Page 75 of Dead Fall

Oh Christ. She shrank back along the narrow pew, trying to scramble to her feet.

Then the harsh clatter of metal on stone. Looking down, Cassie saw a bright crimson sash unspooling across the flagstones, pooling in the mortar joints. Still her brain struggled to catch up, until she saw the steady trickle of blood falling from the fingertips of Chrysanthi’s other hand.

‘Sins of the blood can never be washed away,’ she said, with a terrible smile, before slipping off the pew in slow motion onto the floor.

Fuck fuck fuck!

Bending over Chrysanthi, Cassie pulled up her sleeve to reveal a long gaping gash from inside her forearm down to her wrist.

No!

Part of her brain went into analytical mode, assessing the damage. It was the worst kind of wrist slash – longitudinal cuts, two of them, each around ten centimetres long. Going by the pulsing flow, Chrysanthi had laid open her radial artery in more than one place.

Cassie used her fingers to apply pressure to quell the bleeding. But the wounds were just too long. As she staunched one leak another would appear, like a grisly version of whack-a-mole. Within seconds her fingers were slippery and useless.

‘Father!!’ she shouted, her panicked voice echoing in that cavernous space.

The pool of crimson on the flagstones had already grown alarmingly large. Just like the cartoon speech bubble of Bronte’s blood on the towpath. Hypovolemic shock, followed by cardiac arrest was a matter of minutes away.

Father Michaelides came flapping up the aisle like a giant bat, exclaiming in Greek. Over his robes he now wore a long blue scarf, decorated with gold circles and crosses. Without a word, Cassie yanked it off his neck and in a few swift moves made a tourniquet round Chrysanthi’s upper arm and tightened it as much as she could.

The blood flow slowed – but not enough.

‘Help me!’ she shouted at the priest.

Together they hauled on the scarf to tighten the knot.

Chapter Forty-Two

Choosing to have the church janitor drive them to A & E rather than wait who knew how long for an ambo had been the right decision. Chrysanthi desperately needed intravenous fluids, and with the tourniquet slowing the blood loss to a dribble, Cassie gambled on speed over the risk of moving her.

Their entrance to A & E must have looked like a scene from a Tarantino movie: the black-robed priest with the blood-spattered beard and the pierced punky gal, her leather jacket caked in blood, half carrying a white-faced woman between them – her tweed skirt and tights streaked in blood, looking like a sacrificial offering.

Chrysanthi had been whisked straight into resus, leaving Cassie and Father Michaelides sitting side by side on uncomfortable chairs in no less uncomfortable silence. In Cassie’s lap lay the box-cutter knife she’d picked up from the church floor, clogged with gore and wrapped in the priest’s ruined scarf. It might be needed by the cops – or the pathologist.

Chrysanthi might be guilty of murder, but Cassie couldn’t face the thought of her dying. There had been too much death already.

Again and again, she pictured the spreading pool of blood, trying to calculate its volume: more than a litre, probably closer to two, getting on for half an adult female’s supply, making Chrysanthi’s chances of survival fifty-fifty at best. She had seen hundreds of deaths-by-haemorrhage in the mortuary; could hear Prof Arculus saying, When the heart runs out of blood, it’s like a car running out of petrol.

‘I’m sorry about your scarf,’ she told the priest, really just to break the awkward silence.

‘It’s an epitrachelion’ – sending her a frosty look.

She narrowed her eyes, dredging up her Greek. ‘Oh right Epi-trachelion: “upon the neck”. Cool.’

Half an hour later, the registrar emerged from backstage.

‘You’re .?.?. Mrs Angelo-pou-los’s niece right?’ he asked, referring to her admission notes.

‘That’s right,’ she said.

The priest muttered something in Greek, probably some hellfire curse against lying harlots, but he didn’t grass her up.

The news was as good as could be expected: Chrysanthi was still only semi-conscious, but out of immediate danger.

‘She’s being monitored while we give her blood and IV fluids,’ the doc went on, eyeing the pair of them.

‘And the arm injury?’ Remembering the way the artery had kept springing leaks, she suppressed a shudder: witnessing a dramatic injury in a living person had been a radically different experience to eviscerating a dead body.

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