She should let Matt know—perhaps they could do some test to either confirm her theory or rule it out. Crawling to the entrance of the shelter to get better reception on her phone, Beth caught sight of something. Hauling herself onto her feet and catching up the makeshift bow in her hand, she started towards a small clearing, surrounded by trees. She had not been able to see it when sh
e was standing up, but at low level the red berries and dark green needles of a yew bush were easily visible.
She stumbled and fell as she ran across the uneven ground, but she was up again in a moment, hardly even feeling the pain in her knee. When she approached the bush, she bent low and saw that one of the branches was broken and hanging loose.
A quick inspection revealed several jagged cuts where branches had been hacked off at low level and when she compared the makeshift bow with the branches that had been cut, she found a match. It looked as if the branches had been cut recently, too, as the wood was still pale in the light from her torch.
Quickly she texted Matt. Yew?
She held her phone, staring at it, willing his response. It came immediately.
Possible. All symptoms in line with taxine poisoning. Do not touch.
Beth rolled her eyes. She knew that. The question was why that well-known fact hadn’t occurred to Josh. Dialling Matt’s number, she saw from the display on the phone that he had answered immediately.
She pressed the phone against her ear, straining to hear. Matt was saying something, but she couldn’t make it out over the crash of branches above her head and the low howl of the wind. She spoke into the phone and heard him fall silent.
‘I can’t hear you properly. Listen and I will talk.’ She repeated the sentence in case he had been speaking and not heard her the first time. ‘I’ve found a shelter behind the back fence. Josh has been here and he’s been cutting yew branches and stripping the leaves off to make bows. The cuts on the bush look recent. Text me back and let me know you’ve got this.’
Beth repeated her message again, but by the time she had finished, Matt had already hung up. Either he’d got it the first time, or he couldn’t hear her at all. She stared at her phone and it obligingly vibrated in her hand.
Understood. Bring everything here. Use my car. Well done.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BETH walked through the automatic doors into A and E to find Matt standing in the reception area, waiting for her. She handed him the carrier bag that she had brought with her, and he smiled.
‘Good work. Wait here and I’ll take these through.’ He disappeared through the door to the clinical assessment unit and Beth was left alone again. She went over to one of the plastic chairs in the waiting room and sat down, inspecting her left knee, which was beginning to stiffen and throb.
Matt reappeared a few minutes later, walked over to where she was sitting, and squatted down on his heels in front of her, squinting at the graze on her knee. ‘Let me see that.’
Beth had lost interest in her own aches and pains. ‘In a minute. How’s Josh?’
Matt shook his head but rose and sat down opposite her, drawing his chair up close so that his feet were planted on either side of hers. ‘He’s not out of the woods yet, but he’s stable.’
That could mean any one of a hundred different things. ‘What’s happening, Matt?’
Matt leaned forward and took her hand. ‘The doctors treating him have accessed Toxbase and are in touch with the National Poisons Information Service in Birmingham. They have enormous experience with this kind of thing, and they agree that it’s probably taxine poisoning—which means that Josh has ingested some part of that yew bush. They have the option of transferring him over to the West Midlands Poisons Unit, but that’s not necessary at the moment.’ He squeezed her hand tight.
‘Aren’t they sure?’ It all seemed a bit hit and miss.
‘They have to act before the tests come back to confirm that Josh has taxine in his system. So we have to diagnose the old-fashioned way.’ He made an attempt at a grin. ‘Assess the symptoms and the probabilities and act accordingly. What you found out has helped a great deal, though, because we know what to test for and what the most probable cause of his symptoms is. They’re doing a gastric lavage and Josh is on an IV drip to keep his fluid levels up, but the good news is that he’s breathing on his own and his heart is steady at the moment.’
‘And what’s the prognosis?’
‘The main worry is Josh’s heart. He may experience periods of heart arrhythmia of various kinds, which, as you know, can be very serious. Or he may develop brachycardia—where his heart beats very slowly. If that’s the case they’ll need to consider transcutaneous cardiac pacing.’
‘An external pacemaker?’
‘Yeah.’ Matt stared at the floor. ‘The main aim of this is to keep him stable until the taxine is expelled from his system. He’ll need to be kept a very close eye on over the next day or so, but there are very few deaths from this kind of poisoning, where people are not trying deliberately to do themselves harm.’
‘And the other boy, Simon?’
‘We don’t know yet. I’ve just heard from Kat and she still can’t contact them by phone so she’s going to call the police to see whether they can send someone round to the house. In the meantime, we have to assume that the parents are awake and with the boy and that they’ll get help if he falls ill.’ A muscle twitched at the side of Matt’s jaw.
‘So all we can do is wait. Do Marcie and James know what’s going on?’
‘Yes, I explained it all to them and they’re with Josh now. They’ll probably transfer him up to the high-dependency unit initially to keep monitoring him, but I expect that he’ll be taken down to the children’s ward soon if everything goes well.’ He paused. ‘There’s no reason to think that it won’t.’