CHAPTER 26: THE STITCHES
St. Bartholomew's Hospital, A&E — August 27, 2010, 1:20 AM
The waiting room at Bart's A&E at one in the morning was a cross-section of London at its worst: a drunk with a split lip arguing with a triage nurse, a woman holding a crying toddler with an ear infection, two teenage boys with matching black eyes who wouldn't look at each other, and me, sitting in a plastic chair with my jacket wrapped around my left forearm and a growing stain on the armrest.
The triage nurse — a heavyset man with a shaved head and the patient expression of someone who'd seen everything — had looked at my arm, asked if I could feel my fingers, and given me a number. "Busy night. Shouldn't be more than forty minutes."
Forty minutes. I could bleed through my jacket in forty minutes. Probably not fatally — the cut was shallow — but the waiting room floor would need cleaning.
I concentrated on keeping pressure on the wound and not thinking about the kitchen. The extinguisher. The knife. The sound the chair had made when I'd shoved it between me and a man who'd have killed me without hesitation.
You're not a field agent. You were never a field agent. You were an analyst who sat in a climate-controlled office in Quantico and read case files and drank terrible vending machine coffee and went home at five-thirty.
The vending machine coffee at the Bureau had been bad. Bart's cafeteria coffee was worse. The comparison almost made me laugh, which told me the adrenaline crash was entering its delirious phase.
The doors from the main corridor opened. A woman in a white lab coat walked through, heading for the exit — late shift, heading home. She was halfway across the waiting room when she stopped.
"Nathan?"
Molly Hooper. Hair loose, coat unbuttoned, a messenger bag over one shoulder and the particular tiredness of someone who'd been in a morgue since eight AM. She looked at me. At the jacket. At the stain.
"Good God, what happened to you?"
"Aggressive filing cabinet."
"That's—" She came closer. Her eyes went to the jacket, the blood, the way I was holding my arm. The pathologist took over. "How long ago?"
"Hour and a half. Maybe two."
"Can you feel all your fingers? Wiggle them for me."
I wiggled. She watched each finger move, assessing nerve damage with the clinical focus of someone who spent her days cataloguing the specific ways human bodies could be damaged.
"It's not deep," I said. "Surface laceration. Six inches, left forearm. I don't think it hit anything important."
"You don't think." She dropped her bag on the chair beside me. "Let me see."
"Molly, you don't have to—"
"I look at injuries for a living. Mine are just usually on people who can't complain about my bedside manner." She peeled the jacket back. The cut was ugly under the fluorescent lights — a raw red line crusted with drying blood, the edges slightly ragged where the blade had caught. Fresh blood welled from the centre where my movement had reopened the wound.
Her hands were steady. Completely steady. The nervous woman from the cafeteria — the one who fumbled her phone and couldn't finish sentences — was gone. In her place was a professional who knew exactly what she was looking at.
"Clean laceration, shallow-to-moderate depth, no visible tendon involvement. You'll need stitches — eight or ten, probably. And a tetanus booster if you're not current." She looked up at me. "This wasn't a filing cabinet."
"No."
"A knife?"
"Yes."
She didn't ask who or why. She flagged the triage nurse — "Excuse me, I'm Dr. Hooper, pathology department. This laceration needs cleaning and suturing, and he's been waiting with an open wound" — and within five minutes I was in a treatment bay with a curtain pulled around me and a nurse preparing a suture kit.
Molly stayed.
She cleaned the wound herself — antiseptic on gauze, methodical passes that stung badly enough to make my jaw lock. "Sorry. I know it hurts."
"It's fine."
"It's clearly not fine." She rinsed the gauze. "You're grey. And your hands haven't stopped shaking since I found you."
"Adrenaline crash. It'll pass."
"I know what an adrenaline crash looks like." Another pass. The antiseptic burned into the raw edges of the cut. My right hand gripped the bed rail until the knuckles went white. "I've seen what happens when people try to walk off injuries like this. They get infections. They lose range of motion. They end up back here in a week with a fever and a wound that's gone septic."
"You're very persuasive when you're angry."
"I'm not angry. I'm — concerned." She set the gauze down. The nurse arrived with a local anaesthetic, and Molly stepped aside while the injection went in — a cold sting that spread outward and turned the screaming nerve endings into a dull, distant hum.
The stitching took twelve minutes. Ten stitches, not eight — the nurse was thorough, precise, the kind of competence that comes from doing the same procedure six times a night. Molly watched every stitch with the critical eye of someone who'd write a report on the technique if asked.
When it was done, the nurse taped a dressing over the sutures, handed me a prescription for antibiotics, and told me to keep it dry for three days. "Come back if there's redness, swelling, or discharge. Or if you get another filing cabinet injury."
Even the NHS staff don't believe that one.
Molly walked with me to the dispensary, where a night pharmacist filled the prescription — amoxicillin, seven days, take with food.
"I was protecting someone," I said, in the corridor between the dispensary and the exit. Too tired to construct a better cover story. Too tired to want one. "A client. Someone came after him. It got dangerous."
She was quiet for a moment. "Could you have been killed?"
"I don't think so. They wanted him, not me. The knife was—" I gestured at my arm. "Defensive. I got in the way."
"You got in the way." She repeated it. Not a question. An observation, the way she'd observe a wound pattern or an injury distribution — cataloguing the facts, building a picture.
"It's what the job is, sometimes."
"Most private investigators take photographs of cheating husbands. They don't get stabbed."
"Most of my work is exactly that boring. This was the exception."
[+15 SP. Relationship progress: M. Hooper. Trust deepened.]
She walked me to the exit. The night air was cool after the sterile warmth of A&E — early autumn creeping into London's edges, the first suggestion that summer was ending. The Maglite torch was still in my jacket pocket, heavy against my hip. The jacket itself was ruined — blood doesn't wash out of cotton, not completely.
"Text me when you get home," Molly said. "So I know you're safe."
"I will."
"And take the antibiotics. All of them. Don't stop because you feel better after three days."
"Yes, Doctor."
A smile. Small, tired, genuine — the same smile from the cafeteria, but with something else behind it. Something that hadn't been there before.
She wrote her mobile number on the back of the prescription bag. Not her work email. Her phone number.
"For emergencies," she said. "Or if you need someone to tell you to take your antibiotics."
I took the night bus home. Texted her from the bedsit at 2:15 AM: Home. Thank you.
Her reply came four minutes later: Next time, try ducking.
I laughed. It pulled at the stitches. Both things hurt in different ways.
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