16. CAROL

Carol was in a flat panic as she pulled into the lay-by and stopped the car. Christ! what an idiot! She knew now of course that she should have called a taxi, but she’d never even thought about all that wine she’d been knocking back once she’d taken that call from Stu. All she could think about was Chris lying alone and hurting in the woods, and that she needed to get to him and give him all the help he needed.

The young Constable strolled over from the police car and tapped on the window next to her, and, playing her part in the time-honoured ritual to the letter, she pressed the button that wound down the glass and looked up at the young man in his uniform, the crisp elegance of which was rather ruined by the fluorescent jacket he was wearing over it.

“He’s a bit of a dish!” she found herself thinking, but she quickly realised that this was probably the wine combining with the adrenaline in her system making her feel flirty. She then also felt terribly ashamed at herself for this brief mental indiscretion whilst Chris was still lying out there in the woods. She looked up at the youthful officer and forced a tiny smile. “It is true,” she thought “They really do start to look younger…”

“Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle, Miss?” he said. The still formality of someone she thought could be little more than a teenager made her have to stifle a slight giggle and she turned away to unclip her seatbelt in order to hide it. Then she pushed at the door for all she was worth, but the wretched thing refused to budge.

“Sorry, Officer,” she smiled up at him, “Frozen locks…”

Was that a faint glimmer of a smirk the lad quickly tried to hide? She wasn’t sure, but she messed around with the door release catch a few more times from the inside, and the young officer, with a sigh that really implied that such a thing was well beneath him, started to jiggle the handle on the outside. Eventually the door gave in to their combined efforts and swung open.

Despite having thrown her outdoor clothes on in a bit of a hurry, Carol had always been able to catch the eye of most young men, and as she stretched her legs out onto the freezing tarmac, she definitely noticed his eyes as he became very aware of them, even clad in her old jeans and snowboots.

“This might not be so bad” she thought, and as she stood up to her not-that-impressive height, she managed to slip ever-so-slightly on the icy surface and fall into him, hoping that he might just respond to this brazenly flirtatious act and let her go with a warning.

“If in doubt,” she remembered her Mum telling her once, “Flutter the eyelids for all you’re worth. It might get you out of trouble one day!”

Well, it had worked more than once when she worked at the Oddfellows.

“Here goes! Nothing ventured…”

Unfortunately it seemed to have the reverse of the desired effect on the young man. He misinterpreted her unsteadiness for the effects of alcohol, and her sudden proximity to him gave him ample opportunity to smell her breath.

“Oh, dear, Miss. Have we been drinking…?”

She considered for a moment his use of the “we” and thought better of commenting upon it.  Instead she found herself saying “Just one or two, Officer” which of course wasn’t a lie if you were counting in bottles.

Pretty quickly she found that the other officer had come over and joined him and the whole tedious and unpleasant process of the breathalyser had taken place and she was in the back of their car having been arrested.

This was really not how she’d hoped things would turn out.

She started to babble about why she was out there, about the phone call she’d had and about Chris lying injured up in Sixteen Acre Wood. She even had enough wits about her to explain that her mystery caller probably knew that she was a nurse because she used to work in a bar, and might just have rung her up because of that.

“If nothing else,” she thought, “That gets me off the hook with Stu.”

They kind of listened, seemingly managing to make it possible to listen sarcastically, but she could tell that they refused to believe a word of it. Presumably they were thinking, as she had when making her explanation, that the mystery man was more likely to ring 999 than some random nurse he might have once met. She imagined that they’d come to the conclusion that she was just making up some feeble excuse to try and get away with it. Both had by now adopted the sardonic air of men who’d heard it all a thousand times before, and from young women with much prettier legs than hers too, she expected.

Then she remembered her bag, and dived into it, triumphantly producing her hospital identity card, which she shoved under their noses.

“Look” she said, with the emphatic air of someone who just dared them to ignore her, “We all work in the emergency services, so we’re all pretty much interested in the same thing. Now I don’t care if you throw the book at me or not, but… there’s a bloke lying out there in the snow in Sixteen Acre Wood. A bloke who I happen to be rather fond of, so per-lease can we go up there and look for him before he freezes to death?”

The two young men looked at each other.

“Okay. Just don’t try anything, all right?”

“You wish!”