The Doctor’s Rescue Mission

CHAPTER EIGHT

THEY drove back to the village in unbroken silence. There were eggshells everywhere, Grady thought ruefully, and he wasn’t sure where to tread. Where to go to from here?

Back to Sydney? Of course. In a couple of days. When the disaster was over.

Or when the disaster was just beginning…

He couldn’t afford to think like that, he told himself. Could he?

In the meantime, silence seemed the only option.

They arrived back at the field hospital just as Lucy was being prepared for the helicopter flight to the mainland. Jaqui had been looking after her, and as Morag appeared in the hospital entrance, Jaqui looked up in relief.

‘Lucy was hoping you’d be back before she left.’

‘I’ve been out at the settlement,’ Morag told the teenager.

‘Are there more deaths out there?’ Lucy whispered, and Morag took her hand and squeezed. Grady stood back with Jaqui, watching in still more silence. He was starting to feel impotent. There was nothing he could do. Nothing!

‘There are,’ Morag told her.

‘My dad’ll hate it.’ Lucy hesitated. ‘Nargal?’

‘Nargal’s fine.’ She smiled, and turned to include Jaqui and Grady. ‘Nargal shows Lucy’s father the best place to fish. Lucy’s dad found Nargal after his canoe was upended in a storm twenty years ago. Peter spent the night out searching when everyone else had given up. By the time he found him, Nargal had almost reached the end-he was far gone with hypothermia. But Peter brought him back and Nargal’s been good to him ever since.’ She hesitated and then turned back to Lucy. ‘Nargal says his men are out looking for Hamish.’

‘Everyone’s looking for Hamish.’ The girl’s voice broke on a sob. ‘I should be.’

‘No. You shouldn’t.’ Morag ran her fingers down Lucy’s face. ‘You’ve lost skin all down your chest, your arm’s broken and you’re in no fit state to do anything but recuperate.’ She motioned back to Grady and Jaqui. ‘You know these two are part of the country’s top Air-Sea Rescue team. If they can’t find Hamish, no one can. We have hundreds of people combing the island and the sea.’

‘He’ll be drowned.’

‘If he is,’ Morag said gently, ‘then it’s even more important that you be with your parents. They’ll be going out of their minds, Lucy. I know you can’t do anything here, but you can be with them and, believe me, it’s the most important thing. When you can’t do anything else, you give yourself.’

Hell.

Grown men weren’t supposed to cry.

Grady sniffed.

Jaqui cast him a suspicious glance and offered him an out. ‘Dr Reece, Doug wants you in the control room,’ she told him. And then, as he turned to leave, she pressed something into his hand. ‘Don’t forget your hanky.’

‘So where the hell is he?’

‘There’s nothing else we can do, Grady.’ Doug, their search and rescue chief, was looking grim as Grady emerged from his encounter with Lucy. ‘We have to assume all the missing are drowned. The Kooris were all on the beach when the wave hit and we can assume Hamish was on the beach as well. There’s been bodies washed in but if they were caught in currents, we need to accept the fact that we’re never going to find them.’

‘You’re still searching?’

‘It’s been twenty-four hours. Surviving in the water for that long…’

‘It’s possible. Especially if they caught hold of debris.’

‘Grady, it’s been a really calm day. The water’s like a pond. Our visibility is great. We’re checking every piece of debris in a twenty-mile radius-’

‘Make it thirty.’

‘Grady…’

‘These are kids,’ Grady said. ‘Kids.’

‘Grady, let’s keep the emotion out of it,’ Doug told him, giving him a curious glance. ‘We’re doing the best we can.’

‘And long term?’ he asked dully.

‘Services are non-existent,’ Doug told him. ‘No power, no water, no sewerage. No money and no political clout. There’s no long term for this island.’

That was blunt. Grady dug his hands in his pockets and stared out into the late afternoon light. From this point high on the cricket ground, he could see the devastation the wave had caused. There was so much destruction. To rebuild…

Morag would have to leave.

It was personal. He found his hands were clenched into fists deep in his pockets and Doug was staring at him as if he didn’t recognise him.

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah.’ He grunted an assent. ‘Yeah, I am.’

‘The powers that be want a health statement from you,’ Doug told him. ‘No water, no sewerage… You know the risks.’

‘And the answers I give will mean this island goes under.’

‘This island went under yesterday,’ Doug said bluntly, and then looked skyward as a helicopter appeared on the horizon and started its descent. ‘Here’s the chopper for the girl. Maybe we could move some more people out on the same flight. The evacuation has to start some time.’

‘Not yet,’ Grady growled. A group of men were making there way up from the township and he recognised Marcus, the unofficial spokesmen for the townspeople. He was walking slowly, his shoulders slumped. Like a man defeated, Grady thought. Hell.

‘Let’s get everyone out who’s medically unfit at least,’ Doug urged, and Grady thought back to the old lady dying slowly and unnecessarily back at the Koori settlement.

‘Let’s not,’ he muttered. ‘Not yet.’

He paced.

The helicopter landed and took off again, half-empty. From where Grady stood he had watched as Jaqui and Morag had seen Lucy on board, handed her medical notes over to the flight team and then stood back while the chopper had roared off toward the mainland.

He watched as Jaqui turned and gave Morag a hug.

He wasn’t the only one this situation was getting to, he figured. His team was trained to be dispassionate. Trained to get in hard, do what had to be done and get out again.

In two or three more days they’d have made a decision about evacuating the island. The place would be empty and he’d have moved on.

And Morag?

She’d have moved on, too. Back to Sydney?

He couldn’t see it.

Did he want to see it?

It didn’t matter, he thought heavily. It wasn’t going to happen. He and Morag… No and no and no…

Jaqui was down there, hugging her. Damn, why wasn’t he down there, hugging her?

Because he knew that if he touched her, he’d commit himself.

Hell, Reece! He gave himself a sharp mental kick. He didn’t do commitment. At least, not to women who were caught up with small boys and islanders and who were going to blame him for every decision that was made about this island and…

This was really deep water.

He dug his hands still further into his pockets. Morag was walking back to the tents. There might not be a medical need back in the hospital beds, but there was certainly an emotional need. From the moment she’d appeared back from the settlement the rest of the med team had been telling Morag who desperately needed to talk to her. She was burdened as no woman should be, he thought savagely. How dared the islanders put such a load on her shoulders?

‘She’s quite a woman,’ Jaqui said softly, and he jumped. He’d been watching Morag, and hadn’t noticed his partner come up behind him.

‘She’s devastated,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘This island’s finished.’

‘It’d take a huge commitment to keep it going. One doctor’s not going to cut it.’

‘Not only one doctor. The infrastructure…’

‘I know.’ Like him, Jaqui was looking down at the ruined town. ‘Did you know my husband’s head of the Public Works Department in Sydney West? I’ve been talking to him about the vast effort it’d take to rebuild this place.’

‘Huge.’

‘It’d be such a project…’ She cast him a look that was as curious as the one Doug had given him. ‘How did you go with the Kooris?’

‘They’re…’ He hesitated and then shrugged. Why not say it? ‘They’re fantastic. They take our medicine on their terms.’

‘They wouldn’t let me near,’ Jaqui told him. ‘But, oh, I wish…’ Her voice trailed off and he knew exactly what she wished. He was wishing it himself.

‘It’s not going to happen,’ he said roughly. ‘They’ll be relocated.’

‘I’d imagine they’ll refuse to be relocated,’ Jaqui said. ‘They’ll stay here with no medical facilities at all, and all the good Morag’s done will be undone.’

‘It’s none of our business.’

‘No,’ Jaqui said, with another curious sideways glance. ‘Of course it’s not. How can it be?’

There were still a couple of hours of daylight left. He could go back into the hospital and help Morag-but for most of the things she was doing she didn’t need help. She’d be adjusting pain medication, talking through terrors, facing the future.

With her people…

The thought was unsettling and Grady wasn’t sure how to handle it.

At least there was other work to be done. He took himself down the hill to where an army of people was sifting through sodden belongings, searching for some trace of a past that had been washed away.

Doug overtook him there and together they checked the smashed infrastructure as Doug talked him through the impossibility of rebuilding.

‘OK, it’s not possible,’ Grady said at last. He gazed at an elderly woman in the ruins of what had obviously been the village church. The wave had gone straight through, leaving only a shell. Pews and fittings had been shattered into a pile of jumbled ruins. The nave, though, with its vast, east-facing window, was still almost intact. The window was without glass, but from where Grady stood he could see right to the ocean beyond.

The woman was staring outward, looking at the sea. Just…looking. In the midst of all this confusion, it was an incredibly peaceful scene, and Grady thought suddenly that there was little need for fittings. It was breathtakingly lovely, just as it was.

The woman turned and saw the two men, she gave them a faltering smile.

‘The doctor. Just who I need. I have a splinter that’s stopping me working.’

Grady crossed the ruins to meet her. She was none too steady on her feet, he noticed, and she let him take her arm and help her out to the remains of the church-ground. While Doug watched, he lifted her hand and saw a shard of wood had been driven right under the nail.

‘I’ll take you to the medical centre.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I have too much to do to bother. But if you could pull it out…’

‘It’s in deep.’

‘Just…pull.’

‘I need to cut the nail.’

‘Then cut it,’ she said, and there was desperation in her voice. ‘Now. Please. The pain’s driving me crazy and I need to concentrate. Please, will you help me?’

He looked down at her, trying to figure how to argue, but what he saw in her face gave him pause. There was no argument. She wouldn’t go to a medical centre. And the light here was good enough…

OK. He could do this. He always carried a fully equipped medical kit in his backpack, and in a way he welcomed something practical to do. At least this was something medical rather than medical administration.

The questions he and Doug were trying to find answers to were impossibly difficult. How long could villagers survive without a viable water source? What were the risks of disease if sewerage contaminated the groundwater?

Or maybe they weren’t impossibly difficult. Maybe they were questions to which he knew the answers, but he didn’t like facing them. The thought of Morag’s reaction when she heard was dreadful.

Morag. He couldn’t think of what she was facing. He didn’t understand her fierce love for this little community but now at least he knew that her love was for real, and the dispersing of the islanders would break her heart.

Hell! He’d much rather face a splinter, complicated or not.

So, as Doug excused himself, he found himself perched on a low stone wall, carefully extricating a splinter from an elderly lady’s finger.

Working with care, with her hand spread on the sun-warmed stones, he blocked her ring finger with local anaesthetic. Then he carefully sliced a wedge from her nail, lifting it free so he could reach the sliver underneath.

The woman-she said her name was May Rafferty but that was all she was saying-stared straight ahead as he worked and she didn’t speak until he applied antiseptic and dressing and asked her about tetanus shots.

‘They’re up to date,’ she said shortly. ‘Morag sees to that.’

‘I’d imagine she would.’ He hesitated. The woman, in her late sixties or early seventies, lean and weathered, with the look of someone who’d seen a lifetime of hard work, was staring again through the ruins of the church toward the sea.

‘I’m sorry about your church,’ he told her.

‘It’ll be OK. We’ll rebuild.’

Would they? Grady thought of the report he was preparing and he winced. But now wasn’t the time to talk of that.

‘My husband was buried from this church,’ May said softly. ‘And my baby daughter. That’s how I got the splinter. There’s a plaque somewhere that my husband carved when our baby died. I thought…I thought I might be able to find it.’

‘Would you like me to help you look?’ he heard himself say, and she nodded as if she’d expected no less.

‘I’d be very grateful.’

So with all the work to be done-with the momentous decisions still hanging in the balance as to the fate of this island-Grady found himself hauling aside splintered timber and ruined furnishings, trying to reach the base of the west wall, trying to locate one tiny carving…

Like the technical medicine of removing the splinter, it was work that he welcomed. It let him stop thinking of Morag’s face as she read the report.

Morag…

Enough. Stop thinking now!

He had thick leather gloves to work with, and the task was simple enough. From the sidelines the woman watched, still in silence. Without gloves, and with her injured hand, he wouldn’t let her haul things aside, but her eyes still searched the ruins. Ceaselessly.

And when he hauled aside a section of what looked like a door, she saw what she was looking for. She gave a soft moan of relief and darted forward to lift a plaque.

It was a battered piece of wood, a little less than a foot square, and it looked as if it had once been highly polished. The wave had battered it with force, marring the carving, but the lettering was still clear.

Morag Louise Rafferty

29 July 1970-20 January 1971

Precious infant daughter of May and Richard.

Died of diphtheria, aged six months.

A tiny life; a jewel;

a love that will live for ever.

May was cleaning the lettering with her sleeve, smiling down at it as if she’d found the child herself. And for the second time that day Grady found himself swallowing. Hard. Hell! He didn’t do emotion. He didn’t!

‘Morag,’ he managed after a while. ‘Your little girl was called Morag?’

‘Mmm.’ She smiled mistily up at him. ‘Your Morag was named after her.’

‘My Morag?’

‘The Morag you’ve been working with,’ she explained. ‘Your Morag’s father was my second cousin. He was best man at our wedding, and he was our Morag’s godfather. We’re so intertwined, the two families. My son…’ She clasped the plaque closer. ‘My son Peter-my Morag’s brother-married Christine. Christine’s brother was David, the fisherman who married Beth, your Morag’s sister. So Christine is Robbie’s aunt.’

He thought it through. He was confused. Very confused. Genealogy wasn’t his strong point, and the complexities of this island’s relationships had his head spinning. But he finally thought he had it. ‘So your son and his wife are Peter and Christine Rafferty, the couple we’ve evacuated to Sydney?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then Lucy-Lucy and Hamish…’

‘Lucy and Hamish are my grandchildren.’

That had him even more confused. ‘Then why…?’

‘Why haven’t I been with Lucy?’ She shrugged and hugged the plaque against her, as if suddenly cold. ‘Lucy didn’t want me. She’s so angry. So distressed. She said I should be out here searching for Hamish, and, of course, I have been. But there’s nowhere else to search and your people are so much more competent, and suddenly…’ She shivered again. ‘I just wanted…’

She just wanted contact with her daughter, Grady thought with sudden insight. Her little one. This plaque was a tangible link with the past, a link to hold onto when the future looked dreadful. Grady could see it in her face and he let her be for a moment, waiting until she turned again to the east window. She gazed out to sea for a long moment, and finally her face regained a little of its serenity.

‘You’re all so intertwined,’ he said softly. ‘I’d thought…I’d thought when Beth died that Robbie had no one.’

‘Robbie never had no one,’ May said simply. ‘Robbie has every single islander. There’s no one here who wouldn’t give the boy a home and be glad to do it. But Beth and Morag were sisters. They were very close. You don’t mess with closeness like that.’ It was said with such flat simplicity that there was no argument.

He tried to take it all in. He tried. ‘This island’s one big family.’

‘It is,’ May told him, and attempted a faltering smile. ‘In a while…in a little while, when everyone who can be saved has been saved, then this church will be cleared and the funerals will start. When my Morag died, when Beth died, when Beth’s husband David was drowned…every single islander was here to bid them farewell. It’ll be no different this time. As long…’ She faltered and then attempted to recover. She didn’t quite make it. ‘As long as they find Hamish,’ she whispered. ‘If he’s drowned… They must find his body. They can bury him next to my Morag. I…’

But the thought of the loss of her grandson was suddenly overwhelming. She put a hand to her face and turned away. ‘Enough. If there’s any news, let me know. I’ll be up at the tent place that everyone’s calling home. Thank you for tending my hand.’ She hugged the plaque again. ‘And thank you for finding my…for finding my Morag. If I can’t find Hamish…’ She faltered again and closed her eyes, but when she opened them there was a calmness there. A strength. Generations of tragedy had touched this woman and would touch her further, but she was here, here with her people, and life would go on.

‘Take care of your Morag,’ she whispered. ‘She needs it most.’

Doug was waiting in the background with more of his damned facts.

‘It’s impossible,’ he said. ‘There’s no infrastructure. We’d have to pull in really top people from Sydney. This needs an engineer who really knows what he’s doing to supervise, huge manpower to pull it off, tradesmen of all descriptions… Then there’s the medical side. We have a situation where the entire island’s been traumatised, including the local doctor. She’s a single mum. She can’t cope with this long term. The money…the commitment…’

‘The islanders won’t leave.’

‘They won’t have a choice,’ Doug said bluntly. ‘It’s either abandon the island or be cut off from all services. You’ll never get political support for the sort of funding this place needs. And you’ll never get the personnel.’

He should go back to the medical centre. There was still an hour or so before dusk and Jaqui might need him. But Grady’s radio was on his belt and he knew he could be contacted, so he found himself picking his way through the debris until he came to the promontory where the lighthouse stood.

Morag was there. As he’d hoped. He rounded the cliffs that separated the promontory from the township and he saw her, standing at the foot of the lighthouse, staring up at the whitewashed tower.

David and Goliath.

That was what she looked like, he thought. A tiny figure, facing immeasurable odds.

He called and she turned, but she didn’t smile. She simply watched as he made his way down the cobbled walkway that reached out to where the lighthouse tipped the promontory.

‘I hoped I might find you here,’ he said, but there still wasn’t a smile.

‘I need to put out some food for Oscar.’

Oscar. Of course. Sam’s cat.

‘He comes here?’

‘He likes here,’ Morag told him. ‘Oscar’s the most independent cat we know. He lives on Sam’s boat but for some reason he thinks this is his territory, so he visits us each night.’

‘Maybe he likes you,’ Grady said gently, but he still didn’t get a smile.

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re exhausted.’

She nodded. ‘And…defeated. So much death.’

‘You need to go back to Robbie.’

‘I just phoned him. He’s OK. He understands. I just wish…I just wish he didn’t have to.’

‘Let me help you here and I’ll walk you up to Hubert’s’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘It doesn’t help,’ she whispered. ‘If I learn to lean on you.’

There was nothing to say to that. He watched as she scooped a can of cat food out into a crevice beside the lighthouse walkway, out of sight of watchful seagulls but certainly in smelling distance of the tomcat if he cruised past later in the night.

She straightened and looked at him as if she couldn’t quite figure out why he was there. ‘I need to check the light,’ she told him, and it was a dismissal.

‘I want to see.’

‘Grady-’

‘I know.’ He held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘I’m not helping. But I’m curious. I’ve never been in a lighthouse before.’

‘It’s not as good as it used to be.’

‘Why not?’

She hesitated then shrugged, as if she didn’t have the energy to tell him to get lost. Though her shrug said she’d certainly like to. ‘The light used to be fantastic,’ she told him. ‘It was a huge Fresnel lens that once filled the lantern room.’

‘Tell me about it.’ More than anything, he ached to take that look of utter defeat from her face. He could think of no way to deflect her. But she must love this lighthouse.

And it seemed that she did.

‘It was vast,’ she told him. ‘Wonderful. It had about a thousand individual glass prisms mounted in brass. It stood almost twenty feet tall and six feet wide, and was large enough for a man to stand inside. But now… Now we have a small green DCB-24 Aerobeacon. It’s about a hundredth of the size, even though it can still be seen for almost eighteen miles.’

‘Can we go up?’

‘I guess…I guess we can,’ she told him. ‘At least, I can. I usually go up and check the light every couple of days. The globes change automatically-it’s fully automated-but things still go wrong. Once I went up and a sea eagle had somehow smashed through the glass and was beating itself to death trying to get out again. I managed to get it out-amazingly it flew off and even looked like it might survive-but it had damaged the beacon.’

‘You coped with a sea eagle alone?’ he asked, stunned, and she looked at him as if he was stupid.

‘Of course I did. What else was I to do?’

Scream and run? he thought. Call for Air-Sea Rescue?

That’d be him.

Call for him?

‘I can go up now because the lamp’s not burning,’ she told him. ‘After dusk you’ll blind yourself.’

‘I’d like to come.’

She gave him a dubious look. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be busy writing down all the reasons why the island should be declared uninhabitable?’

‘Morag…’

‘It’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?’

And there was no answer but the truth. ‘Yes.’

‘Creep!’

‘Don’t shoot the messenger,’ he said mildly, and got an angry glare for his pains.

‘If people would support us-if the politicians realised how wonderful this place is…’

‘You’re too far from the mainland. Even the lighthouse doesn’t need maintenance any more. It’s been through a tidal wave without a blink.’

‘Go jump, Grady.’

‘Show me your lighthouse,’ he told her. ‘Please.’

‘Fine,’ she snapped. ‘And then will you get out of my life?’ She stomped forward and walked up the three huge stone steps to the lighthouse door, produced a key that was almost as big as her hand-and then paused. Instead of inserting the key in the lock, she simply pushed.

The lighthouse door swung wide.

‘It’s unlocked,’ she said, and added, staring down at the lock, ‘It’s smashed.’

‘The wave…’

‘I checked yesterday. It was still locked and firm. This door’s been built to survive battering rams.’

‘It can’t have been locked.’ Grady wasn’t really thinking of locks. He was thinking of Morag. Only of Morag. Of the way she looked…tired and defeated, yet still with shoulders squared and with the flash of fire in her words. Pure courage…

He’d thought it took courage to do what he did. Rescuing people from high seas, from burning buildings, from all sorts of peril.

But maybe Morag had needed a different kind of courage to do what she’d done over the past few years-and she’d certainly found it. In spades.

‘It looks like someone’s attacked the lock with an axe,’ she was saying, and he hauled himself out of his preoccupation and moved forward to see.

She was right. The vast wooden door was intact, except for one slash, splintering deep into the lock.

Grady frowned and pushed the door further inward.

There was an axe propped against the wall where the spiral staircase started its long swirl upward.

‘Who…?’ Morag moved to the stair, but Grady stopped her.

‘Let me go first.’

‘The axe is down here,’ Morag said reasonably. ‘We’re not about to get attacked.’

But Grady was already climbing, his face turned upward and his ears tuned to danger.

‘If you’re thinking it’s a house burglar, there’s not a lot of call for used aerobeacons,’ Morag told him.

‘Hush.’

‘They’re a bit strong for spotlighting rabbits.’

He smiled at that, but schooled his features to seriousness, turned and frowned her down. She was wonderful, he thought. Her humour shone through no matter how black things were. How could he have let her go four years ago?

But he needed to focus on other things beside Morag. ‘Will you shut up, woman?’

‘I only thought-’

‘You didn’t think enough. Hitting lighthouse doors with axes isn’t a reasonable thing to do. So someone’s acting unreasonably. Let’s find out why before we treat this as a joke. We don’t know if someone’s here, but let’s assume there is.’

And a hundred and twenty-nine steps later they had part of their answer. The trapdoor up into the lantern room was securely bolted. From the other side.

Behind Grady, Morag had grown obediently silent. Her spurt of laughter had been as fleeting as any joy on this island this day.

Grady pushed the trapdoor upward but it didn’t move. Frowning in concern, Morag edged him aside and knocked. Hard.

‘Hello,’ she called into the stillness. ‘It’s Morag. Dr Morag. Who’s up there?’

The voice from above them responded immediately-a male voice, deep and gruff, with the hint of an educated English accent.

‘Can you go away, please?’ The man sounded distracted, almost panicked.

‘William.’ Morag seemed confused.

‘Yeah, it’s William,’ the voice said. ‘But, Morag, please…go away. I hadn’t intended anyone to be here. I’m sorry, Morag. I’m sorry you have to…cope with this. Cope with me. But, please, let me be. I need to jump.’