Mildenheath Hospital didn’t hold happy memories for Wendy. Whenever she’d visited on work it had inevitably been depressing, as hospitals and police work tended to be. Even her private visits had been ones to want to forget, from her parents’ deaths to her brother’s hospitalisation after a drug overdose. The solemn mood that accompanied her, Culverhouse and Debbie Weston this time, though, was something she’d never felt before.
Being a police officer was a job that carried a certain amount of risk. All officers knew that. But none actually expected to be shot in the line of duty. Especially not a CID officer, who was generally kept away from the front line.
There had been incidents in the past, of course, but nothing quite like this. Wendy herself had been hit by a car whilst chasing a suspect on foot not long ago, and as a result had suffered a miscarriage. That had been bad enough, but it had been a strange sort of private pain. The death of a person whom only she had ever known. Hearing the frantic sounds of the medical team battling to keep Luke Baxter alive was something very different. It was the desperate anguish of the life of a colleague — a friend — hanging in the balance. The unspoken truth was also that it could have just as easily been any one of them.
Luke’s aunt, Shirley, was inconsolable, looking like a lost puppy as she kept glancing up at the door to the intensive care unit, desperate to be allowed in but told by the doctors and surgeons to stay outside and try and keep calm. Her other nephew, Luke’s older brother, Sam, was doing his best to console her.
For Wendy, she wished desperately she could say something to them. She’d been in that position herself, when she’d found out what had happened to her dad. It wasn’t something she wished on anybody and she felt every bit of Shirley and Sam’s pain.
Just as she was considering trying to say something to them — some words which could go some way towards reassuring or comforting them — the door to the intensive care unit opened and a middle-aged female doctor came out and sat down with Shirley and Sam.
From where Wendy was sitting, she couldn’t hear the words the doctor said, but the reaction from Luke’s aunt said everything. As she saw Shirley’s world fall apart in fits of hysterical sobbing, Wendy knew exactly what had been said.