‘I’ve no idea what happened to her,’ he said, dragging his thoughts back to the question he’d been asked, frustrated when he saw that the man was having trouble finding a vein. But, then, with her blood pressure so low, it was hardly surprising. Still, he had to fight the urge to take over and do the job himself. They needed to get the IV started and the lactated Ringer’s running into her veins as soon as possible to get her blood pressure up. If she’d had some sort of spontaneous bleed that had caused a catastrophic drop in her blood pressure …
‘I came home from work to find her lying on the bed,’ he continued, forcing himself not to waste any time second-guessing, even as the need to do something urged him to continue CPR. ‘At first, I thought she was sleeping, but when I tried to wake her …’ he shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s when I realised how ill she was.’
‘Do you know if she’d had any alcohol to drink before you found her?’ he asked, and Dan almost smiled.
‘It’s unlikely. She never drinks anything stronger than a white wine spritzer … too many calories,’ he added.
‘Do you know if she’s taken any drugs, sir?’ the young man asked as he peeled the gel pads from their protective backing and positioned them swiftly on Zara’s chest, and even though Dan knew that the questions were necessary for him to do his job, the suggestion shocked him.
‘No!’ he exclaimed immediately, horrified at even the thought that this bright beautiful woman might have wanted to kill herself. Then he remembered a conversation he’d overheard at one of the parties she’d dragged him to earlier on in their marriage. He’d been shocked to learn just how many of her fellow models resorted to chemical assistance to maintain their almost skeletal slenderness.
‘Oh, God,’ he muttered, praying that Zara hadn’t been tempted down that route. In a profession that valued the freshness of youth above almost everything else, her age was already counting against her. Had she been that desperate to extend her modelling career that she would use drugs to help her compete with all those younger wannabes?
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted finally. ‘I’ve never seen her taking anything, but …’
‘Could you go and have a look in the bathroom, please, sir,’ the paramedic asked firmly, as he gestured to his colleague to take his hands off their patient while he activated the machine to monitor the state of her heart. ‘We’ll take over here now.’
‘Stand clear. Analysing now,’ said the disembodied voice programmed into the machine as he strode into the en suite bathroom, almost grateful for an excuse not to watch if they were going to have to make her beautiful body convulse with the brutality of a shock.
It took precious seconds to search through a mirror-fronted cabinet crammed full of beauty products of every shape and size, but the only tablets he could find were those in a half-full plastic bottle of over-the-counter painkillers.
‘No shock required,’ the voice was advising as he came back into the room, and his heart lifted briefly at the thought that at least Zara hadn’t gone into ventricular fibrillation or cardiac arrest.
‘Did you find anything, sir?’ prompted the paramedic as he rejoined them and he saw that in his absence they’d intubated Zara to secure her airway, rather than relying on the face mask, and had connected her to their portable oxygen cylinder. The monitor clipped to her finger was already starting to record an improvement in the saturation level in her blood.
‘No drugs, other than some generic analgesics,’ he said, disorientated by the fact that he was little more than a bystander in a situation where he was usually the one in charge. But this was completely different to working in A and E. There, he could work fast and effectively, treating any number of cardiac arrest patients in a single day with his brain working swiftly and clearly and every possible piece of equipment readily to hand.
Here, it felt as if his thoughts were travelling through treacle as he saw the paramedic’s gloved fingers sort through the pre-loaded syringes in his kit. Somehow, he just couldn’t get his brain to tell him what the man should be looking for, or why.
‘They were paracetamol and the bottle was half-full,’ he added, before the man could ask.
‘What about the bedside cabinet?’ prompted the other man, and Dan dragged his gaze away from what the two of them were doing to stride across and pull the drawer completely out. He upended it over the bed and several items fell off the edge of the mattress and hit his foot to land out of sight under the bed.
‘Some herbal sleeping tablets and … a bubble pack of contraceptive pills,’ he added in disbelief, suddenly wondering just how many kinds of a fool he’d been. So much for Zara’s grief that she couldn’t give him a child! If she’d been taking contraceptives to prevent herself getting pregnant, had anything about his marriage been real?
He reached under the bed to retrieve the items that had fallen, his first sweep revealing nothing more than a couple of pens and the locked diary that Zara had written in each night.
His second sweep shocked him to the core.
‘Barbiturates!’ he exclaimed when the empty bottle rolled into view and he caught sight of the name of the contents printed on the label. ‘Where did she get barbiturates from?’
There was an awful silence in the room, with only the soft sibilance of the oxygen to break it, all three of them gazing at the slender beauty with varying degrees of disbelief, incomprehension and pity. They all knew that the incidence of barbiturate overdose had dropped considerably with the introduction of newer, safer sleeping tablets, but if the label on the bottle was genuine, the dangerously addictive drugs were clearly still readily available in other parts of the world to globe-trotters such as models.
Although why Zara would feel the need to take …
‘We need to get her to hospital quickly, sir,’ the paramedic said briskly, as he selected several syringes. ‘Do you know your wife’s approximate weight so I can give her the first dose of sodium bicarbonate?’
Thank goodness he’d found the prescription bottle, he thought, realising wryly that he was probably one of very few husbands who would know almost to the ounce what his wife weighed, the result of Zara’s obsessive morning ritual had been a cause for alternating delight or despair for every single day of their marriage.
At least they now knew precisely which barbiturate she’d taken and that it was one that bicarbonate would promote more rapid urinary excretion—anything to get the drug out of her system before it could do any more damage. Zara was already deeply comatose and if he’d arrived home any later …
He shook his head, deliberately shutting that thought away as he followed every move that the two-man crew made with critical eyes. Not that he doubted their competence. From the moment they’d entered the flat they hadn’t made a false move.
His colleague had already piled everything else back into their packs and as soon as it was closed he straightened up. ‘I’ll get the stretcher,’ he announced and took off out of the flat.
‘Do you want to travel with her, sir, or—?’
‘I’ll follow you,’ Dan interrupted, and understood the look of relief that briefly crossed the man’s face. He didn’t know many paramedics who would be entirely comfortable about doing their job under the eagle eyes of an A and E doctor, especially when the patient was a member of that doctor’s family.
Apart from anything else, he and his colleague were probably wondering at the situation between Zara and himself that could have led her to make such a desperate gesture.
He sighed heavily with the realisation that there was no way this would remain a secret, no matter how strict the rules were over patient confidentiality.
‘The last thing any of us needs is speculation and gossip,’ he groaned under his breath as he followed the stretcher out