4338.210 · July 29, 2018 AD
Accident During Search
Detective Sarah Lahey drives herself to the Emergency Department of the Royal Hobart Hospital with a deep laceration across her palm, the early signs of concussion, and no intention of calling the incident in through any of the channels the incident ought to have been called in through. The triage nurse who assesses her, Rachel Thomson, asks the questions triage nurses asked, and Sarah commits in front of her to a single careful fiction about the events that had put her here, while the hospital's own protocols quietly set in motion an arrival she has not prepared for.
Sarah Lahey drove herself across Hobart to the Emergency Department of the Royal Hobart Hospital with a strip torn from her own work shirt wrapped around her bleeding palm and the radio on her dashboard conspicuously silent. Officer-involved injury in the field was the kind of incident the radio existed to report. Sarah declined to report it. The honest report would have set in motion a sequence of notifications that ended with the career of Karl Jenkins, and Sarah was not yet ready to be the person whose transmission ended it.
She parked illegally, walked in through the automatic doors, and was received at the triage desk by a nurse called Rachel Thomson whose twenty years on the job had given her a practised ability to recognise an injured police officer who had arrived on her own and did not particularly want to explain why.
What Sarah committed to across the triage intake in Bay Four was a careful two-sentence fiction about a residential search in Berriedale, a lost footing, broken glass from a window, and the misfortune of a wall on the way down. The fiction was engineered to contain no verifiable falsehood that could not be defended in a follow-up enquiry, and the version of the truth it permitted was the version that kept Karl Jenkins out of the hospital's official record of the afternoon. Sarah heard her own voice saying it in the tone of a person speaking a language she had learned and never made her own. Rachel Thomson typed it into the triage record without comment, and the fiction passed from Sarah's mouth into the hospital's system and became, from that moment onward, the official account.
Rachel finished the examination, told Sarah the laceration would need stitches and a doctor's review, and then told her one other thing before she left the bay. Hospital policy on injuries sustained on duty by serving police officers was automatic. The notification had gone out the moment Sarah's name had come up in the system. The listed emergency contact was Detective Sergeant Charlie Claiborne.
The news landed with the particular weight of a consequence Sarah had not thought to prepare for. The courtyard she had watched him standing in with Louise Jeffries less than two days earlier assembled itself inside her chest as Rachel delivered the news, and the man who was already on his way to Bay Four was the same man whose hand had been on Louise Jeffries's elbow.
Rachel, who could read most of what was happening behind Sarah's silence and had decided it was not the kind of thing a triage nurse pushed at, offered her quietly that there were people to talk to if anything about Sarah's situation required talking about. Sarah thanked her and said she was fine. Rachel accepted the deflection with the same grace she had extended to everything else, and left the bay.
Sarah sat alone on the trolley-bed behind the closed curtain with her bandaged hand cradled against her chest and a head injury whose severity she was not in any state to measure. The fiction was in the system. Her sergeant was already on his way. The version of the afternoon she was going to give him when he arrived was a version she had not yet written.
