Someone To Save you (3 page)

‘Couldn’t sleep?’ Anna asked, rubbing her eyes as she watched him pour the tea.

‘Not much,’ Sam admitted, turning to face her.

‘Bad dreams?’

Sam shook his head, stirring the tea. ‘I just keep seeing the look in the eyes of that woman. And I keep thinking – how can you do that to your children?

Anna shrugged.

‘I mean, what could be so bad that you’d lock your baby up in the boot of your car, strap your children in the back seats, and drive straight onto a railway track?’

‘She can’t have known what she was doing,’ Anna replied, taking the tea that Sam proffered.

‘Probably not,’ Sam agreed, looking off towards the left.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘I’m thinking that she must have locked the doors after driving down the embankment,’ Sam explained. ‘She watched one of her children get away and run for help, and her reaction was to lock the doors, knowing that the other three would probably die as a result.’

‘It’s impossible for us to understand,’ Anna said.

Sam exhaled, taking a sip of tea and grimacing at the singeing heat. ‘If only I could have got the car off the tracks. I was nearly there; I could feel the car moving…’

‘You’re bound to think things like that,’ Anna said, cradling her drink. ‘But you couldn’t have done anything more. You saved three people’s lives.’

But he hadn’t saved one person’s life. And that thought gnawed at him, the same as it did whenever a patient was lost. Yes, you pushed it to the back of your mind, you had to in order to focus on the next person, but the regret was there. It was what drove him to improve – he didn’t ever want to find such failure acceptable.

‘I should have called someone to stop the trains. I should have gone back to get my phone.’

‘It’s easy to say that now,’ Anna countered. ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing. And who’s to say the outcome would have been any different?’

Sam nodded. ‘You’re right - as usual.’

‘Come here,’ she said, putting down her tea and embracing him. They hugged tightly, and Sam wallowed in the comfort of Anna’s body as it moulded to his. He buried his head into her hair, smelling her shampoo.

‘I do love you, Sam Becker.’

‘I love you too,’ he replied over her shoulder, kissing her hair. He pulled back to see Anna with watery eyes.

‘You okay?’

Anna nodded. ‘Just a bit emotional after everything that’s happened. I don’t like the thought of losing you.’

‘You won’t,’ Sam reassured her, hugging her again. ‘I promise. I’ll take you to the airport. Seeing as I’ve now got the day off.’

This time Anna pulled back. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to stick around?’ she said, searching his eyes for the answer. ‘I can call Bob now and that will be that. They’ll just have to make do without me this time.’

Sam shook his head. He had persuaded Anna on the drive home from the hospital that she should make the trip to Bangladesh – they desperately needed her expertise – so she had somewhat reluctantly booked a replacement flight when they got home. ‘They need you, Anna. Honestly, I’ll be okay. The hospital wouldn’t have let me go so soon if they hadn’t been satisfied. I just need some rest. Anyway, it’s only four days.’

‘Okay,’ Anna replied, not sounding convinced. ‘But on one condition.’

‘Go on.’

‘That you’ll think about seeing that counsellor.’

The hospital had offered Sam an appointment with a counsellor, which was now standard procedure for anyone involved in a traumatic event. It was meant to reduce the likelihood of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, although there were some who believed that it actually increased the chances of suffering after-effects. Sam had politely declined, although Anna had thought it could be a good idea.

‘Okay,’ Sam conceded. ‘I’ll think about it.’

An hour and a hearty breakfast later, Doug McAllister, a consultant anaesthetist who was a good friend and work colleague of Sam’s, rang to let them know that there was a short piece in the Telegraph about the train crash. Anna set off immediately to the local newsagents, returning ten minutes later.

‘I checked all the papers, and the story is in five of them.’

Anna handed Sam the pile of papers as he sat by the large bay window of their ground floor flat. It offered a lovely view across to a small but beautiful area of parkland in Clerkenwell, North London. The place, the bottom half of a Georgian property, wasn’t the largest, but it was more than adequate for two people, and they were lucky in having the garden. It had also been fortunate that they’d bought when they did – just before the London house price boom. Their long-term upstairs neighbours, a young couple with whom they had become good friends, had recently sold the top floor apartment for just over three hundred thousand. It was no wonder that the new guy to move in was a city banker – you had to be to afford those kinds of prices. Sam had been meaning to return the spare front door key, which they’d recently found buried in a kitchen drawer.

Sam surveyed the papers on his lap with horror, hardly daring to open them for fear of what was written inside.

‘They don’t mention you by name,’ Anna said, flicking through the top newspaper and pointing at the story on page ten. The headline read “Good Samaritan saves train crash family”. Sam skimmed the article. There was indeed no mention of his name, although the piece documented the identity of the dead woman, Jane Ainsley, from Islington, North London, and her children Alison, Simon, Charlotte and baby Jessica.

‘They only live just down the road,’ Anna said, settling down next to Sam, perching on the wide ledge.

Sam nodded. ‘It doesn’t mention that Alison is missing,’ he noted, reading on.

‘None of the papers do,’ Anna confirmed. ‘They’re all a little sketchy. I guess they had to go to print before they could get many details. What do you think’s happened to her?’

‘Who knows,’ Sam said, ‘maybe like Louisa said, she’s traumatised and just wanted to get away. I just hope that she’s safe, wherever she is. I guess we’ll just have to wait to hear from the police.’

Anna nodded. ‘They’ll probably want to speak with you again.’

‘I would say definitely, especially if Alison isn’t found soon,’ he said, moving on to the next paper. The story was essentially the same. He placed all the papers on the side and looked out across the street outside, watching the people pass by. Sam watched a stocky man as he crouched down, stroking his dog in front of the flat, before moving on. ‘I hope that’s the end of the press. I don’t want any publicity.’

‘You’re afraid they’ll pick up Cathy’s story?’

‘They did last time.’

Twelve months ago, in the middle of a transatlantic flight to a conference in Washington DC, Sam saved a baby’s life. The baby, who was suffering from a collapsed lung, was saved by using a straw and a needle, which enabled Sam to reopen the airways. The saving of the baby, who happened to be the child of a high-profile American senator and expected future presidential candidate, made headlines around the world. It brought press attention that Sam found difficult to handle - especially when they picked up on the story of his sister Cathy’s death, who over a decade ago had been brutally raped and murdered by Sam’s then best friend, Marcus Johnson. The coverage had reopened wounds that even a surgeon of Sam’s talent couldn’t easily mend.

‘Maybe today’s stories will be it,’ Anna said.

‘Hopefully.’

Anna reached for his hand. ‘I’m really sorry. With all that’s happened we haven’t even spoken about what it was like at the weekend. Was it okay?’

‘Better than I expected,’ Sam replied. ‘Mum and dad seem to be finally moving on with their lives. It’s only taken fifteen years.’

‘Did anyone mention Marcus Johnson’s release?’

Marcus Johnson, the person who had so brutally cut short his little sister’s life was now able to walk the streets and make a new start. Sam shocked himself by the strength of hatred he still felt towards the man who he used to be so close to. It remained unfathomable to Sam how Marcus could have betrayed such trust. And during his fifteen years in jail, Marcus had offered no explanation. In fact, he had always protested his innocence, despite the overwhelming evidence against him. It had happened on a camping trip in North Wales. Sam and Marcus, Louisa and Cathy. On the second morning Louisa had woken Sam and Marcus. Cathy had gone. After twenty minutes of frantic searching, her body was found on the nearby sand dunes. Tests revealed later that Cathy’s body had been covered with Marcus’s DNA. There was hair, skin, semen – it all matched. They had never found the murder weapon, thought to have been a glass bottle, but they hadn’t needed to. In the immediate aftermath Marcus had denied being with Cathy that night. But when it became clear that the evidence was so stacked against him, he changed his story. He claimed they had been dating in secret for months, and that they had crept out of the tents and walked down to the beach, before drinking vodka under the stars and making love. He had written to Sam, protesting his innocence. He said his last memory was lying down next to Cathy, and although he was unable to remember anything after that, he would never have hurt her.

Sam shook his head. ‘No one said a word about it, including me.’

His parents hadn’t spoken about his release, and instead it had hung over the remembrance day like a ghost.

‘So you don’t know how they feel about it – your parents?’

‘I can guess,’ Sam replied. ‘I think they just want to pretend that he’s still locked up.’

‘And you?’

Sam shrugged his shoulders. ‘Pretty much the same really. I think he should have spent the rest of his life inside. But, he’s out and that’s it.’

‘You sure you’re okay?’

Sam glanced across at Anna in the front passenger seat, as they crawled through the traffic on the outskirts of Heathrow later that afternoon. She’d been uncharacteristically quiet throughout the journey to the airport, and had spent most of the time staring out of the window.

Anna shook herself out of her daydream. ‘What? Sorry?’

‘Just wondering if you’re okay,’ Sam explained. ‘You’ve been really quiet. If it’s about going away, I’ll be okay, honestly. And if it’s about me risking my life like an idiot, I promise I won’t do that again.’

He glanced over at his wife.

‘It’s something else?’ Sam tried. She was biting on her lip – a sure sign that something was bothering her.

Anna kept quiet.

Sam brought his attention back to the road as the traffic thinned slightly. He followed the signs for Terminal 3, edging around coaches and cars that were busy unloading luggage irrespective of traffic laws. One car was parked across half a lane, the boot jammed full of cases. Heathrow was always a nightmare to negotiate. Finally parked in a drop-off zone, Sam looked across at Anna, whose eyes were now glistening with tears. She very rarely cried.

Sam placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘What’s the matter, A?’

Anna surprised him by smiling as she pinched the tears away. ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she began, surprising Sam with a smile. ‘I was going to tell you last night, but it didn’t seem like the right time. And I wanted to be sure, so I did another test just before we left the house.’

Suddenly Sam knew, breaking out into a smile of his own. ‘You’re…?’

Anna took his hand in hers and smiled broadly. ‘We’re having a baby.’

4

Sam Becker watched little Sophie Jackson. She looked so fragile while asleep, like a doll, eyes closed with alabaster skin. Born with a congenital heart defect, Sophie, now two years old, was clinging onto life as her heart failed. But now she had a chance, thanks to the Berlin Heart, a miniature heart pump that acted as a bridge between her own failing heart and a donor one. Five days ago Sam had led the procedure to fit the device. It had all gone to plan, yet it would all come to nothing unless she could get that transplant.

‘Your mum and dad love you very much, Sophie. Keep fighting.’

Sam had known Sophie and her parents Tom and Sarah since her birth, and they had been in contact ever since. The adorable little girl had been a fighter since her first breath, and she was still fighting, but time was running out. The pump would buy her time, maybe up to twelve months, but in truth there was no telling and the risk of death was always there. She was however in the best place. The Cardiothoracic Centre at St. Thomas’s Hospital, on the banks of the Thames in Central London, was one of the most advanced treatment centres in the world. With state of the art equipment, a suite of private high dependency rooms, and some of the best trained staff in the world, the centre was barely five years old. It led the world in paediatric cardiac surgery, and for Sam, working under one of the world’s foremost surgeons, Professor Adil Khan, it was a dream job.

‘Thought I’d find you here.’

Sam looked up as Louisa approached and pulled up a chair. Louisa, with her hippish, flowing dress sense, corkscrew curly red hair and face of freckles, cut a distinctive figure in the otherwise uniformed, groomed hospital environment. Far from unattractive, she turned heads among both staff and patients. Always jovial, Louisa was a popular clinical psychologist who did a lot of good work with patients and family on the wards. She was a master listener and, where necessary, imparter of advice.