The Nurse He Summoned

Iris Tolland carries a black bag across wartime Tyneside and knows every doorstep on both sides of the river, including which ones have a bottle behind the door. So when a wounded pilot dies in his billet with no marks on him, Iris knows the nurse who dressed him after death was no nurse. The medical officer signs the form, the sergeant salutes, and the morphine goes on being counted wrong. With a hospital porter who lost a brother at sea and a colliery full of people who do not trust anyone in uniform, Iris must follow three missing ampoules to a chemist's back room and a man quietly deciding which patients are not worth keeping alive. She has one bag and one trap in it.