The man on the pavement was slight, pale, blond-haired. He was also unconscious. One hand was stretched out above his head as if he had been reaching for something when he fell; the other was crooked at a strange angle, the black fabric of his thin turtleneck sleeve shiny with blood. His face was bruised, his otherwise smart clothing torn and soiled with dirt from the streets. Near to his body was a revolver.

Elidh Jones was arrested by the sight. Momentarily frozen, she dithered, not sure whether to approach the man or call for help. She had seen plenty of sights like this at the hospital, but somehow this wasn't quite the same. Something wasn't right. She couldn't put her finger on it. Maybe it was the gun unnerving her; but something wasn't right.

The thoughts whipped through her head in seconds, but then training kicked in. She ran to the man, dropping her handbag on the street as she crouched beside him, pressing her fingers to the side of his neck to feel for a pulse.

It was there. It was weak, but it was there.

She touched her fingers to his cheek, not wanting to shake him until she could be sure he had no damage to his spine.

'Can you hear me?' she called in the loud, clear voice she was used to using in A&E to seemingly unresponsive patients. 'Sir, can you try to wake up?'

Her eyes flicked over him again. There was rope knotted around each wrist. That wound to his arm looked to be a violent break of some sort. Bruising to his head and neck. No doubt there was bruising to his body too under his torn clothes. He reeked of stale urine.

'Can you hear me?' she called again, getting her mouth close to his ear.

He hissed in his breath in a sudden motion that startled her into almost falling over backwards. His eyes snapped open, and she saw a flash of startling blue before he sat up in one coiled motion, and grabbed at the collar of her blouse.

Well, that's one for the bin, she thought as he fell back again, leaving a smear of grime and blood on the white fabric.

'There, just lie there quietly,' she told him.

At least she knew now that he probably had no severe spinal injuries, but that burst of movement had left him even paler than before. She started to roll him onto his side, just in time, because he vomited pitifully onto the concrete slabs of the pavement. It was pitiful because there was so little in his stomach that nothing came up but water and bitter bile.

She pulled out her handkerchief and wiped his mouth.

'I need to leave you,' she said clearly. 'I need to get to a telephone box, call an ambulance.'

His eyes snapped open again, and she saw that her impression of brilliant blue irides had not been mistaken. He looked distracted, in pain, but his eyes were startling.

'No. No, no ambulance,' he murmured, obviously struggling against great pain. 'No, need to get somewhere safe. Fast. No ambulance. Please. They'll find me. Take me to...'

But his eyes rolled back in his head, and he fainted.

Elidh was left kneeling on the pavement, her head spinning. He had sounded Russian. She was sure of that. He looked damn near Russian too. And that gun… She reached out to it tentatively, and picked it up in her fingertips. Now, guns certainly weren't something she came across every day, not in this neck of the woods.

Her conscience warred within her. The man needed medical attention. He needed it badly. And if he were Russian, a Russian carrying a gun, come to such grievous harm in the London streets, then surely this must be something the authorities should know about? But there was something about him, something about his eyes, something about the desperation in his voice, that overrode that higher, rational brain. She needed to help him. She wanted to help him. And here she was on her way back from a night shift at five a.m. on a clear summer's morning, with apparently nothing else that she could do.

She shrugged off her coat and laid it gently over him.

'Stay right there,' she said, although she knew he wouldn't hear her. 'I'll be right back.'

It was a matter of minutes, once she'd pulled off those ridiculous heels, to run in stockinged feet the rest of the way home through the streets and get into her car. It took less time to get back.

He was still there, still unconscious, lying on the ground with her coat still over him. He was hard to get into the back seat of the car, and even unconscious he groaned faintly as she dragged him up onto the fake leather seats, but she hadn't spent five years working at the Royal without lugging quite a few heavy bodies around. This man was small, at least, without an ounce of spare fat on him.

It was harder once she got him back to the house. She opened the door near his feet but there was no way she could pull him out of the car and get him all the way inside, not without help. She opened the other door and leant in over him, patting his cheek.

'Come on now, come on,' she said in her most encouraging voice, keeping it low so as not to wake the neighbours. 'Come on, you need to wake up now.'

The man groaned, his eyelids fluttering open. He was going to have a good bruise around one of those eyes and all down his cheek.

'Wha- ' he began, as if he had forgotten what was happening.

'You're in my car,' she told him clearly, 'and I need to get you into the house, but I can't do it on my own. Can you manage to walk?'

Without speaking, the man started to shuffle himself painfully across the seats, unable to stop the occasional cry of pain. As he lowered his feet to the ground she saw him definitely favouring one of them.

'Come on, there we go,' she said softly, pulling his good arm – or, at least, his better arm – around her shoulders. He leant almost all of his weight onto her as she helped him inch by inch up the path and to the front door. She had intended to get him upstairs, but as soon as the door closed behind them he failed in his efforts to stay upright, and she couldn't do anything more than make his slide to the ground more gentle than otherwise.

He lay there for a moment, eyes closed, gasping as if he had run a mile. Then, 'My gun? You got my gun?'

'I got your gun,' she promised him. 'It's in my bag.'

'Ahh...' The acknowledgement was on a slow outbreath of air. He was exhausted, and she wasn't quite sure how he was conscious considering his injuries.

'All right, Mr – '

'Kuryakin,' he murmured. 'Mr Kuryakin.'

'All right, Mr – Kuryakin,' she said, stumbling for a moment with the foreign name. 'Now, you've fallen on your feet, so to speak, because you have some pretty severe injuries, and I'm a nurse. I wish I could be a doctor too, because you need one, but I'm guessing – '

There was that near look of panic again as his eyes opened. 'No doctor,' he said. 'No doctor...'

She dearly wanted to ask him to explain what the hell was going on, but there were much more important things to deal with for now. That arm injury was bleeding. She didn't know what the landlord would say about the stain on the carpet, but for now that wasn't a concern. She looked around, wondering if she could get the man into the living room, or even the kitchen, but by the look of him that wasn't going to be an option. She would just have to make the hallway into a treatment room.

Half an hour later she sat down on the hall carpet and leant her back against the wall. He was unconscious again, but at least he was clean and bandaged. She had had to resort to cutting his filthy, torn, blood and vomit stained clothes off him, but that was little loss, torn as they were. She had the horrible feeling the clothes had been deliberately torn so as to gain better access to the sensitive flesh beneath. She discovered that not only had he been subjected to a horrific beating with blunt objects, probably fists or boots, but he also showed evidence of burns and whipping. At some point he had wet himself, whether from pain and fear or because he had been given no other option, she didn't know. The right arm was broken, and she was terribly afraid that it had been broken by a bullet. She wasn't familiar with gunshot wounds, but that pulpy mess of flesh and bone below his elbow seemed like one to her. The only consolation was that there were both entry and exit wounds, so there was no bullet inside him. The bone splinters she could do little about, but the bleeding was stopped at least.

The rest of his injuries were confined mostly to burns, cuts, and bruising, although he seemed to have a few broken ribs. She would have been happier if she could x-ray and set his arm instead of just splinting it, happier if she could consult with a doctor about internal injuries, happier if he would let her take him to a bloody hospital.

She let her head sink onto her knees, deadly tired. She had been on duty all night and looking forward to a cup of tea and crawling into bed, not finding a grievously injured man on the way home. But there wasn't time for self indulgence now. She spared herself enough time to make a strong cup of tea with sugar and light a cigarette, and then came back to sit next to her patient, made as comfortable as he could be on the floor with a pillow and blankets from upstairs.

On the floor beside her she had laid out his possessions. There was that wicked looking gun. A pen, or something very like a pen, but it didn't seem quite right. Too heavy, too solid somehow. There was his watch and his wallet, and a few loose coins from his trouser pocket – English coins, mind, a few shillings and pennies, a thruppence and a farthing. She had gently removed a ring from his left hand, wondering if he were really married, and if so, to whom.

She turned her attention to his wallet. He wasn't badly off, with a sheaf of English notes in there and a few American ones too, tucked into the back. And then she found it. A yellow card with black print that made a shiver run through her spine. He had been telling the truth. His name was Kuryakin, Illya Kuryakin, and he worked for the U.N.C.L.E..