the east had lightened. The narrow streets of the Lanes, though, were still drenched in shadows.

The Lanes are one of the oldest and most interesting areas of Lerwick. They run downhill, in parallel lines, the quarter of a mile from Hillhead to Commercial Street, from where it's a two-minute walk to the harbour. The Lanes are flagged, steeply sloping alleys, interspersed with short flights of stone steps. It would be impossible to drive a vehicle down them; in places they are so narrow that two grown people would struggle to walk abreast. The buildings, a mixture of residential and commercial property, rise up to three and four storeys on either side. The Lanes are quaint, popular with tourists and much sought-after as trendy, town-centre homes. But when the light is poor and no one else is around, they are dark, decidedly eerie.

Three times, I'd tried Dana on her mobile but had got no response. At first, I'd assumed she'd gone to bed, but now that seemed unlikely. I'd found her door and had been banging on it for several minutes. No one was coming. She wasn't home and I was in no fit state to drive anywhere else. I climbed slowly back up to my car. On the back seat were my coat and an old horse blanket. I thought, briefly, about trying her mobile again but couldn't summon up the energy. She was almost certainly somewhere out of signal range. I wrapped coat and blanket around me and was asleep in seconds.