‘Is it all right?’ Laura asked, panic plain in her voice as she tried to lever herself upright. ‘Is my baby all right?’
‘You have a beautiful baby girl, Laura,’ Eli replied, wincing slightly as the baby let out a deafening wail. ‘With a singularly good pair of lungs. Are there two arteries present in the cord?’ he added under his breath, and Brontë nodded as she clamped it.
‘What about the placenta?’ she murmured back.
‘Hospital. Let’s get them both to the hospital,’ he replied, wrapping the baby in one of the ambulance’s blankets. ‘Giving birth in the back of an ambulance isn’t ideal, and I’ll be a lot happier when both mum and baby are in Maternity.’
Brontë couldn’t have agreed more and, by the time they had delivered Laura and her daughter to Maternity, the young mother seemed to have completely forgotten her pledge to kill her husband if her beaming smile when he arrived, looking distinctly harassed, was anything to go by.
‘That’s one we won tonight,’ Eli observed when he and Brontë had returned to the ambulance.
She smiled, and nodded, but his good humour didn’t last. Not when they then had several call-outs for patients who could quite easily have gone to their GPs in the morning instead of calling 999. She knew what Eli was thinking as she watched his face grow grimmer and grimmer. That as a government assessor she must be noting down all of these nonemergency calls, would be putting them in her report as proof positive that ED7’s services could be cut and, though part of her wanted to reassure him, she knew she couldn’t. Assessing, and criticising, was supposed to be what she was here for, but she felt for him, and the depth of her sympathy surprised her.
‘Coffee,’ Eli announced tightly when he and Brontë strode through the A and E waiting room of the Pentland Infirmary after they’d delivered a city banker who confessed in the ambulance to having twisted his ankle two weeks before, but had been ‘too busy’ to go to his GP. ‘I need a coffee, and I need it now.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Brontë agreed, but, as she began walking towards the hospital canteen, she suddenly realised Eli was heading towards the hospital exit. ‘I thought you said you wanted a coffee?’ she protested when she caught up with him.
‘Not here,’ he said. ‘The coffee they serve here would rot your stomach. Tony’s serves the best coffee in Edinburgh, and it’s where all the ambulance crews go.’
‘But—’
‘Look, just drive, will you?’ he exclaimed. ‘Buccleuch Street, top of The Meadows, you can’t miss it.’
Just drive, will you. Well, that was well and truly putting her in her place, she thought angrily, and for a second she debated pointing out that she was a government assessor, not a taxi driver, but she didn’t. Instead, she silently drove to Buccleuch Street, but, when she pulled the ambulance up outside a small building with a blinking neon sign which proclaimed it to be Tony’s Twenty-four Hours Café, she kept the engine running.
‘Eli, what if we get a call?’ she said as he jumped down from the cab.
‘Hit the horn, and I’ll come running. Black coffee, café au lait, latte or cappuccino?’
‘Cappuccino, no sugar, lots of chocolate sprinkles, but—’
‘Do you want anything to eat?’ Eli interrupted.
‘No, but—’
‘You’ll be sorry later,’ he continued. ‘Tony’s makes the best take-away snacks, and meals, in Edinburgh.’
He probably did, she thought, as Eli disappeared into the café. Just as she was equally certain Eli would instantly come running if she had to hit the horn, but did he have to make life so difficult for himself? Of course he was legally entitled to a break, and he could take it wherever he chose, but biting her head off was not a smart move. One word from her and he could be out of a job.
And you’re going to say that one word? a little voice whispered in the back of her head, and she blew out a huff of impatience. Of course she wouldn’t. She’d felt as frustrated as he had by some of the calls, and from what she’d seen he possessed excellent medical skills. He just also very clearly detested bureaucracy and, to him, she was the living embodiment of that bureaucracy. If only he would meet her halfway. If only he would accept she was finding this as difficult as he was. And if only he hadn’t brought a hamburger back along with their two coffees, she thought with dismay when Eli opened the ambulance door and the pungent aroma of fried onions filled the air.
‘You’re not actually going to eat that, are you?’ she said, wrinkling her nose as he got into the passenger seat, and the smell of onions became even stronger.
‘You have something against hamburgers?’ he replied, taking a bite out of his and swallowing with clear relish.
‘Not at the proper time,’ she declared, ‘but at half past three in the morning…?’
‘Well, the way I figure it,’ he observed, ‘if we worked a nine-to-five job like regular people, this would be lunchtime.’
‘Right,’ she said without conviction. She took a sip of her coffee, then another. ‘Actually, this is very good.’
‘Told you Tony’s made the best coffee in Edinburgh,’ he said, stretching out his long legs and leaning his head back against the headrest. ‘And nothing beats a good dose of caffeine on a night when you seem to have picked up so many patients who aren’t even code greens.’
She shot him a sideways glance. All too clearly she remembered the instructions she had been given. Don’t ever become personally involved with a station you have been sent out to assess. Remain coldly objective, and clinical, at all times.
Oh, blow the instructions, she decided.
‘Look, Eli, I can completely understand your frustration with some of the people we’ve picked up tonight,’ she declared, ‘but the trouble is, though the vast majority of the population realise, and accept, they should only call 999 in an emergency, there’s a very small number who seem to think if they arrive in A and E by ambulance they’ll be seen a lot faster even if there’s nothing very much wrong with them.’
‘Yeah, well, one visit to A and E would soon disabuse them of that,’ he replied. ‘In my day, if there was any indication that a patient was simply trying to queue jump, we made them wait even longer.’
‘You used to work in A and E?’ she said, considerably surprised.
Eli finished the last of his hamburger, crumpled the paper which had been surrounding it into a ball and dropped it into the glove compartment.
‘Ten years at the Southern General in Glasgow for my sins. I was charge nurse until I packed it in.’
‘Why?’ she asked curiously. ‘Why did you give it up?’
He took a large gulp of his coffee, and shrugged.
‘Too much paperwork, too much time spent chasing big-shot consultants who couldn’t be bothered to come down to A and E to see a patient.’ He glanced across at her, his blue eyes dark in the street lamp’s glow. ‘I hear you were a charge nurse in A and E at the Waverley before you became a number cruncher. What made you give it up?’
‘Much the same reasons,’ she said evasively, and his gaze became appraising.
‘Nope. There was something else.’
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. He was right, there was, but she had no intention of confirming it. Her private life was her own.
‘Would you settle for, it’s none of your business?’ she said.
‘Not fair,’ he protested. ‘I gave you a straight