Dick Francis's Front Runner

19

My friend with the carving knife, and his taller chum with the red baseball boots, came a-calling sometime between one and two o’clock on Friday morning, well outside visiting hours.

Fortunately, I was awake.

In fact, I was more than awake, I was up and wandering around in my brand-new silk dressing gown and slippers.

When he’d said it, I hadn’t particularly agreed with Doctor Shwan that the itching in my chest was a good thing, yet it had been that itching, together with my desperate urge to scratch, that had woken me and driven me from my bed at the same time my unwanted visitors made their appearance.

The itching saved my life.

The duty night nurse had suggested that a cup of hot chocolate might help me sleep. Hence I was standing in the small ward kitchen with her, heating milk in a saucepan, when the buzzer sounded at the main door.

‘I wonder who that is?’ said the nurse. ‘The doors are locked at night, but all the staff have key cards. Can you manage a moment?’

‘Sure,’ I said. She went to open the main door while I was left to mind the milk.

Unexpected visitors in the dead of night? Alarm bells started ringing in my head. I flicked off the light and peered around the doorframe of the kitchen.

I recognized the two men as soon as I saw them. It was something about their heights and body shapes rather than their facial features, which, this time, were covered by dark balaclava masks.

One of them was holding the nurse from behind, his arm across her neck, while the other stood in front of her holding the long thin carving knife in his right hand.

Bugger, I thought. I should have asked for that stab-proof vest.

‘Where’s Hinkley?’ I heard the knifeman ask the terrified nurse.

She nodded towards my room.

The man with the knife disappeared but soon returned.

‘Where is he?’ he hissed at the poor woman, raising the knife towards her face.

She made an involuntary glance right at me.

I ducked back into the kitchen before the men could turn, and waited in the dark.

I saw the knife first, then the hand holding it as the man edged towards the doorway. But I didn’t wait for him to see me.

I picked up the saucepan from the hotplate, stepped forward and threw the boiling milk straight into his face, following it up with a swipe of the pan that made a satisfying clunk as it connected with his nose.

The man screamed, dropped the knife and tore away the balaclava from his burning face, but I wasn’t finished with him yet. I hit him again with the heavy base of the saucepan as hard as I could on the side of his head and he went down to the floor.

The knife? I thought, looking around me desperately. Where’s the bloody knife?

Meanwhile, the other man had tossed the nurse to one side and was now coming across to help his friend. Did he have a knife too?

I didn’t wait to check. Instead, I went for him, yelling loudly and wielding the saucepan high above my head. At first he wavered, then he turned on his red baseball boots and ran fast for the exit.

There was a sharp pain in my tummy. I’d done myself some mischief. I was sure of that. I reached down my front with my left hand and could feel wetness on my pyjama jacket.

Blood.

I’d burst some stitches, but I wasn’t ready to give up.

I turned back to the knifeman and was greatly dismayed to see that he was neither unconscious nor dead, as I had hoped. Indeed, he was beginning to get to his knees and he had recovered his knife from the floor.

Shit.

I was in no state to fight him off again. The way I was suddenly feeling, I’d have had some difficulty fighting off a fly.

He stood up and looked at me. I looked back, deep into his unfeeling dark eyes.

Underhand, I thought. He was holding the knife underhand, with the point facing up. Would it make any difference? I was not wearing a tweed jacket and thick overcoat this time to protect me, just a pair of striped pyjamas and a thin silk dressing gown.

The Grim Reaper was waiting in the wings, about to make his appearance.

The cavalry arrived suddenly in the shape of four scrubs-wearing medical staff running into the ward pushing a trolley. The knifeman took one look at these unexpected reinforcements and obviously decided that flight was the wisest course of action. He grabbed his discarded balaclava, pushed past the new arrivals and scarpered in the direction of the stairwell.

‘Where?’ one of the medics shouted at me urgently.

‘Where what?’ I asked.

‘Where’s the cardiac arrest?’ he shouted again.

In my chest, I thought.

‘What cardiac arrest?’ I asked blankly.

‘You pushed the cardiac arrest alarm,’ he said accusingly.

‘I did that,’ said the ward duty night nurse, coming out from behind the nurses’ station desk where she’d taken refuge. ‘We needed help fast. It was the best I could think of.’

Good girl, I thought.

I sat down on the floor. I wasn’t feeling at all well.

Oh God, not again.

I ended up back where I’d started, in A & E, for repairs.

Doctor Shwan wasn’t on duty so it fell to one of the other doctors to tut-tut about not exerting oneself so soon after open-heart surgery when one is only held together with silk thread and catgut.

‘And stainless-steel wire,’ I added helpfully.

I was sent for an X-ray on my breastbone but nothing seemed to have moved in that department. It was the incision made to repair my bowel that had split open. The underlying muscle wall, thankfully, had remained intact.

‘You nearly gave yourself a massive hernia,’ the doctor said sternly by way of reprimand. ‘If you had split the internal sutures as well as the external ones, you could easily have had your guts out all over the floor.’

‘But I didn’t,’ I said, smiling at him.

My guts had nearly been all over the floor for another reason, I thought, courtesy of my friend with the carving knife.

A uniformed policeman came to see me as soon as the doctor had finished his stitching, even though I was still feeling absolutely lousy and utterly exhausted.

‘Call Detective Inspector Galvin,’ I said.

‘Why?’ asked the policeman.

‘Because I’m not well enough and too tired to tell the story twice.’

I closed my eyes.

Why was someone trying so hard to kill me? Three times now, in rapid succession, I’d escaped an untimely death.

I had been assuming that all three attempts were connected. But were they?

Clearly, the second and third had been, but shutting me into a sauna didn’t follow the pattern of the other two. Had I simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time at Dave Swinton’s house?

The two most recent attempts by the same two men had shown a certain determination to succeed on their part.

It had only been good fortune that I’d been awake and out of my room when they had appeared in the hospital, and I could hardly rely on my luck holding every time they came looking for me.

What was it I knew or had done that was so important it was worth killing me over?

DI Galvin came to see me at nine thirty on Friday morning as I was snoozing, back in bed in my room on the ninth floor of the hospital.

‘I told you I needed a guard,’ I said to him before he even had a chance to speak.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I agree. You were right.’

‘So can I have one now? Those two guys have tried at least twice to kill me. In my book, that demonstrates an undeniable degree of persistence. I reckon they may well come back for a third try.’

‘I’ll see what I can arrange,’ DI Galvin said. ‘Can you add anything to your description of the man with the knife?’

‘He now has a scalded face,’ I said. ‘I threw boiling milk at him.’

I told the detective everything that had happened from the moment the door buzzer was pushed until the time the knifeman ran for the stairs.

‘It seems you gave rather better than you got,’ he said.

‘I had some catching up to do.’

‘We are trying to establish how the men got in. There’s night-time security in A & E that’s meant to prevent members of the public wandering through to the rest of the hospital.’

‘Surely this place has closed-circuit TV?’ I asked.

‘All over. It’s being looked at even as we speak. Any luck with the mugshots?’

‘Not so far, but I’m only about halfway through and there’s one or two I now want to go back and look at again. I had a much better look at the knifeman last night than I did at my flat. I have a vague feeling I’ve seen his face before.’

‘I’ll leave the iPad with you, then. Give me a call if you spot anyone familiar.’

‘Talking about giving people a call, is there any chance someone could fetch my phone? I dropped it during the struggle in my flat hallway, and I feel totally lost without it.’

‘Ah yes, that reminds me,’ said DI Galvin. ‘I have your front-door key.’ He dug in his pocket and placed the key on the bedside locker.

‘Did you hear what I said? Could someone please fetch my phone?’

‘We’re finished there now,’ the inspector replied, not properly answering the question. ‘Is there no one else who could go for you?’

‘I suppose I could ask my sister to go.’

‘Good,’ he said, standing up. ‘You will need to make a formal statement about the incident here last night. Can you write it yourself?’

I nodded. Another bloody statement. And I still had to do the one for DS Jagger. ‘I’ll do it later,’ I said wearily.

‘OK. But, in the meantime, keep looking at the mugshots. I’ll be back later for the statement.’

‘How about my bodyguard?’ I said.

‘I’ll arrange for a uniformed officer to be present in the ward reception area. The nursing staff are demanding it anyway.’

Good for them, I thought.

The detective went away and I went back to my snoozing. But about an hour later I came face-to-face once more with my would-be assassin.

He was younger and had a moustache, but I was certain it was the same man — my friend with the carving knife.

Mugshot number 282.

He was indeed one of those I’d gone back to have another look at, having passed over him before. It was the dark unfeeling eyes that gave him away, the same eyes I’d stared deeply into when I’d been convinced he was about to kill me. They were not eyes I would forget in a hurry.

Just the picture of him sent shivers of fear down my spine.

‘Two-eight-two,’ I said to DI Galvin when I called him using the hospital phone.

‘Are you sure?’

‘A hundred per cent.’

‘Two-eight-two, you say?’ I could hear him tapping it in on a computer keyboard. ‘Right, got him.’

‘What’s his name?’ I asked.

‘Lawrence. Darryl Gareth Lawrence. Ever heard of him?’

‘No,’ I said with certainty.

‘He was born sixteenth July 1978. Originally from Port Talbot in Wales, his last known address was in Streatham, south London. He’s got previous — lots — mostly for violence, including wounding with intent.’

‘With intent to do what?’

‘Cause grievous bodily harm. Sentenced to seven years for that at Southwark Crown Court in 2008. He was released on licence in November 2012 having served two-thirds of his sentence. According to his record, he’s been out of trouble since then but that only means he hasn’t been arrested for anything.’

‘Well, you can arrest him now for wounding with intent to commit murder.’

‘I’ll get on to it straight away.’

He hung up.

In some strange way, I felt slightly safer knowing who was trying to kill me. All I needed to know now was why.