Enemy Within: A heart-wrenching medical mystery (British Military Thriller Series Book 3) Read online

  Enemy Within

  Nathan Burrows

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  A note from the Author

  Also by Nathan Burrows

  1

  Robert Hunter, or Titch to his few friends, wasn’t really a misogynist because it wasn’t just women he hated. He had equal disdain for anyone who wasn’t like him, so people who were British, white, and male were fine by him. It was everyone else he didn’t like.

  Most of the time, Titch could keep his somewhat unpopular opinions to himself. It was only when he was in the sanctuary of the dark web that he really felt himself. Only there was he among friends, among equals. Only there could he hate who he wanted to hate, the way he wanted to hate them. Not only that, but his peers and his subordinates would applaud him for it. It wasn’t his peers or subordinates who Titch was trying to impress this evening, though. It was what passed, in that dark underbelly of hatred for his superiors…the gatekeepers for the group he so badly wanted to join.

  Titch gripped his hands tightly on the steering wheel of the battered Nissan Micra he’d bought for cash and no questions from a bloke in Mile Cross, an area of Norwich that wasn’t showered with love by the rest of the city’s inhabitants. The only positive thing that could be said about the car was that it ran and did so completely under the radar. In every other respect, it was a wreck. And it was about to be wrecked even more.

  He slowed his speed as he passed the Coach and Horses in Thorpe Road, the lights of the city behind him. The exterior seating area of the pub was full of revellers, celebrating Norwich City Football Club’s imminent return to the premier league. Titch shook his head, knowing that they wouldn’t have much to celebrate about next year other than a fight to survive in a league they were ill-prepared for. But the merry faces of the drinkers singing outside the pub didn’t seem to reflect that.

  Titch held his breath as he passed the Indian Flowers takeaway on the corner of Thorpe Road and Rosary Road, keen to not have to inhale any of the foreign scents it polluted the local air with, and crunched the gears as he tried to get the Micra to accept second gear as a viable option. Most of Rosary Road was downhill as it led back toward the River Wensum, so at least he could keep gear changes to a minimum. The languid river ran through the heart of the city on its slow way to the sea to the east and was probably the reason the Anglo-Saxons had settled there. Titch would have liked to have been an Anglo-Saxon back in those days. They had, he reflected as he coasted down Rosary Road, a lot more fun back then.

  He saw the first one within a hundred yards of the junction with Thorpe Road. She was skinny, had peroxide blonde hair, and as Titch slowed to take a closer look at her, was probably old enough to be his mother, perhaps even his grandmother. Hearing the car approaching, the woman turned toward it and smiled as Titch drew level.

  “Crack whore,” Titch muttered under his breath as he saw the state of her teeth. Even in the poor lighting, he could see the gaps between them. The woman’s smile faded as Titch drove past her, but he was sure there would be someone else along in a moment to take their chances.

  There were a couple of other chancers that Titch drove past, and as he glanced into a dark alleyway leading to a communal area called Old Library Wood, he saw a man sitting on a park bench with a woman kneeling in front of him. As their eyes met, the man on the bench gave Titch a thumbs up, seemingly oblivious to the woman kneeling in front of him, her head bobbing up and down as she earned her next fix. This was not, Titch reflected, the finest part of Norwich.

  He finally saw her at the very end of Rosary Road, just before it reached Riverside Road and, as the name would suggest, the river. She was standing outside a modern red-brick building that housed a variety of businesses. Titch knew from previous excursions to the area that behind the building was a secluded parking area that was a lot more discrete than a bench in Old Library Wood.

  The woman was slim, perhaps five foot seven or eight, but her being taller than him wasn’t an issue for Titch. Despite the cold March evening, she was wearing a short black skirt that showed off long, elegant legs and she had a thin jacket on. As Titch slowed the Micra, she put her hands on her hips, making sure that the gesture moved the jacket so he could see her almost certainly pneumatic breasts. The woman smiled, her face indistinct in the dim street lighting. But as far as Titch was concerned, she was perfect.

  “Hi, babes,” the woman said as Titch pulled to a halt beside the woman and wound the window down by a couple of inches. The Micra was that crap that it didn’t even have electric windows, and it took him a couple of tries to find the handle. “What’re you looking for?”

  Titch looked at her closely to see if she was as perfect as he’d thought she was. The woman had milk chocolate coloured skin, dark hair falling in ringlets to her shoulders, and sharp cheekbones with deep shadows that accentuated her eyes.

  “What’s on offer?” Titch mumbled as he looked at her.

  “Whatever you want, babe. Blow and go for t
wenty quid, full service for forty.” She jerked her chin in the direction of the car park behind the building she was standing in front of. “It’s private back there. Everything’s covered though. That’s non-discretionary.” The woman’s voice had a strange lilt, almost melodic, but it certainly wasn’t local.

  Her words confirmed two things to Titch. The first, and this was pretty obvious anyway, was that she was a whore. The second—her offering him a shopping list without him asking for it—told him she wasn’t the filth. Titch looked at her, realising that although she looked young, she was probably a good few years older than he was. Mid to late thirties was his revised estimate. Even the caked-on make-up and poor light couldn’t hide the spider’s web of wrinkles around her eyes.

  “I’m good, thanks,” Titch said as he struggled to get the Micra back into gear. “Maybe another time?” To her credit, the woman’s smile didn’t falter.

  “Sure,” she replied. “You know where I am if you need something exotic.”

  Titch pulled away, muttering under his breath as he did so.

  “That’s non-discretionary,” he said, mimicking her accent. “A prostitute with a vocabulary?”

  Titch reached the junction of Riverside and Rosary Road and pulled the Micra round in a lazy u-turn. He pulled in by the side of the road and watched as another car slowed to examine the woman he’d just been talking to before gently speeding up without a word being exchanged, let alone any money or bodily fluids. Titch looked at the driver as he passed him, but the man had his hand up over his face as he drove by.

  Returning his attention to the woman standing a hundred yards in front of him, Titch put the Micra back into gear and pulled away from the kerb. The woman, perhaps not realising that it was the same car, turned and faced in his direction, her smile reappearing as he drove toward her.

  The best part of what happened next, Titch reflected as he drove his everyday car back to his base at RAF Honington later on, was the expression on the whore’s face in the split second before her head fractured the windscreen of the Nissan Micra.

  2

  “What’ve you got?” Paul Adams asked as the doors to the resuscitation room in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital emergency department burst open. Accompanied by a frantic-looking paramedic, a young woman was lying on a trolley and moaning softly.

  “Pedestrian versus car,” the paramedic replied, his concern obvious. Adams looked at the woman on the trolley and came to an instant, instinctive decision based on the years he’d spent in similar departments. She was hurt, but not badly. The one eye that wasn’t closed by facial swelling was open and darting around the room and the fact she was moaning told him her airway was clear and that her breathing was—for the time being—okay. He couldn’t see pools of blood on the trolley or the floor behind it, so that was the ABC of airway, breathing, and circulation in one go.

  But Adams was far too experienced to let his split-second instinct cloud his judgement. After training as a nurse in the National Health Service, he’d joined the Royal Air Force a few years ago and had seen more trauma on operations than most of the staff in the department would see in a lifetime. He would only be happy when he and the rest of the team had done a full assessment of the woman. Adams had been caught out before. He took a step back to allow the paramedics into the resuscitation room.

  “So, hit and run at the bottom end of Rosary Road, name unknown just yet. She’s got facial injuries and bilateral tib and fib fractures. Open on the left. Haemodynamically stable apart from a slight tachy, GCS is thirteen to fourteen.” Adams glanced down at the woman’s legs, both of which were badly broken. But apart from a slightly fast heart rate, she seemed to be fairly stable and her Glasgow coma score told Adams she probably didn’t have a significant head injury.

  The paramedics lined their trolley up with the much more industrial departmental trolley and started getting ready to transfer the casualty to it. “We’ve not had time to do much with her other than assessment and a dressing to the left leg. There’s a line in her right antecubital fossa with some normal saline running through.”

  Adams took a step closer to the woman and looked at her face as the resuscitation room started filling up with other personnel alerted by the ambulance’s arrival. The swelling on one side of the woman’s face was quite marked, and from the peculiar angle of her jaw he thought it was probably broken.

  “Going to need max fax,” he muttered to himself, “and the orthopods as well.” The maxillofacial team would need to assess the woman’s jaw, and the fact that one of her lower leg fractures had pierced the skin—an open fracture—would need the orthopaedic surgeon’s attention. Adams raised his voice. “Hello, can you hear me?” The woman nodded in response, despite the rigid cervical collar that was around her neck in case she had a bony injury to her spine. “My name’s Adams, and I’m one of the charge nurses on duty this evening. Can you tell me your name?”

  Adams had to lean in to hear her response. He wasn’t certain, but he thought he heard her say Rosie.

  “Do you want me to take this one, Adams?” a woman’s voice behind him said. Adams turned to see Hannah, one of the more experienced nurses, standing a few feet away. “You’re off in a few minutes, aren’t you?”

  “Are you happy to?” Adams replied. She was one of the few nurses on duty that evening who Adams knew would be fine looking after Rosie. Also, it would make sense for continuity if she took charge, as she didn’t finish until midnight. Hannah had been in a big argument with the sister who managed the rota the previous week. The sister’s revenge, which was both petty and predictable, was a run of evening shifts for Hannah. Adams had spoken to the sister on the quiet to see if he could get her to change her mind. He liked Hannah, and had even thought at one point that they might end up together as he’d been on the cusp of asking her out for a meal just before things started happening with him and Lizzie. But all the conversation with the sister had resulted in was a couple of extra evening shifts for Hannah.

  “Sure, no problem,” Hannah replied with a broad smile at Adams as she stepped forward to introduce herself to the patient. Adams watched as she tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear before she said anything, and he grinned as he wondered if she realised how often she did that every day.

  Just as Adams was leaving the resuscitation room, he could hear Hannah co-ordinating the transfer of Rosie onto the trolley. He walked across the department to the central desk where the senior doctor that evening was typing into a computer.

  “Hey Raj,” Adams said with a grin. “It’s a lot quicker if you use more than just your index fingers.” The registrar raised one hand from the keyboard, continuing to peck with the other, and raised his middle finger at Adams.

  “I save this one for something else,” the doctor said, smiling. “What’s in resus?”

  “Pedestrian versus car,” Adams replied. “Open tib and fib and a nasty-looking face. You free to come and have a look once Hannah’s done her assessment?”

  “Sure,” Raj said, returning to his typing.

  “Are you in charge?” Adams turned to see a young police officer, his face still pockmarked with acne, standing behind him and looking at Dr Pashanwar.

  “No,” Raj replied, not even looking up from the screen but jabbing a finger at Adams. “He is.”

  “Hi, I’m Adams. Not seen you about before.” Adams didn’t recognise the police officer. Most of the traffic police were well known to the staff in the emergency department, which had helped Adams avoid a speeding ticket on at least one occasion. “Are you new?”

  “Yeah,” the police officer replied. “First shift as well. Sorry, I’m Shaun.” As the two men shook hands, Shaun held up his other hand to show Adams a grimy clutch bag. “This belongs to the woman who’s just been brought in. Do you want it?”

  “Has it got any identification?” Adams asked. “All we’ve got is her first name.”

  “No,” the police officer replied. “The only things in it are cigar
ettes and condoms. Lots of both.”

  Adams glanced at the closed doors to the resuscitation room. The inference from what the police officer had just said didn’t make any difference to Rosie’s treatment, but he would discreetly let Hannah know at some point. He thanked the police officer and took the bag from him, looking around the department to see if anyone was free to book it into property with him. When he couldn’t see anyone, he put the bag down next to Raj’s keyboard.

  “Can you keep an eye on that, Raj? I’m just nipping into the courtyard.”

  “I thought you’d quit?” Raj replied, glancing at the bag.

  “Not to smoke, I just need to text someone.” Mobile phones were banned in the emergency department after one of the hospital’s executives had decided that the staff were more interested in them than their patients.