Phryne had just flounced away from them and headed towards her car, parked illegally (as usual) in front of the station, in one of the spaces reserved for police vehicles. He had just tipped several coins into Constable Foster's palm (he and Collins were about to depart for the pie cart), and although he didn't yet know it, that was the moment his life changed.
He heard her panicked "No! no!", the screech of tyres and the muffled thud, and saw Collins' face morph from disbelief to all out terror, and the young man didn't even look back at Jack as he lurched away from him and toward the road.
As he did, Jack turned and started moving in the same direction, but although his legs were moving, his brain was taking much longer to to process the scene before him, and it seemed as if time had slowed to a crawl.
A woman with a baby on her hip was screaming hysterically on the footpath "Jimmy! Jimmy! My baby! Jimmy!" Jack suddenly recognised the woman; at this moment her husband was in their lockup, living up to his 'drunk and disorderly' charge. As he watched, the woman turned to a young girl beside her, clipped the side of her head so hard that she fell to the ground, and wailed "You were supposed to be watching him! My baby!"
Jack's attention was caught by the bright red bag that lay abandoned near the girl, on the footpath, where its owner had hastily dropped it. His gaze shifted to the matching cloche, upturned in the gutter, its once-proud feathers bent and slick with the oil from the road, and his stomach lurched as he noticed the silky black strands caught in the bent hatpin that protruded from within it.
He turned to his right, where a man was being hauled bodily from a black car by several onlookers, his face contorted in misery. "The little one – he just stepped out! She tried to grab him! I couldn't stop! I couldn't stop! He just stepped out…"
His peripheral vision alerted him to a single feather dancing merrily in the breeze, seemingly held in the outstretched hands of the mascot that reached forward over the car's radiator grille. Below it, on the bumper, a smear of something wet and red, and a drooping scrap of bright silk; the silk of the dress he had been silently admiring, not five minutes before, as she had perched in her usual spot upon the edge of his desk.
Abruptly, the noise and confusion of the scene cut through the fog in his brain. He saw Collins kneel to look under the car, then scramble away, ashen, to heave his breakfast into the gutter. Suddenly he was screaming her name "Phryne! Phryne!"
He bent near the grille; a spill of straight, black strands, and a tangle of golden curls. His voice was harsh, "Get out of the way! Out of the way!" and he didn't care what he had to do to get to her. He shoved someone aside, he would never know who, and dropped to his side on the road behind the front tyre.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness under the car, and as they did the golden head moved; and screamed, as it realised it was not only hurting, it was trapped – tangled in her arms, and wedged firmly beneath her. He heard the mother's wailing start again, this time in relief "Jimmy! Jimmy…"
The contorted, tear-stained face turned to his, and a tiny pink hand reached out for him. He gripped the arm and tugged. Harder. The boy's screams intensified as Jack finally managed to haul him into the sunshine. His left hand and cheek were grazed, and he was smeared in blood; definitely not all his.
He returned his attention to the silk-clad sleeve that had dropped limply to the ground when relieved of its bundle. He reached for it, before realising that, of course, her left was closer. He grabbed the limp hand – blood oozed from the torn fingernails, and the graze that covered the back of her hand and continued up and beneath the shredded fabric on her arm. He squeezed it.
Nothing.
"Phryne!"
Nothing.
He wriggled closer, nudged her shoulder. "Phryne!"
The jet lashes finally struggled open. Oh thank God. Thank God. Thank God.
"Phryne…"
"Jack…" Her voice was weak, and her pale eyes were understandably confused. "You've been in an accident… You're alright… Don't try to move…" He squeezed gently on the bloodied hand. "Just give me a second…" He hauled himself out, and motioned Hugh to his side for a quiet word, "Telephone Mr Butler and tell him what's happened, ask him if he can contact Doctor MacMillan, then I need you back here with the others to keep this mob under control" and he jerked his head at the ever-increasing crowd.
He slid back under the vehicle, someone yelled at him that an ambulance was coming, and relief flooded through him.
It was short-lived.
His eyes soon became fully accustomed to his dim surroundings, and he pulled away to assess her.
She was awkwardly wedged beneath the chassis and motor, her left leg straight on the ground, her right bent at the knee, the hip angled upwards and a little toward him. Her torso was twisted, her right shoulder held in place from above, angling her chest slightly toward the ground as she faced him.
She looked strangely like a beautiful doll, carelessly discarded on the floor when the fun had ended; the still-perfect red of her lips, the long, dark lashes, her glossy black hair, and the bright, printed fabric of her tailored costume – but dolls didn't bleed.
Her arm wasn't the only thing that had been grazed by the road surface; as she moved her head he saw that her left cheek and jawline were also oozing, and there was a slick, dark mat of hair two inches above her left ear.
Her short, shallow breaths indicated that she was having trouble breathing, and there was a suspiciously dark patch spreading from under her right arm, down across her abdomen.
He took in the shredded skin of her left leg, the bright patent of her shoe scraped to reveal the paleness underneath, and the broken heel of her right, at the base of her bent leg.
Her clothing had been dragged up her body and was hitched up around her hips and waist, exposing the kind of underwear Jack had only ever seen in contraband photographs passed around in the trenches; except far more expensive. Pale silk stockings, topped with pink bows and several inches of fine pink and cream lace, which was torn in places where several of the button-clips of her garters had been violently pulled away. The freed garter ribbons were tangled in the lace-hemmed legs of a pale pink silk step-in; they were bunched around the bottom of her satiny pink girdle, which was fastened up the curve of her hip by a row of buttons and loops in the same fabric.
He moved to pull her dress down to cover her, but it wasn't going to be possible to draw it all the way down. He had noticed the stain of red high up on her right thigh, and now the realisation struck him; the leg wasn't bent by choice – the red marked the place where it was pinned by a thick, greasy piece of metal that had pierced her flesh. He immediately broke into a cold sweat; in the trenches he had seen a man bleed to death in a few short moments when his well-meaning fellows had pulled a piece of shrapnel from a similar location, releasing the severed artery it had concealed.
"Jack… what happened?"
He wanted to keep her talking as long as possible, "What's the last thing you remember?"
"Hmmm… we were talking… in your office… I don't remember what about…"
"Nothing after that?"
"No… no… nothing else…"
He took a breath and squeezed her hand. "I didn't see it, but Collins did… A little boy stepped out into the road, and you were trying to save him…"
"Is he–"
"I think he's alright…" she closed her eyes for a second in relief and he squeezed her hand again, "His lungs were certainly working when I pulled him out of here…"
"He was here?"
"Yes… you were holding him…" his voice started to break and he had to turn away from her for a moment. She had acted without hesitation, probably without the slightest thought for her own safety, and no one on the scene was in any doubt that she had saved the boy's life. He flashed back to those terrible moments before she had responded to him, and he had thought…
"Jack…" it was her turn to squeeze his hand, and he reflected that she really was the bravest person he knew. Who knew what pain she was in right now? And she was concerned for him. He didn't think any of his colleagues would be doing as well as she was in her circumstances.
Shouting indicated that the ambulance had arrived; he had to get to the crew and tell them what he'd found, before they inadvertently revealed it to her. He stroked his thumb across the back of her hand. "I'll be back in just a moment…"
She actually chuckled. "I'll be here…"
tbc