Chapter Fourteen
By the time they got to the hospital, Nina just looked like an exhausted child asleep in her father’s arms. They had driven themselves – they could not wait for an ambulance.
The choice had been between the A&E at Exeter, a half-hour drive, and the Victoria, only ten minutes away, which had a Minor Injury Unit.
They rushed to the Victoria. Gabriel broke every speed limit and every red light.
A weekend morning gave them the chance to avoid traffic.
At the hospital the reception area was clear, but it was so quiet they waited five minutes for the duty nurse to return from what seemed to be a tea break.
Gabriel was holding his daughter tightly, as if he might squeeze the life into her. Andrea had sat in the back of the car with their daughter lying across the back seat. She had been too limp to go into the booster chair. ‘Gabriel, her forehead is burning,’ she kept saying.
The nurse took one look at the child from behind her desk and ran around it to see more closely. ‘You need Exeter.’
‘Please,’ said Gabriel, and Andrea burst into tears. ‘You must have someone. She collapsed!’
The nurse was close to the child now. ‘Foam at the mouth?’
‘Yes!’ said Andrea and Gabriel at the same time. There was only a thin line of white on Nina’s lips now.
‘We are worried she ate something she shouldn’t have,’ said Gabriel. From her handbag Andrea produced the sealed freezer bag with the two tiny ampoules.
The nurse, short and strong, with red eye make-up, took the bag and held it to the light. ‘These just look like vitamin gels. Did she pick them up somewhere?’
‘The pizza parlour yesterday. The one on the seafront where—’
The nurse interrupted Gabriel. ‘The crash?’ He saw her name badge now: MERCY AKUA. ‘Poor thing, poor all of you.’
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 to Gabriel, ‘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 be nothing.’ 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.’