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Air and sunlight wash over me. I feel like a vampire whose coffin lid has been opened in broad daylight. Blinded and weak from dehydration, I am lifted from the car. Someone holds a bottle of water to my lips. Another bottle is poured over my head. Tape is cut away from my hands and feet.
‘Arben?’ I whisper.
They look at me blankly.
He’s gone.
The female paramedic has a baggy green uniform with epaulettes on her shoulders and multiple pockets. Her dark hair is pulled back from her face and she’s wearing a smudge of red lipstick that accentuates the paleness of her skin.
She raises her hand. ‘How many fingers?’
‘Three.’
‘Any headache, blurred vision, nausea?’
‘No.’
‘You’ll need an X-ray and stitches in that wound.’
I’m holding an icepack against the back of my bandaged head. My other hand is wrapped in a plastic bag, preserving the evidence.
‘I scratched one of them,’ I explain.
‘That was clever.’
I don’t feel clever. I feel stupid and angry, but most of all I’m desperate to find Arben. The paramedic forces me to sit still while an intravenous drip restores my electrolytes.
‘You were lucky,’ she says. ‘You could have died of heatstroke. Your body temperature was dangerously high.’
‘Lucky and clever,’ I say, looking across the parking area. I think about the other car. What was it? A Range Rover. A Land Cruiser. Something big and boxy and black. The police will want to know. They should set up roadblocks and launch drones, put patrols on the roads.
Carlson has arrived. He waits as my fingernails are swabbed and scraped by a SOCO and the resulting samples are bagged and labelled. Then he hands me a fresh bottle of water. ‘Can you walk?’
I follow him to the Fiat, explaining what happened. I give him a reasonable description of the man who hit me. The second one I barely glimpsed.
‘What did they say to you?’
‘The first one offered to help me change the tyre.’
‘Which they’d sabotaged earlier?’
‘I assume so, yes.’
‘Accent?’
‘English. Northern.’ I glance across the parking area. ‘There should be CCTV.’
‘We’re collecting it now. Did you notice them following you?’ he asks.
‘No.’
‘They must have been waiting outside Birchin Way when you left the station.’
‘How did they know what car to follow?’
‘The media have been reporting a teenage survivor.’
Carlson crouches next to the flat tyre. ‘Why did you stop here?’
