She hadn’t, but thanks to Rosie she knew what had been on it. “Kyle Parker died of a diffuse axonal injury secondary to a massive basilar skull fracture. He had multiple minor injuries consistent with an assault, and his tox screen was positive for a whole cocktail of crap. Other than the head injury, his gross anatomy was intact.” She didn’t spell the rest out for him. She just said a silent “thank you” to Rosie and watched his face turn even redder.

“You get a lot of jobs like this, don’t you?” he said, taking hold of a pile of PRFs—her PRFs, she realised—and leafing through them. “You’re averaging about three arrests per shift: suicides jumping off buildings in front of you, chokings, hangings, stabbings, a couple of shootings, cot deaths. You’ve had six partners come off your line in the past eighteen months, citing stress as the reason, and an unusual percentage of calls that turn out to be far more serious than their initial triage code would suggest.”

Unsure where he was going, she didn’t respond. It wasn’t as if she was unaware of the facts he had just reeled off, nor could she deny them.

“Kyle Parker will be your fourth Coroner’s Court appearance this year,” he continued, “and we’re only in the middle of March. Some paramedics never get to go there in the entire course of their careers.”

Something in his tone made her ears prick up. She studied him with more care, noting how tightly he held her paperwork, and the undisguised resentment in his expression. He wasn’t angry with her, he was jealous that she had dealt with jobs he would probably give his eyeteeth to experience. To a certain extent she understood his envy. She had felt the same way when she first started, craving the excitement of major traumas and the critically ill, calls that would put all of her training to good use, but no one wanted to deal with a near-constant deluge of such jobs, and she would be content to see out the remainder of her career working shifts with a regular mate, managing falls and innocuous bellyaches and idiots who should know better.

“I don’t self-allocate,” she said, reminding him that his role as an Advanced Paramedic allowed him to do just that. “I go to the jobs I’m sent to, and I can’t help what they turn out to be.”

He scoffed as if to dispute that, but it was a kneejerk reaction he took no further. “The court will require a statement from you,” he said, drawing a line beneath the discussion but seeming satisfied he’d won some kind of victory.

She collected her mug and biscuits, her patience worn to the point of snapping. “I’ll email it to Legal as soon as they formally request one.”

“I’d like to see a copy before then.”