“Not wonderful,” he said. He opened one of her eyelids and examined her eye. “Opiates?”

“I don’t really know her. She told me she’d swallowed condoms filled with heroin.”

“Silly girl.”

The doctor picked up the leather briefcase and undid it, rummaging inside to find what he wanted.

“I’m John, by the way.”

The doctor did not acknowledge him as he removed a series of medical supplies and dropped them on the sheet next to Sakura. Milton saw a needle, a syringe and a clear ampoule.

“And you are?”

“Edwin,” the doctor muttered. “Let’s keep it vague, shall we? I don’t want to know anything more than is absolutely necessary.”

He took out an alcohol wipe and opened it with his teeth, spitting the torn packet onto the floor. He ripped open the sterile packets containing the needle and syringe and assembled them. He snapped the top from the plastic ampoule with a well-practised twist of his hand and held it up in front of his face as he pierced the seal with the needle and filled the syringe with the liquid from inside.

“What’s that?” Milton asked.

“Naloxone.” He turned his attention to Sakura and, to Milton’s surprise, lifted up her skirt to expose her thigh. “It’s an antidote to opiates.” He squeezed the flesh of her thigh with his fingers and then clucked his tongue. “Too thin.” He raised her skirt even higher so that one of her buttocks was exposed. He drew an imaginary cross on her skin before swabbing it with the alcohol wipe.

Milton recalled the annual training he had done in the Regiment. The gluteus maximus was the best place for an intramuscular injection. His training had been the opposite of this; he had been shown how to get morphine into someone’s body, not how to counteract it.

Edwin worked quickly and with obvious skill. After he had injected the naloxone into Sakura’s buttock, he placed an intravenous port into her forearm and secured it with tape.

“See this,” he said, nodding down to Sakura’s arm. “They used to call it the houseman’s vein.”

“Really,” Milton replied, not sure what else to say. “What’s a houseman?”

Edwin flushed the cannula with saline. “A baby doctor, back when I was doing my medical training. That’s why it’s a houseman’s vein—it’s easy to get a line into it.”

“You learn something every day.”

Edwin was filling another syringe from an ampoule and missed Milton’s gentle sarcasm. He connected the syringe to the cannula and slowly injected its contents into Sakura’s vein. “Another shot of naloxone. The jab in her backside will take a while to kick in, but this should wake her up a bit quicker.”

That proved to be something of an understatement. Sakura’s eyes started to flicker within seconds. A minute passed and then she sat bolt upright and stared around her.