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Chapter Three

Emerging from the dense undergrowth only ten or fifteen feet away, crouching like a wild animal and almost as wary, came a person. A female in some sort of difficulty, evidently. One shoulder looked lopsided, and the black hair was in disarray.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Thea, as she jumped down to ground level.

‘Hmm, umm, ohh,’ came the inarticulate reply.

‘You’ve hurt your shoulder, have you?’ Now fully face-to-face, Thea found herself looking at a woman of roughly her own age, with features that seemed Chinese or possibly Japanese. There were signs of suffering on her face. The body language heightened this impression. One hand was clutched to the opposite shoulder and the whole stance was bowed in pain.

‘I think it might be dislocated,’ came the reply. ‘I fell off that … thing.’ She pointed at the monumental stile. The accent was slight, the English perfect, rather to Thea’s relief. ‘But I was already hurt, before that,’ the woman added, as an afterthought.37

‘Gosh – you poor thing! That must be horribly painful. Can I get you to a doctor or something? Have you got a car anywhere near?’

‘No. No.’ The woman was breathless, but was clearly making an effort to seem less damaged. ‘I’ll be all right. I can walk.’ She kept glancing from side to side, as if expecting to be jumped on by something large and dangerous.

‘Well, I can’t just leave you here, can I? The trouble is, I’ve got no transport, either, so I’m not sure how useful I can be. We could go back to the business park and ask for help. Have you got a phone on you?’

The woman began to shake her head, before realising that this was likely to exacerbate the pain. Again she said, ‘No,’ and then added, ‘Sorry.’

Fighting against a growing sense of helplessness, Thea tried to assess the options. She looked more closely at the injury. ‘You know – I’m not sure it is dislocated,’ she said. ‘Your arm’s still at a fairly normal angle. From what I’ve heard, it would be dangling horribly if it was out of its socket. What exactly happened to it? I mean – did you land right on it? Did you fall from the top?’

‘I wrenched it. I tried to save myself from falling and it got twisted.’ There was a clear avoidance of Thea’s eye at these words, oddly suggesting the presence of an untruth. ‘That thing is an outrage.’ She glared at the stile.

‘Did you hear any popping sound? Have you put it out of joint before?’ Thea was frantically dredging up everything she had ever known about dislocations. Her father had had a brother who did it, making a famous 38family story that had been told fifty times. ‘There’s dreadful pain, for a start,’ she went on. ‘I can see yours hurts, but you’re not exactly rolling on the ground in agony, are you?’

This brisk attitude had an obviously bracing effect. ‘But it really hurts. It’s burning right down to my elbow.’ An undertone of indignation roused Thea’s innate curiosity. Who was this woman? Surely she had a whole lot of explaining to do?