PROLOGUE
They could have been anyone.
They could have chosen to come at a different time, on a different day, or even to a different beach. It was chance that made them swing their four-wheel-drive vehicle off the narrow lane and on to the sand dunes at that precise location.
Lashed to the Range Rover’s roof rack was a robust orange dinghy and a pair of oars. In the back of the car was a tackle box and two state-of-the-art rods. But the men weren’t fishermen. The local newspaper would call them guardian angels, but their real-life occupations were more prosaic: they were doctors.
They’d left their warm beds and sleeping wives in their luxury holiday rental and crept through the darkened house like excited schoolboys, hell-bent on adventure.
Dr Adam Banner, A & E consultant, was behind the wheel. He was grinning as he sipped hot coffee from a Thermos and drove over the rippled sand towards the water’s edge.
Beside him, Dr Phillip Digby, consultant anaesthetist and highly competitive angler, was proposing a wager over who was likely to catch the most fish that morning when he caught a glimpse of something in the headlight beams.
‘Hang on a sec. What was that?’
With one foot already moving from accelerator to brake, Adam took his eyes from the deserted sand dunes and turned to his passenger and oldest friend beside him.
‘What waswhat?’
Phil shook his head, craning forward in his seat to peer through the inky black expanse of sand and sea, broken only by the line of frothy white surf where water and shore collided.
‘There was something way over there, to the left. By the mudflats.’
Adam slowed the car and stared into the darkness.
‘What kind of a something?’ he asked. He shivered involuntarily, remembering the warning a local old-timer had given in the pub just the night before after overhearing their fishing plans. ‘You need to mind where you go walking on them mudflats,’ the old man had advised, happily accepting the pint Adam had offered him. ‘Seen ’em suck a man down right up to his waist.’
Phil was frowning. ‘I’m not sure what it was. It looked like a bundle of material or something.’
‘It’s probably just an old ripped sail, washed up by the tide,’ Adam replied. But even so, he was already turning the car in a slow circle, trying to capture whatever it was Phil believed he’d seen in his lights.
‘There!’ Phil cried triumphantly. On the periphery of the headlights’ beam, perilously easy to have missed, somethingwasflapping in the wind. It was pale and fluttered like a flag. From this distance, it looked too flimsy to be part of a thick waxy canvas sail. It looked more like a bundled-up dust sheet.
Wordlessly, Adam pointed the car towards it, feeling the consistency of the sand begin to change the closer they got to the mystery object. The car was sitting lower now, sinking into the dunes, which were sucking on the tyres even on a vehicle like theirs, built for off-road terrain.
The wheels were beginning to spin as they sought to find traction and with a helpless shrug Adam brought the car to a stop, with the object they were going to investigate squarely lit by the headlights. With unspoken agreement, the two men got out of the car and reached in unison for the heavy quilted jackets they’d thrown on the back seat. It was five o’clock in the morning in late January and neither needed a thermometer to know the temperature was below zero.
They walked swiftly and with purpose, unconsciously emulating the way they travelled the hospital corridors. ‘Real-life doctors don’t run the way they do in those TV shows,’ Adam had once told his wife, who was addicted to medical dramas. ‘And after twenty years as a physician, I’ve never once said “stat”,’ he added for good measure.
‘It’s bound to be just a piece of rubbish,’ Phil declared, tugging to free one foot from the greedy sand.
‘If it is, you owe me a new pair of trainers,’ Adam said, releasing his own foot with a noisy squelch. ‘In fact—’ He never got to finish his sentence. Because that was the moment when he saw the woman’s foot.
Neither of them could remember crossing the final twenty metres that separated them from the casualty. But they did so at a run. Phil had reached for his phone and was swearing softly at the absence of signal, while Adam dropped to his knees beside the unconscious woman. She was lying on the mudflats, dressed in a thin cotton nightgown, one naked leg exposed to the elements, the other lost beneath the surface of the mud.
‘Fuck! No reception,’ Phil said, abandoning his mobile and hurrying to join Adam, who was already shaking his head as he sought for a pulse at the base of the woman’s long, slender neck.
With slick choreography, Phil bent his ear to the woman’s blue-tinged lips. No breath warmed his cheek, her chest didn’t rise or fall. He reached for her hand, slapping the back of it as though searching for a vein.
‘Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?’ he shouted, but the woman was unresponsive.
‘We need firmer ground for CPR,’ Adam said, his teeth chattering from the cold.
There was probably an efficient technique to extract someone from the enveloping mud but neither doctor knew it, so they locked their hands beneath the woman’s armpits and hauled her out roughly, knowing that ribs could mend, dislocated joints could be fixed, but there was no coming back from lack of oxygen to the brain.
‘Here. Check mine,’ Adam said, tossing his phone to Phil before bending to the woman. This was what he did. It was his job, and yet in all the years since he’d qualified, this was the first time he’d attempted to resuscitate anyone outside of a hospital ward.
Her ribcage lifted from the strength of his first rescue breaths but failed to take over the task when he’d finished. There was an unfamiliar tremor to his hands as he locked them in position in the middle of the woman’s chest and began compressions. As he breathed into her lungs and rhythmically forced her heart to circulate blood around her body, Phil tried their phones one more time.