Dick Francis's Front Runner

15

A police car and an ambulance turned up together, both with multiple bright blue flashing lights that lit up the street and hurt my eyes.

It became clear that a stabbing in a London street was not sufficiently unusual for either the police officers or the ambulance crew to get too excited. In fact, I found the perceived indifference to apprehending my assailants to be frustrating.

‘Can’t you get the helicopter up?’ I urged the police as soon as they arrived.

‘Helicopters cost money,’ one of them replied, shaking his head. ‘Especially on Sunday evenings.’

I was carried on a stretcher, half sitting, half lying, into the back of the ambulance and we set off with one of the policemen sitting on a chair near my head, just as I had done the previous day with Bill McKenzie.

‘My front door is wide open,’ I said. ‘The key is still in the lock.’

‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said the policeman. ‘My colleague will look after your house.’

The paramedic cut my shirt away and raised his eyebrows in surprise.

‘You have at least a dozen stab wounds on your torso,’ he said. ‘How come you’re still alive?’

The policeman suddenly took a slightly greater interest.

‘I don’t think they’re very deep,’ I said. ‘My overcoat saved me.’

The paramedic placed several electrodes on the bits of my chest with no knife punctures and wired them up to a metal box above my head. Next, he slipped a blood-pressure cuff over my arm. He also attached a sort of bulldog clip to my finger, and then inserted a needle into a vein on the back of my hand to set up a drip.

‘To stop dehydration,’ he said when I looked at him quizzically. ‘You’ve lost a fair amount of blood.’

‘So who stabbed you?’ the policeman asked.

‘There were two of them,’ I said. ‘They were waiting for me in my flat.’

‘Associates, were they?’ he asked in a tone that implied he didn’t care much. It dawned on me why.

‘No,’ I said to him. ‘They were not associates, and I am not a drug dealer. I am a senior investigator for the Integrity Service of the British Horseracing Authority. I am the horseracing police and two men have just tried to kill me. I would like, please, to speak to a higher-ranking officer.’

The policeman swiftly changed his tune, asking me for a description of the men so he could put out a call.

A description?

‘I spent most of the time with my eyes glued to the knife,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really look at their faces.’

‘But you saw them well enough to know they were not associates,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Funny how the mind works. I couldn’t remember seeing their faces yet I must have done. Enough, anyway, to realize I didn’t know them.

‘White or black?’ he asked.

‘White,’ I said with certainty. The overhead light in my hallway had been off but there had been enough illumination from the one in the open porch.

‘Masks and gloves?’

‘Gloves, yes,’ I said. ‘Leather gloves. But no masks.’

‘They obviously didn’t expect you to survive long enough to provide us with a description.’

I was beginning to feel seriously unwell and I was having great difficulty breathing. I leaned my head back on the pillow.

‘Blues and twos,’ the paramedic shouted at his colleague who was driving. ‘Blood pressure’s dropping and his O saturation has fallen below ninety.’

I heard the ambulance’s siren start up. It couldn’t go quick enough as far as I was concerned.

The medic put an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth, which made me feel marginally better, but I was so tired — I could hardly keep my eyes open.

‘Stay with us,’ the paramedic said loudly into my ear. ‘Stay with us.’

He briefly disconnected the drip from the needle in the back of my hand and replaced it with a full syringe. ‘Adrenalin,’ he said, pushing the plunger, but I was barely listening. I was drifting off.

‘Don’t go to sleep,’ said the paramedic leaning over me and putting his face close to mine. ‘Come on, Mr Hinkley, you must stay awake.’

I forced my eyes open and was not greatly heartened by the worry lines on his forehead as he listened to my chest with a stethoscope.

‘I need you to sit up some more,’ he said, placing his arm around my shoulders and pulling me forward. The move helped a little but my breathing was becoming more and more laboured as I gasped for air, and still I felt so extraordinarily fatigued.

I was going to sleep and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

In my last conscious moment before oblivion, I thought with despair: this is it — I’m dying.

I woke up lying on a hospital bed with all my senses switching back on at once.

I stared at the light fitting on the ceiling, could hear a beep-beep somewhere over my head of what I took to be a heart monitor, and I could smell the typical sweet aroma of hospital disinfectant.

My sensory nerves were fully operational as well, with my chest feeling like someone was driving nails into it. My abdomen was on fire and my throat felt like it had been rebored with a wire brush.

And I was thirsty.

I tried to speak, but my tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of my mouth. All that I could manage was a groan.

‘Ah, you’re awake,’ said a voice.

I swivelled my eyes away from the ceiling and looked at a pretty young woman standing at the foot of the bed dressed in a blue nurse’s tunic.

‘Water,’ I tried to say through the oxygen mask that covered my nose and mouth. I’m not sure it came out quite right but she seemed to understand because she nodded and disappeared, returning with a cup and a straw. Nothing ever tasted better.

For a few moments when I’d first awakened, I had wondered where I was, then I remembered everything up to and including the hopeless feeling of impending death that I’d experienced in the ambulance.

I wasn’t dead — I was alive and in hospital.

Unless, of course, this was the afterlife.

I reckoned that it wasn’t, not unless this pain constituted Hell itself. I did consider that seriously for a few seconds but came to the conclusion that Lucifer was unlikely to have pretty nurses on hand to fetch water for the inmates.

I was still alive, and I was glad of it.

‘Do you know your name?’ asked the nurse, holding the oxygen mask away from my face.

‘Jeff Hinkley,’ I said, my voice still coming out as a croak.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I hurt.’

‘I’ll fetch you something for that.’

She replaced the mask and disappeared from view, returning in a few moments with a small plastic cup containing some clear liquid.

‘Morphine,’ she said. ‘This will help.’

She held the mask away from my face again and helped me raise my head slightly to drink it down. Only then did I realize that I had a multitude of wires and tubes coming out of the side of my neck below my right ear.

A man came into sight. He was wearing surgeon’s scrubs.

‘So, Mr Hinkley, you’re still with us?’ I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement. ‘I’m Doctor Shwan. It’s Egyptian, like a swan only with an h. I’m the doctor that operated on you. You’re a very lucky boy. Very lucky indeed. I thought we’d lost you but we managed to bring you back.’ He smiled.

He’d called me a boy yet he was hardly older than I.

‘I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck,’ I said. ‘I’m so sore.’

‘I’m not surprised. I had to open both your chest and your abdomen.’

‘And my throat?’ I asked. ‘That hurts as well.’

‘We had to insert a tube down your throat in order to ventilate your lungs with oxygen during surgery. Normal breathing isn’t possible with the chest wall open. The tube tends to cause some minor discomfort for a while afterwards.’

It didn’t feel minor to me.

‘You rest,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll tell you everything later.’

‘Tell me now,’ I said. I was never one for waiting.

‘You have thirteen separate stab wounds, most of which are superficial. Two of them, however, are deep. One penetrated the abdominal muscle wall and punctured your bowel, while the other, the most serious, passed between your second and third ribs on the left side, causing a laceration of the aortic arch just above your heart.’

I suppose I had asked.

‘It is that one that almost killed you,’ he said. ‘It caused substantial bleeding into the chest cavity, which compromised your breathing and also filled the space around the heart with blood, giving it no room to beat.’

‘But I was fine for a while. I was even able to run.’

‘Yes, but all the time the chest cavity was slowly filling. Only when the blood got to a critical level did you suffer any symptoms. Usually, by then, it’s too late to save the patient. You had a cardiac arrest as you arrived at A & E and I had to perform an emergency thoracotomy right there and then to get your heart pumping again. There wasn’t even time to get you to the operating theatre. As I said, you’re a very lucky boy.’

‘Very lucky to have you around when I needed it.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ he said with a smile. ‘Yours was the first chest I’ve ever opened. I’ve only ever seen it done by others. I’m an Accident and Emergency doctor, not a heart surgeon. But needs must, and it seems to have worked.’ He made a movement as if to mop sweat from his brow.

I knew from my time with the army in Afghanistan how extreme situations could require desperate solutions well out of one’s comfort zone. And how it takes immense courage not to wait for someone with the right experience but to make the decision to do it yourself, because to wait would be to fail.

‘Thank you, Doctor Shwan,’ I said, meaning it.

‘Don’t thank me yet,’ he said. ‘Give it another forty-eight hours or so. A trolley in A & E is not the most sterile of environments to perform heart massage or to repair a major artery. I’m just hoping you won’t get an infection. We are delivering antibiotics direct to your heart cavity, yet we can never be sure. And then there’s the rupture of your bowel. I repaired that as well but there’s always a chance of peritonitis.’

‘Well, thank you anyway,’ I said, ‘for what you’ve done so far.’

‘You need to rest now. Give your body the chance to heal itself.’

The morphine was finally beginning to work. I closed my eyes.

‘The police are outside and they’re keen to speak to you,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell them they have to wait.’

Good idea, I thought. Let them wait.

There would be plenty of time later to think about why I’d been attacked and who would have done such a thing to me.

Twice in eight days, someone had tried to kill me.

I just hoped it wouldn’t be third time lucky.

The police in the form of two plain-clothes detectives were finally allowed in to question me the following evening, by which time the pain in my chest had subsided a little from an unbearable level 10 to an almost manageable 8.

Thankfully, my throat was nearly back to normal and the oxygen mask over my face had been replaced by two little tubes that jutted up into my nostrils. Hence two-way communication was much improved.

‘Mr Hinkley,’ one of the policemen said, ‘I’m Detective Inspector Galvin of the Metropolitan Police Homicide and Serious Crime Command, and this is my sergeant, DS Gibb.’

They sat down on two chairs, one either side of the bed.

‘You’ve been causing quite a stir,’ said the detective inspector. ‘The Commissioner has been getting calls from the chairman of the horseracing authority demanding to know who tried to kill his senior investigator.’

Blimey, I thought. I hadn’t had that sort of response the previous week. Probably because I’d played it down. And also because of the death of Dave Swinton.

‘I’m glad somebody cares,’ I said.

‘Tell me what happened on Sunday evening,’ said the detective.

I went through the whole thing as best I could remember, from the moment I turned the key in the lock of my front door, right up to the time of the arrival of the ambulance, and the sergeant wrote it all down in his notebook.

‘According to the constable who attended the scene, you told him you didn’t know your attackers,’ said the inspector. ‘Is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Quite correct.’

‘But you were unable to give him a description of the men.’

‘I became too ill.’

‘Can you give me one now?’

I had thought of little else for the preceding twenty-four hours. Over and over again, I had gone through the whole thing in my head trying to conjure up the image of the two faces, but with very limited success.

‘I was concentrating on the knife,’ I said. ‘I know that the men were white and I must have seen their faces well enough to realize I didn’t recognize them, but I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

‘Did they say anything?’

‘Not that I remember. It all happened so quickly. One of them grabbed me and the other started stabbing as soon as I walked through the door.’

‘So they were waiting for you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am sure they were. I was careless. I checked the bushes in the front garden and never imagined that anyone would be inside.’

The sergeant looked up at me from his notebook. ‘Were you expecting to be attacked?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly expecting it, no. I’m just naturally vigilant. And it isn’t the first time. Someone tried to kill me only a week ago.’

Both the policemen looked at me in surprise.

‘Was it the man with the knife?’ the inspector asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not unless he’s risen from the dead.’

I told them all about being shut in the sauna, my escape, and the subsequent discovery of Dave Swinton’s body in the burning car. They’d heard about that.

‘You can speak to Detective Sergeant Jagger from Thames Valley Police if you need to. He’s the investigating officer.’

DS Gibb wrote it down.

‘How did the men get into my flat?’ I asked.

‘They forced open a window in your kitchen,’ said the sergeant. ‘It’s now been screwed shut.’

They must have come down the lane that ran along the back of the garden.

‘Was anything stolen?’ I asked.

‘You’ll have to answer that yourself, Mr Hinkley, when you go home. There certainly wasn’t the usual mess we find when villains have been searching for valuables. No drawers turned out or anything.’

That seemed to confirm that it had definitely been me they were after, not my meagre worldly goods.

I leaned back on the pillow and closed my eyes. I was getting tired.

‘We will leave you now to rest,’ said the inspector, standing up, ‘but we’ll be back with some mugshots for you to look at when you’re a little better. Is there anything you need?’

‘You could contact my sister for me,’ I said. ‘She’ll be wondering why I didn’t call when I got home on Sunday, as I usually do.’

I gave them Faye’s phone number.

‘No problem,’ said the inspector. ‘I’ll call her as soon as I’m outside.’

‘Please don’t worry her,’ I said. ‘Ask her to come in tomorrow.’

They started to leave.

‘Hold on a moment,’ I said, opening my eyes again. ‘There were some telephone calls.’

‘What calls?’

‘On Saturday night and Sunday morning, I received four calls on my landline but no one spoke. I am sure there was someone on the line because I could hear noises in the background, but they didn’t say anything, they just listened for a few seconds and then hung up. I now wonder if the calls were made simply to find out if I was there.’

‘Are you ex-directory?’ the inspector asked.

‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘I hardly ever use the landline. It was my former girlfriend who liked it. I just transferred the number to my new flat when we sold the old one. I need the broadband that comes with it.’

‘We’ll check your phone records,’ DI Galvin said.

‘I dialled 1471 each time to get the numbers. I tried to call back but none of them would receive incoming calls.’

‘Phone boxes, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said the inspector. ‘Those don’t accept incoming calls any more.’

‘I wrote down the numbers,’ I said. ‘They’re on the back of the envelope that my gas bill came in. I left it on the counter in my kitchen.’

‘We’ll look into it,’ the inspector assured me.

Fine, I thought. Let someone else do the work. I was too tired.