St Matthew's Passion - By Sam Archer Page 0,44

lights competing with each other. The police and fire department were there, the former cordoning off a large section of the bank and keeping the growing public crowd back. A policeman lifted the cordoning tape to let Melissa through, noting her identifying overalls.

Beneath the suspension bridge she saw the two boats, one twice the size of the other. The larger craft had evidently rammed the smaller one side-on at an angle and the smaller boat lay on its side, half submerged. Some of the passengers were already on the bank and stood shivering, swaddled in blankets. Others bobbed in the water still, being supported and guided by police divers in wetsuits.

Melissa moved swiftly to the water’s edge, picking her way between the paramedics laying down stretchers onto which shuddering and semiconscious casualties were being manoeuvred. She stepped among the stretchers and gave a quick once-over to each in turn, issuing recommendations where the paramedics needed them, staying out of the way where they didn’t.

She had just finished listening to one groaning man’s chest and ordered his immediate transfer to hospital as a priority – he’d suffered a pneumothorax, which meant air had entered the sac around one of his lungs and was restricting his breathing – when she noticed a sodden woman stumbling away down the bank, her hand against her head.

Melissa started after her. When she drew near enough to be heard she called, Hey. Are you all right?’

The woman didn’t react. Melissa hurried closer and touched the woman lightly on the shoulder.

‘Are you hurt?’

The woman turned her head, her hair plastered across her face, and stared vaguely at Melissa as if not quite seeing her. Melissa took her by the shoulders and peered at her eyes, what was visible of her scalp. There wasn’t any obvious sign of injury, but her dazed expression suggested that she was concussed.

‘Where –?’ the woman muttered.

‘Where are you? You’re safe. The boat you were in was involved in an accident. I’m a doctor, and you’re going –’

‘No.’ The woman shook her head, spraying Melissa with droplets of river water. Her eyes took on a more focused look and stared deep into Melissa’s. ‘Where is he?’ Her voice rose in panic. ‘Where’s my son?’

Melissa raised her head from her scrutiny of the woman’s face and looked over at the throng of people, both accident victims and emergency personnel, on the bank behind her. She spotted a few children, but they all seemed to be with parents. Whirling, she scanned the dark, roiling surface of the water.

There. Some distance away from the smaller, capsized boat, a tiny figure bobbed.

Melissa stared around wildly. ‘Hey! There’s a child in the water!’

One or two of the paramedics glanced over for a moment but were engrossed in helping their own patients. Melissa turned to the river and waved frantically to the police divers dotted about, yelling: ‘A child!’ and jabbing with her finger in the boy’s direction. She went unheard in the general tumult, which wasn’t helped by the roar of helicopter blades as two choppers swung overhead.

Melissa looked quickly at the woman, who still hadn’t caught on that her son was in the water but clung to Melissa’s arm, mumbling desperately and incoherently. Melissa stared from helicopters to divers to the tiny floating figure.

The boy would be spotted before long. But by then it would be too late.

Melissa pulled her arm out of the mother’s grip. She closed her eyes and drew a long breath, filling her lungs almost to bursting.

She leaped forward, launching herself as far as she could out into the water.

In the fraction of a second she spent in the air, the images came flooding back, as clear as if the intervening years hadn’t happened.

Melissa was six years old, playing too close to the pond at the bottom of a friend’s garden. Her friend’s parents were only a few feet away but had turned their backs for a moment, and little Melissa, stretching out with a stick to snare an elusive lily, slipped on the wet grass at the edge of the pond and tumbled into the water. Within seconds her friend’s father was there with her, his arms around her and lifting her free. But those seconds of heart-stopping terror, in which she’d been surrounded by the dark, cloying silence of the water, were burned into Melissa’s memory. They’d made her uneasy around lakes and rivers, and had prevented her from enjoying holidays on the beach ever since.

And, of course, she’d never learned