‘Okay, son, here we go,’ said Norrie aloud, looking back at the ambulance through the rear window of the police car as it led the way out of the airport. ‘Hold on tight!’
Six
‘You’re shivering, we’ve got to go home to get you sorted,’ said Sue’s mother as they left Grantham Hospital in the early hours of that Wednesday morning, having seen the ambulance carrying Martin set off for Nottingham at high speed. Shock was setting in. Sue only had on a T-shirt and jeans and the dawn was chilly. The ambulance driver had told her father that it was pointless to try and follow behind, so they went back briefly to her house first and Sue found some warmer clothes. Rocky, their grizzled old Border Collie, was baffled by all these people turning up in his kitchen so early, booting him out into the garden to do his business.
‘Come on, old boy, we don’t know when we’ll be home again,’ said Len, helping the dog out of the door with the side of his foot, but Rocky didn’t get it. He did what he had to do, then came straight back in and flopped back into bed.
‘Where can we put a key?’
Len was thinking ahead. They put it under a pot in the shed and left that door unlocked. ‘I’ll phone your friend later and get her to take the dog,’ said Joan. She would also phone Sue’s office and tell them what was happening, assuming control of that side of things to help out her daughter.
Sue was barely there. She was thinking of Martin and the bleed on his brain, whatever that meant. The hospital staff had not said much more. She was thinking about brain damage. She was thinking about therapy and what that meant and what it cost and whether she would have to give up work to care for him at least for a while and whether their house would have to be adapted in some way, until he was better. He was alive, at least. Whatever happened, he was still her boy. His ambulance would have arrived in Nottingham by now. Their journey took an hour, with her father driving painfully slowly and Sue got exasperated, believing the doctors could not operate on her son without her permission.
‘Go faster, Dad. Go faster! I haven’t signed anything, they can’t take him into theatre without my signature as a parent, you’ve got to speed up here.’ But Len wouldn’t go faster, for fear of crashing. They had to follow a map, they didn’t know where they were going and when they got to the vast Queen’s Medical Centre – the biggest hospital in the country at the time, with more than a thousand beds – and were eventually able to find the intensive care unit, the night sister had not heard of a Martin Burton. ‘Sorry, we don’t have anyone of that name. Where have you come from again? No, we’ve not had any patients from Grantham here and I don’t think we’re expecting any.’
Sue panicked then, but the sister looked at her again. ‘Hang on, what age is your son? Sixteen? You want PICU then, he might be there.’
A young male nurse who didn’t look much older than Martin himself explained in a kindly voice that the P was for paediatric, for kids. She knew that, of course, but her head wasn’t working properly. He walked them there, ten minutes away through the labyrinth of the hospital, up to the fifth floor in the lift and through corridors that confused and this time the answer was yes, they had Martin. ‘Or we will have, he’s just coming back from theatre.’ So they were already operating without asking, thought Sue. He must be in a really bad way. Her stomach twisted tighter. There was tea or coffee in the family room, but she didn’t want either. There were tissues, but she was past tears. There was nothing to do now but wait.
The hammering on the door startled Nigel Burton as he lay awake in a bed far from home, on the other side of the Atlantic and on the far side of America.
‘Yes? What?’
It was still Tuesday night there, eight hours behind Nottingham.
‘Chief Tech Burton?’
The big, bulky Sergeant Supplier with a grim look on his face clearly hadn’t come to drag Nigel out on the town. ‘I’ve had a call from the guard room at Cottesmore.’
They worked at the same base in England but were staying in apartments on Las Vegas Boulevard for ‘Red Flag’, an advanced aerial combat exercise in the skies above Nevada. Red versus Blue with live bombs, the RAF on the side of the good guys in raids and dogfights across hundreds of miles, training for serious combat. Nigel was the liaison between the pilots and the ground crews that kept the planes flying. The Sergeant Supplier at his door saw to the spare parts, but they knew each other only by sight. Whatever this was about, couldn’t it wait? Nigel had been up at half past four that morning and out to Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of town to get the first wave of Harrier Jump Jets away. He’d turned down a trip to the Strip with the lads for an early night, but clearly wasn’t going to get it.
‘One of your sons has collapsed and they’d like you to phone home.’
Nigel had served his country in wartime, and this carefully spoken man with a dark moustache and close-cropped, thinning hair was known and admired for being cool under pressure. He was trained to put other worries to the back of his mind and focus on the task in hand. This news was nothing he could not handle, although somebody at home had obviously thought it was serious enough to ring the helpline for forces families, which was how he had been traced and told. He didn’t expect it was Christopher who was poorly, Martin was the one who was always tripping over his own feet. He once fell off his skateboard and they took him to hospital then, but it all worked out okay. Fully expecting to be told that the crisis had passed, he rang home. There was no answer. Len and Joan did not reply to the phone at their house either. Nigel rang his own father, who knew nothing.
‘It’s very early here.’
Nigel told the sergeant he was not too worried.
‘These things happen. It will be fine, I’m sure.’
They sat in the apartment kitchen while Nigel kept trying to call home without success, but the next person he spoke to was a squadron leader calling from RAF Innsworth in Gloucestershire, the management centre for the RAF, who said he had been tasked with getting Nigel home. That was alarming. They didn’t pay for a commercial ticket back to the UK without a good, urgent reason, particularly if you were the only person in your unit who could do your job during an important exercise.
‘All I can tell you at the moment is that Martin has collapsed and it is serious. The earliest I can get you out of Vegas is 07.45 hours tomorrow morning. You will have to stop over in Pittsburgh for three hours, then catch the Gatwick flight from there. It’s the quickest way. We’ll have a car at the airport to take you to Nottingham. We’ll get you to your son as fast as we can.’
Fine, thought Nigel, as he started to pack his two kit bags, alone again in his room, but why the massive rush? There must be something he was not being told. Something terrible.
Seven
The police car rode the hills like a speedboat on the waves. Pushed back into his seat by the force of it all, Norrie felt sick to the stomach and gripped the hand rest with fright. He didn’t dare look at the speedometer. They were plunging into deep space, with the blackness wrapping back around them in the rearview mirror. The ambulance was just about in their slipstream, but suddenly they were slowing down.
‘What’s up? What are we doing?’