Guilty Not Guilty

by Felix Francis

  I thought back to all the things that had happened to me since I’d hit that tree in October.

  There had been plenty of them.

  27

  My first sensation was an itch on the side of my nose.

  I tried to move to scratch it but I couldn’t. Something seemed to be preventing my hands from working properly.

  I began to panic.

  Where was I?

  In hospital, I thought. I could tell from the smell.

  I’d been in hospitals before, too often, due to racing falls.

  So where had I been riding this time? And on which horse?

  I couldn’t remember. It seemed that it was not only my hands that weren’t working properly, my brain wasn’t either.

  And the itch wouldn’t go away.

  No matter. Amelia would be in to see me soon and she could scratch it, as she always did.

  I opened my eyes.

  Definitely a hospital. I could see privacy-curtain rails hanging from the ceiling and square lights. The curtains were pulled round my bed. Why did I need privacy?

  I tried to turn my head to look at my right hand but it wouldn’t move either, and I realised that I was wearing a very tight surgical collar that was squeezing into my chin. That wasn’t a particularly good sign, I thought.

  It must have been a heavy fall.

  A face came into view looking down at me. Female, but not Amelia.

  The face turned away briefly.

  ‘He’s awake.’

  The face turned back to me.

  ‘We’ve been worried about you,’ she said. ‘Glad you’re back with us after so long.’

  I tried to reply but the collar wouldn’t let me open my mouth, so the muffled gurgling sound that did emerge was completely unintelligible, even to me.

  Another face appeared in my field of view. A male one, this time.

  ‘Don’t try to speak,’ he said, not that I could anyway. ‘Blink your eyes twice if you can understand me.’

  I blinked twice and both the faces smiled broadly.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ the male said to the female.

  I was confused. Of course I could understand them. What did they think I was, foreign?

  ‘You were in a car accident,’ the man said. ‘A bad one. Ten days ago now.’

  Car accident? Ten days ago!

  Somewhere deep in my head an alarm bell started ringing.

  Accident? Car accident?

  I knew there was something I should be remembering but, try as I might, I couldn’t recall what.

  I felt tired.

  I closed my eyes again and went back to sleep.

  *

  When I woke the next time it was not just an itch on my nose that I was worried about; everything else now hurt.

  ‘Ah, he’s back with us,’ said a voice from somewhere over my right shoulder. ‘I thought he might be soon, now we’ve shut off his pain relief.’

  Oh, thanks, I thought. Turn the damn thing back on again.

  But I also realised that pain was a good thing. My arms hurt, and my legs too, so I wasn’t paralysed. That was a huge relief.

  But why did I think that I might be?

  Another face appeared and I focused on it.

  ‘Hello,’ it said. ‘I’m Mr Constance, one of the orthopaedic consultants. You’re a lucky man – a very lucky man. We thought we’d lost you several times.’

  I tried to ask where I was but again without any success.

  ‘You just rest,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you some more pain relief now that you’re awake. Your whole system had quite a nasty shock from the accident. And we can’t take the collar off just yet, or let you move, because your neck is totally unstable. You need another urgent operation on it.’

  Another?

  Did he mean after the one I’d had several years ago?

  I suddenly realised I could remember that, and then all sorts of other things came flooding back in a rush, not least the awful realisation that Amelia wouldn’t be coming in to scratch my nose.

  Car accident?

  But she hadn’t died in a car accident.

  I was still confused.

  I did as the doctor had said – I rested, drifting in and out of sleep or unconsciousness – I wasn’t sure which.

  *

  When I woke for the third time, I was in a different place. The lights in the ceiling above me were round, not square, and the sounds were different too, with beeping and bells going off regularly in the background.

  And there was also a large tube fixed into my mouth. I could feel it with my tongue.

  I looked up at the round lights and wondered what else had changed. I still couldn’t move anything, but the collar round my neck was seemingly less tight.

  My body might not be much improved but my mind definitely felt clearer.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice.

  I swung my eyes round to my right and they settled on the face of a nurse wearing blue scrubs. I tried to reply but without any success whatsoever, not even the internal gurgling of last time.

  ‘I won’t ask how you’re feeling,’ she said, ‘because you can’t answer. That’s an endotracheal tube in your throat. You were intubated to put you on a ventilator during the operation, to assist your breathing. But it can probably come out now, since you’re awake.’

  That was encouraging.

  So I’d had an operation. This must be the recovery ward.

  After a while the nurse returned with another woman, this time in mauve scrubs, and, between them, they removed the tape around my mouth and then slid the tube out. As it passed my eyes, I was amazed how long it was. It seemed to go on forever and must have stretched all the way down into my lungs. No wonder I hadn’t been able to talk.

  Boy, that felt better.

  ‘Take it easy at first,’ said mauve scrubs. ‘You might be a bit hoarse.’

  Did she say that I was a bit of a horse? I almost laughed. Which bit?

  Then I realised what she had really said and the amusement subsided. My brain obviously wasn’t completely back to normal.

  ‘Where am I?’ I croaked.

  ‘Oxford,’ she said, smiling down at me. ‘The JR.’

  I looked quizzically at her.

  ‘The John Radcliffe Hospital. You’re in the intensive care unit.’

  The John Radcliffe Hospital.

  What was it I knew about the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford?

  Then I remembered. But I wish I hadn’t.

  The John Radcliffe Hospital was where the Home Office pathologist had done the post-mortem on Amelia. Perhaps she was still here, lying in the mortuary. Maybe she was just down the corridor.

  A wave of panic rose in my chest.

  Oh, Amelia.

  I could feel tears running down the sides of my head and into my ears.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ asked mauve scrubs with a concerned look on her face. ‘Do you need something for it?’

  Yes, I was in pain, but it was not the sort of pain that drugs could alleviate.

  A new face came into view, one that I recognised.

  ‘Hello again,’ said Mr Constance, the orthopaedic surgeon. ‘How are you doing? I have managed to stabilise your neck using two small metal plates. They should hold everything in place. Your spinal cord is intact but I don’t know how much it’s been affected by the bruising. You gave it quite a clout. It’s now just a matter of time to see how you get on.’ He smiled down at me. ‘Just don’t be having any more road accidents.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I croaked up at him. ‘It was done on purpose. Someone tried to kill me.’

  His smile disappeared and then, after a moment or two, so did the rest of him.

  When he came back he had someone else with him, as if needing a witness.

  ‘Now,’ Mr Constance said seriously. ‘Please say again what you said to me just now.’

  ‘I said that it wasn’t in an accident. Someone tried to kill me.’

 
And we all knew who that was, didn’t we?

  28

  It’s now just a matter of time to see how you get on, was what the orthopaedic man had said, and how I was getting on during the next couple of weeks was variable.

  Some things had improved hugely while others remained frustratingly the same. At least physically.

  I was moved out of intensive care and into a side room of a regular ward and, thanks to the electrically controlled hospital bed, I was able to sit up, which was a huge advance. It meant I could see more than just the ceiling. The cervical collar around my neck was also removed, which made talking much easier.

  Doctors came and went, each of them seemingly testing something different. Neurologists came and poked and prodded me with needles and declared that, as I could feel them pricking me all down my legs and arms, there should be no reason why I couldn’t also move them.

  But I couldn’t. All I could move was my eyes and my mouth, although I could also breathe on my own and swallow, but the nursing staff had to spoon-feed me, and also to deal with my other bodily functions, which was desperately humiliating.

  Every moment of every day, I tried to move my arms and legs, God help me I tried, but nothing happened. It was as if I had been robbed, not of sensation, but of action.

  And it made me hugely frustrated, and very angry.

  More doctors came, and then some medical students too, as if I’d become something of a celebrity, or maybe it was just because I was a clinical oddity.

  It was during one of these visits, when a member of the clinical teaching staff was talking about me in the third person to his students, as if I wasn’t actually there in the room with him listening, that I noticed something extraordinary.

  Movement. Down by my feet.

  It must be a mouse, I thought, caught under the sheet.

  There, it moved again.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said loudly, interrupting the medical class. ‘Can you please pull back the bedclothes?’

  The teacher smiled broadly. ‘Indeed I can. I was just about to do that anyway.’

  He removed the sheet with a bit of a flourish as if he were revealing some great treasure.

  There was no mouse.

  The movement was caused by the big toe on my right foot waving back and forth like some demented digit with a life of its own. Except that I was making it happen and I could stop and start it at will.

  If anything, the poor man looked rather disappointed, as if his prized freak exhibit was now not so much of an anomaly after all.

  I, meanwhile, had more tears streaming down my face.

  Tears, on this occasion, of joy rather than of sorrow.

  *

  It was around this time that I had a visitor in the form of Detective Sergeant Dowdeswell.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, standing at the foot of my bed. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Badly,’ I replied.

  He pulled up the chair and sat down next to me on my right-hand side.

  ‘You’ll have to sit at the end,’ I said. ‘I can’t move my head to see you.’

  ‘What, not at all?’

  ‘Not at all. In fact the only thing I can move is one big toe.’

  He shook his head. ‘I knew you were bad but not that bad.’

  He moved the chair until he was in my eyeline.

  ‘You took your time,’ I said.

  ‘Not from lack of trying, I assure you,’ he said. ‘The medics wouldn’t let us in. Seems you almost died. They placed you into an induced coma at the scene and it took them ten whole days to wake you up again. They were worried you had brain damage. I’m only allowed in here now because I’ve promised to be quick and not to upset you.’

  ‘You not being here before now has upset me a lot more,’ I said. ‘You know that it wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘One of the doctors told me you’d said that.’

  ‘But surely you knew that already.’

  He looked rather sheepish.

  ‘Traffic attended the scene and the assumption by them was that you had tried to take the corner too fast, skidded on some loose gravel, gone through the hedge and hit the tree beyond. Seems the car was a complete write-off, and that was even before the fire brigade had to cut it to pieces to get you out.’

  ‘What about the other car?’

  ‘There was no other car.’

  ‘Yes there was. It struck me violently from behind and sent me flying towards the tree. I didn’t go through the hedge, I went over it.’

  He looked horrified.

  ‘There was no other car there when you were found. But God knows how long it was before someone spotted the wreck.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘About eight o’clock on Thursday morning. Someone walking their dog saw the car over the hedge and then they noticed that there was a body still inside.’

  ‘Thursday morning?’ I said with incredulity. ‘That means I’d been there all night.’

  I received more horrified looks.

  Overall, I was quite grateful that I couldn’t remember anything after flying towards the tree.

  As the doctor had said, I was a very lucky man.

  ‘It also wasn’t very helpful that Traffic didn’t initially identify you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It seems that both the car’s number plates, front and rear, had been shattered in the crash and were unreadable, so the officers on site used your mobile phone number to run a check. But those records indicated that the phone was registered to a man called Henry Jones from Coventry, so they had to contact West Midlands Police. Only when they tried to go there, did they find that the address didn’t exist.’

  It was my turn to be embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid that was my fault. I gave a false name to the shop when I bought it.’

  The sergeant looked at me in a highly disapproving manner. ‘Only drug dealers do that.’

  ‘I was fed up with you lot tracking my movements.’

  He snorted.

  ‘But, never mind all that,’ I said, even though I did mind. ‘Tell me about Joe Bradbury. Have you arrested him yet?’

  At that point the senior ward nurse burst into the room.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she said aggressively. ‘Time for you to go now, officer. We can’t have our patient getting over-tired.’

  ‘No!’ I shouted loudly back, with equal aggression. ‘The sergeant stays right where he is. We’re not finished.’

  She stared at me and pursed her lips.

  To totally bastardise the speech by the first Queen Elizabeth, I may have had the body of a weak and feeble invalid, but I had the heart and stomach of an Olympic athlete and there was no way I was going to let her send the detective away right now, just in case I became a little tired. And she could see it.

  ‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘You can have five more minutes.’

  ‘Ten,’ I said, but she ignored me and stormed out. The old battleaxe clearly didn’t much enjoy having her authority challenged.

  ‘Go on,’ I said to the DS. ‘Have you arrested Joe?’

  ‘Indeed we have.’

  I sighed in huge relief.

  ‘He was arrested two weeks ago on suspicion of theft from his mother and for conspiracy to defraud Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.’

  ‘Not for murder?’

  ‘In their infinite wisdom, the CPS consider that we have insufficient evidence for a charge of murder.’ He said it in a manner that made it obvious he thought the Crown Prosecution Service to be a bunch of idiots.

  And I agreed with him.

  ‘But at least his arrest has allowed us to have access to his phone and computer. We are processing the information they hold, so all is not lost.’

  ‘Where’s he being held?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s not. He’s out on bail.’

  My heart skipped a beat.

  ‘Bail?’

  ‘Yes, he was charged and appeared before magistrates in Guildford. Sadly, they gave him bail,
but that was to be expected for those charges.’

  ‘Why Guildford?’

  ‘It’s close to where the offences were said to have occurred.’

  ‘So it wasn’t you who arrested him?’

  ‘No. Surrey Police did that. But we have requested all his phone and computer data from them. After all, it was us at Thames Valley that gave Surrey the lead in the first place.’

  And Nancy and I had given it to them before that.

  ‘You know he’ll go straight to his mother and convince her that she agreed all along that he could have the money. You’ll have no case.’

  ‘Having no contact with his mother is part of the bail conditions. If he goes near her he’ll end up in prison.’

  ‘That will be very hard on her when she’s dying of cancer.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to see him anyway.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve spent quite a long time with Mrs Mary Bradbury over the past three weeks. Nice old lady. I showed her some of the emails our man sent to your wife. To say she was horrified was an understatement. She couldn’t believe how she’d been taken in by him for so long.’

  ‘But are you sure it will stick?’ I said. ‘She probably won’t remember anything about it by next week.’

  ‘Don’t be so certain. I found her much more lucid than I’d been expecting, especially after the last time I spoke to her over the carving knife incident. She even told me that she hasn’t lost all her marbles, like everyone thinks she has. Seems this confusion thing is all a bit of an act she puts on to make her life easier. No one expects her to be able to make any important decisions, so she doesn’t have to. Saves arguing with her son all the time, apparently. But she thinks he’s gone too far this time.’

  Well I never did. The devious old witch.

  ‘She was particularly angry with him for stealing money from her. She said she would happily have given him some cash if he’d asked her, so why did he have to go and take it without telling her?’

  ‘Right, that really is enough now.’ The battleaxe was back. ‘Time for you to go.’

  I could tell that defiance was not going to work this time.

  ‘Come back and see me again,’ I said to the detective. ‘And make it soon.’

  He stood up and turned to go.

  ‘How about a police guard?’ I asked to his back.