A middle-aged man in considerable pain was frantic that his wife should not be contacted: “She has a heart condition; I don’t want her panicking.”

He proved to have several fractured ribs, one of which had punctured his lung. “Nothing we can’t fix pretty quickly. You can go home tomorrow; tell your wife you’ve got in a fight,” said Emma cheerfully, setting up a chest drain.

“Oh, bless you,” he said, patting her hand, and then, “You don’t look like a doctor, you know.”

“I do know,” she said.

One case was particularly poignant: a young man was stretchered in, covered in blood, his equally blood-soaked friend walking beside him.

“They were on their way to the injured guy’s wedding,” Mark told her when she met him outside the theatre. “How cruel is that?”

“Bad as he looks?”

“Not sure. Head injury fairly superficial, but horrible mess, that leg-we’re not sure yet if we can fix it. Going to try to pin it, but it’s extremely complex…”

Russell looked at his watch; he kept looking at it, willing it to stay still, stop making it later, stop Mary failing him. But it was moving relentlessly on, ignoring his bewilderment and his unhappiness: Seven forty-five, it said now. A whole sixty minutes late. An hour. Surely, surely she’d have got a message to him if she’d been held up somewhere. Surely it couldn’t be that difficult…

He’d come through to arrivals at a half run, he’d been so excited, his heart thudding as he pulled his flight bag behind him. The rest of his luggage had been FedExed to the hotel.

Although he’d instructed her to wait at the Hertz desk, he’d still wondered if she mightn’t walk over to where everyone else was waiting, leaning on the barrier. He scanned the row of people: scruffy, for the most part, generally young, lots of children sitting on their father’s shoulders, pulling on their mothers’ hands, people holding banners saying things like, Welcome Home, Mum and the rows of dark-suited drivers, with their signs neatly filled with people’s names. He had been met all over the world by such people; automatically he scanned the boards now… But there was no neat, smiling white-haired lady, waving as she had been in the wildest of his wildest dreams, calling out, “Russell! Over here!”

Mary had written in her last letter that there’d be no risk of bad holdups, because she’d be travelling against the traffic.

“And I shall allow lots of time, Russell; you can be sure of that. Was I ever late for you?”

And she wasn’t; somehow she had always been on time, working her way briskly across London, hopping from bus to bus, often walking if the traffic was bad. Well, she had been, once, terribly late-two and a half hours-but she had turned up safely just the same, had run into the bar where he’d agreed to meet her, flushed and flustered. “The siren went off, Russell; I had to go down to the tube and wait for the all-clear. I’m so sorry.”

It had been his last night before being moved to a new base; he wouldn’t be able to stay long, he warned her, but she’d said she’d get away from work early specially.

“I might not see you again for… for a long time. I mean, you never know. I don’t want to waste our last evening together, Russell, not seeing you.

“I’m so, so glad you were still here,” she said, smiling as he kissed her, and he said of course he was still there; he’d have waited for her for all night if need be, risked getting into every kind of trouble. As he would now. And this had been only an hour…

The lorry driver had been brought in by helicopter, Alex told Emma, the last casualty to arrive, and taken straight to the theatre. His chances were not rated very high. She had expected him to be old, but apparently he was in his early thirties, with a young family.

“He fielded most of the steering column,” said Alex, “poor chap. You name it, he’s got it: fractured ribs and sternum, tension pneumothorax, contusions of his heart, and then a few more minor things”-he grinned at her-“ruptured spleen, some liver injury. They’ve worked wonders on him, though. He’s very much alive. At the moment. Amazing the punishment the human body can take.”

“And… spinal injuries?”

“Not established yet. Poor bugger. Wife’s on the way, apparently.”

“I hope someone’s with her,” said Emma. “She’ll be terrified.” And then suddenly she found she had to sit down.

“God,” she said, “it’s ten o’clock. How did that happen?”

“Tired?”

“A bit. Any idea at all yet what caused this?”

“Not yet. But the lorry was at the front of it all, went through the barrier. Could have been him, fell asleep, skidded, whatever.”

“Well, if it was, he’s been well punished for it,” said Emma soberly.

Abi and Shaun were still waiting in A &E. They’d arrived almost two hours ago, and Abi was beginning to feel as if they might be there forever.

The relief of reaching St. Marks had been intense. It was a vast, pristine building, gleaming in the evening sun, only four storeys high, but Abi felt suddenly nervous. What on earth might be going on in there? Maybe they could wait outside. She felt she had seen enough blood and guts for one day-literally.

It was very noisy, ambulance sirens cutting endlessly through the air, and a lot of shouting. Ambulances were pulling up constantly, porters running out with wheeled stretchers, nurses following them.

“Right, my love, follow me; let’s get you registered.”

Abi took a deep breath and braced herself for a scene like something out of ER.

But inside it more closely resembled Waterloo station in rush hour than ER: a huge room with a large raised desk by the entrance with three women sitting at it, and an electronic sign that said, Welcome to St. Marks. Approximate waiting time from arrival is now five hours, fifteen minutes. This changed even as she watched it to five hours, thirty minutes. People were crammed onto chairs, standing three deep at the desk, pestering for information any nurse reckless enough to appear. Children were crying, running about, being shouted at; mobiles were ringing constantly, despite stern written instructions not use them, and the three women at the desk were astonishingly calm as they fielded questions, issued directions (mostly to sit down and wait), put out calls for people to go for assessment, and handed out admission forms to newcomers.

A small corner with a low green fence round it-marked, Children’s Play Area-was empty of both children and toys; there were several battered model animals and Thomas the Tank Engines being fought over in various parts of the room.

Bureaucracy took over; Abi was handed a form to fill in and had to leave most of it blank, having no idea who Shaun’s next of kin was, apart from its being clearly his mother, nor his address, nor even his religion. She elicited such information from Shaun as she could, but it was patchy. She sat down obediently with Shaun-having taken him, wildly protesting, into the ladies’ when he wanted to pee-and played Hangman and Join the Dots with him until he slumped into an exhausted stupor.

A white-faced young woman next to her, with a small girl on her lap, sat staring at the door; she looked as if she was about to cry. Abi smiled at her.

“You OK?”

“Not really. I’m worried out of my wits. My other little girl’s out there somewhere with her dad; she’s been hurt and they’re waiting for an ambulance.”

“I’m sorry,” said Abi. “Is she badly injured?”

“Not according to him, but he wouldn’t know bad if it hit him in the eye. He says it’s just a banged head, but that could be anything, couldn’t it? He’d been to collect her from her nan’s; they were late leaving. I said to him, if he’d been on time for once in his life, she’d be home tucked up safely in bed by now, but no, he had to go and check on a job he was doing first.”