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Adam’s sure Ross is asking more from professional curiosity than genuine concern, the pathologist enjoying his discomfort. He answers anyway. “Having injections, seeing needles, touching needles, watching someone else have an injection, hearing someone talk about it.”
“Most things?”
“Yeah.” He sighs. “I tried sorting it a few years back. Cognitive behavior therapy, trigger ladders, graded self-exposure to cure. Nothing worked.”
“So when was the last time you had an injection?”
“A few years ago. The usual boosters for hepatitis and TB. I tried to punch the nurse, then passed out.”
“I hope she gave you the jab?”
“Yeah. Mags was there, next in line. She grabbed the needle and shoved it in while I was unconscious on the floor.”
Ross laughs. “Good for Mags. Well, take it easy for a few hours, won’t you?” Adam gives him a look. “At least try. I’ll write up the findings in a report and give it to someone else.” He pauses. “I’m sorry, Adam.” Adam looks at him. The pathologist’s normally disapproving gaze has softened. “About Pippa. Please pass on my condolences to DS Hoxton.”
“I will.”
* * *
Adam walks slowly out of the hospital to the car park. He opens his car door and gets into the driving seat, putting the key in the ignition. But as he does so, his sleeve pulls back, and for the first time in a while, he looks at the long scar running the length of his forearm. He runs a finger down it, remembering how his vein ripped as he pulled the needle out, how it felt—the pain but also the triumph. The thrill that it was up to him and him alone what went into his skin.
But of course, it wasn’t. He’d only been nine, and his parents were in charge. He cried, begged them not to do it, but there was no other way. Take the medicine, the needles, the poison in his veins, or die. And they left him. They couldn’t watch as the doctors restrained him, as he was drugged, sedated so they could pump the chemicals into his body. It cured him. It saved his life, but at what cost?
His parents had abandoned him when he needed them the most. Months in isolation for the stem cell transplant, feeling sick, tired, unable to eat or drink as the remainder of his hair fell out. Cuts that took forever to heal. Infections that wouldn’t go away. The nurses did the best they could, but he needed his mum. At night, in his darkest moments, he would call out for her, receiving only silence in return as he cried himself to sleep.
Whatever the doctors had done, it had worked. But as he left the hospital, the needles, the fear behind, something had changed. A distance between him and his parents. His father had tried to talk to him about it. Once, on the way home from a check-up.
“Your mother,” his father had said, eyes locked on the road as he drove. “She couldn’t cope seeing you that way.”
Adam turned toward him, frowning, as his father continued.
“She’s a delicate woman. She needed looking after.”
Adam opened his mouth and closed it a few times before he was able to speak. “I needed looking after,” he said quietly.
His father glanced away from the road for a second. “You had the best doctors in the country,” he’d replied, his voice sharp. “Wonderful nurses. You were being looked after.”
Adam had felt tears well in his eyes. He’d run his hands through his still-patchy hair, and in that moment, known what he’d suspected since those days in the hospital. That the only person he could rely on was himself.
He went to university. He pulled away. He constructed a shell, a thicker outer skin to protect himself. He barely speaks to his parents now. A call—birthdays and Christmas, their conversations awkward and brief.
He’d let nobody in. Until Romilly.
He picks up his phone now and searches for her number. He wants to talk to her, tell her how he passed out in the mortuary. Hear her soft, sympathetic laugh at his dismay, making the embarrassment feel not quite so bad somehow. His finger hovers over the green “Call” symbol, but instead he clicks the side button, closing down the phone.
He starts the engine and drives to the police station.
* * *
Faces look up expectantly as he walks into the incident room, the chatter subsides. He stands up at the front, waiting for their attention.
“I’ve just come from the mortuary. From Pippa Hoxton.” Everyone is silent, waiting for the latest bleak update. “It looks like we’re definitely looking for someone with medical experience. Where have we got to with the NHS staff?”
One of the analysts speaks: “The report has come back from the NHS trust with all the potential people with access to scrubs. Quinn is cross-checking it against the owners of VW Transporters.”
“Quinn?” Adam asks, turning to Ellie. It’s the first time he’s seen her since her vomit-encrusted state that morning. She’s tidy now, hair washed and clean. Eyes tired, her face colors, but she maintains her composure.
“No, nothing, sorry. No matches. Boss,” she adds.
