Guilty Not Guilty

by Felix Francis

  He turned round once more to face me. ‘Why do you need one?’

  ‘Because, with Joe Bradbury on the loose, I don’t feel safe. That’s why. He’s now tried to kill me twice and I fear he’ll try to do it again, and I can hardly fight back when I’m like this. At the moment, a five-year-old could bump me off in a heartbeat.’

  ‘But what would he gain by it?’

  The battleaxe started to tap her foot with impatience.

  ‘Don’t you ever learn anything?’ I said. ‘Joe Bradbury doesn’t need a reason to try and do me harm. He simply thinks of me as his enemy, someone that needs to be destroyed.’

  It was how I was beginning to think of him too.

  The DS stared at me. ‘I’ll have a word with the DCI.’

  ‘You do that,’ I said. ‘And also find that other car. Start with Joe’s Nissan. Then you can add attempted murder to his charge sheet.’

  29

  The day after my visit from the detective sergeant, the big toe on my left foot started moving, and gradually, during the following week, most of my fingers began to obey my mental commands too, and then my ankles would flex when I asked them to.

  My whole body started to feel human again, rather than just a disconnected brain, uselessly attached to an inert lump of meat.

  And the improvement seemed to please the neurologists and also Mr Constance, the surgeon.

  ‘Now that your neck is orthopaedically stable, and the operation site has healed well, I think it’s time we moved you on,’ he announced. ‘You need to go to a specialist rehabilitation centre rather than staying here in hospital. The physiotherapy there is more intensive and they will try and get you back walking again. I’ll arrange it.’

  I suppose it was the obvious next step but part of me wanted to stay right here at the John Radcliffe. Stupid as it sounded, I found some comfort in being in the same building, or at least on the same site, as Amelia.

  Even though it had now been more than a month since her death, there had still been no mention by anyone of a funeral. I was in no fit state to organise anything, so I just went with the flow and kept quiet. But it was a bridge that would have to be crossed at some stage, although bridge was hardly the right word – minefield, more like.

  Mr Constance returned to say that it was all sorted and I would be transferred by ambulance the following Monday.

  ‘Where to?’ I asked.

  ‘The National Spinal Injuries Centre,’ he said. ‘At Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury.’

  ‘But isn’t that for disabled people?’

  He laughed, even though I thought it particularly insensitive under the circumstances.

  ‘So what do you think you are?’ he said, still chuckling.

  He could see that I wasn’t joining in with his mirth.

  ‘Look,’ he said more seriously. ‘The problems you are currently experiencing are due to the trauma your spinal cord received in the accident.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I said, interrupting him.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘In the incident, then. The nerves in your neck were heavily bruised and we know from experience that bruised nerves often stop working. In your case, it was specifically the motor nerves that shut down. Thankfully, they are slowly beginning to work again, but there are no guarantees that they will ever return to normal function.’

  He didn’t pull his punches. He gave it to me straight.

  ‘Some patients in your situation regain full use and sensation, but there are others who are confined to a wheelchair for the rest of their lives.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The spinal injuries centre will give you the best chance. Yes, they have specialist therapies to treat people whose cords have been totally snapped, but they also deal with people like you. If anyone can get you back on your feet, they can.’

  ‘Right, then,’ I said more positively. ‘The sooner I get there the better.’

  *

  Over my last weekend at the JR, I had three visitors.

  The first two, on the Saturday afternoon, were Nancy and Dave Fadeley.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Nancy asked, again nervously fiddling with her ever-present pearl necklace. ‘We would have come before but the hospital . . .’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m only just well enough to have visitors, and it’s so lovely to see you both.’

  I smiled, and she relaxed a bit and smiled back.

  By now I could move my head a little from side to side, which was just as well as Dave and Nancy sat down on chairs placed on either side of the bed.

  ‘How are things in Hanwell?’ I asked.

  ‘Much the same,’ Dave replied. ‘We’ve been over to your place a couple of times. We used the key you gave us.’

  They had been keyholders for the alarm company since we first arrived.

  ‘I threw away some stuff from the fridge,’ Nancy said. ‘It had gone off.’

  ‘Thank you. Was everything else okay?’

  ‘I turned off the hot water and put the heating right down,’ Dave said. ‘But everything seemed fine.’

  No sign of Joe Bradbury, I assumed.

  ‘It was Mark Thornton who found you. It’s been the talk of the pub.’

  Mark Thornton, the local publican. After the way he’d spoken to me when I’d collected my car from his car park, I suppose I should be grateful that he’d called the emergency services at all. Perhaps he hadn’t realised it was me, or maybe he’d thought I was already dead.

  We chatted on for a while about a number of mundane things, such as the weather, until I sensed a slight unease in them.

  ‘Have you heard from the police at all?’ I asked, thinking that must be reason.

  ‘Not a dicky,’ Dave said.

  So it was not that.

  I then wondered if their unease was just that of the hospital visitor who wants to leave but doesn’t know quite how to say so to the patient.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I forced a yawn. ‘I’m getting quite tired.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nancy, her unease disappearing in an instant. ‘Sorry. We’ve just been prattling on without thinking. Come on, Dave. It’s time to go.’

  They both stood up just a tad too eagerly.

  ‘We’ll come again.’

  ‘I’m moving on Monday,’ I said. ‘To Stoke Mandeville.’

  ‘Oh, right. Then we’ll come and see you there.’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ I said, and we left it at that.

  Everybody happy.

  *

  My third visitor came on Sunday morning.

  The return of movement to my feet had been accompanied by a feeling of intense pins and needles in my soles, something that was quite painful. And it had been particularly bad during Saturday night and hence I had slept rather badly.

  So, on Sunday morning, I was snoozing quite a lot.

  I woke from one such doze to find Mary Bradbury sitting at the side of my bed. She looked concerned, with deep furrows across her brow.

  ‘Bad, is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Only when I think about it.’ Which was all the time.

  ‘I needed to come and see you,’ Mary said. ‘Before I can’t.’

  She did look much more frail than when I’d seen her only a few weeks before, and her skin was noticeably more yellow. Her cheeks had also sunken in somewhat and her face had a pronounced skull-like appearance. There was not much doubt that the cancer within was taking its dreadful toll on her body.

  ‘I need to talk,’ she said, and tears welled up in her deep-set eyes.

  ‘It’s okay, Mary,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘It’s not okay,’ she said, the tears now openly flowing. ‘And I do worry. I accused you of killing her. I now know that wasn’t true. And I am so very, very sorry.’

  ‘Mary, my dear, forget it. Everyone else was accusing me as well. I promise, you have nothing to be sorry about.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘And it wasn’t just that.’

&
nbsp; She paused as if plucking up the courage to go on.

  ‘I had no idea that Joseph was being so horrid to you and to my dear Amelia. That nice policeman showed me his dreadful emails.’ She cried some more. ‘Why didn’t Amelia tell me?’

  She had tried, often, but Mary hadn’t wanted to know – and she certainly hadn’t wanted to believe. Not least because, all the time, Joe had been whispering in her ear that Amelia was mad and untrustworthy.

  But I didn’t say that.

  ‘Maybe she hadn’t wanted to distress you.’

  But she was distressed now, and seemingly the more so because it was now too late to tell Amelia how sorry she was.

  ‘I so wish she was still here so I could speak to her,’ Mary said, the tears still flowing.

  So did I. It would have done so much good for her mental health.

  ‘That is all Joe’s doing,’ I said, twisting the knife in Mary’s heart. ‘He is the reason Amelia isn’t here.’

  She nodded, as if aware of the fact.

  ‘Will the police be able to prove that?’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  She nodded again. ‘I won’t see it, though,’ she said miserably. ‘I’ve not got long now.’ She suddenly smiled. ‘But I’ll be able to put things right with Amelia on the other side.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I agreed, even though I didn’t really believe in all that. But if the thought gave Mary some comfort, then I would not be the one to mock it.

  As DS Dowdeswell had told me, the old dear seemed more alert and more mentally perceptive than in the past, and I so wished that Amelia had known that too.

  ‘I must go now,’ she said. ‘Fred and Jill, my neighbours, they brought me here. They’re waiting outside.’

  ‘Thank you so much for coming.’ It had obviously been quite an effort.

  She managed another smile. ‘You take care, my dear.’

  I watched her go in the sure knowledge that it would be the last time I would see her, and my eyes filled with tears too.

  But I was wrong.

  No sooner had she disappeared from my sight through the door, than she was suddenly back again.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘I’ve changed my will. You will now receive Amelia’s half of my estate, and Joseph’s half goes directly to his children.’

  Did I detect a slight degree of amusement in her voice?

  ‘It’ll serve him right.’

  30

  Three weeks after my arrival at the National Spinal Injuries Centre, I took my first steps, albeit between parallel bars for support and with lots of help from the team of physiotherapists.

  My housemaster at school had been very fond of using the expression There’s no such word as can’t, whenever one of his charges had moaned, ‘I can’t do it, sir.’

  Here in the rehabilitation gym at Stoke Mandeville, that expression should have been inscribed on the walls in huge flashing letters.

  And what the patients could do was remarkable.

  Wheelchairs, rather than being simply the inanimate objects that most of us see, take on a personality of their own in the hands of men and women so badly damaged that half their bodies have no use whatsoever, other than to be an encumbrance.

  But that didn’t mean that these remarkable people would not participate to the full in love, in life and, especially, in sport.

  The precursor to the Paralympic Games was first held at Stoke Mandeville way back in 1948, on the very day that the Olympic Games were declared open in London by King George VI.

  In those first Stoke Mandeville Games, there was just one event in one sport, archery, and a mere sixteen competitors took part, all of them from the United Kingdom.

  By 2016 the games had grown somewhat such that, in Rio de Janeiro, nearly four and a half thousand athletes from a hundred and sixty countries competed in twenty-two Paralympic sports, still including archery, winning 528 gold medals and setting 220 world records.

  And most of the patients at Stoke Mandeville had seemingly set their sights on being on the next Paralympic flight to Tokyo, or the one after that to Paris, or after that to Los Angeles.

  The level of determination to make the best of life’s bad deal was inspirational, to put it mildly, and it was as much the encouragement from the other patients as that from the staff that made things happen.

  ‘Come on, Bill,’ shouted Robin, a fellow patient who couldn’t even sit upright without being strapped to a high-backed wheelchair, and who was unable to breathe without the aid of a ventilator that rhythmically pushed and pulled his chest in and out. ‘You can do it.’

  It had taken all his strength to shout like that, and all his breath, and I wasn’t about to let him down, now was I?

  Walking was simple, right?

  Even tiny kids could do it, right?

  Just put one foot in front of the other, and then repeat.

  I took five of the smallest steps ever, and I was totally exhausted.

  I sat back down heavily into the wheelchair that one of the staff had been pushing behind me.

  ‘Good job,’ shouted Robin, and then, when the contraption he was wearing gave him another breath, ‘Way to go, Bill.’

  And so my life progressed, one tiny step at a time, each one feeling like a gold-medal winning achievement.

  *

  By the end of the fourth week, I could walk along the total length of the bars, albeit in a manner that made Hopalong Cassidy look more like a marching guardsman.

  And it was after another particularly lengthy stint in the gym that DS Dowdeswell came to see me again.

  ‘We got him,’ he said, echoing the words that Barack Obama had used when he was informed that a US Special Forces soldier had shot and killed Osama bin Laden.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, my mind clearly not working properly after such a strenuous session.

  ‘Who do you think? Joe Bradbury.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘Cell-site evidence.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Evidence from his mobile phone,’ the detective said with a laugh. ‘It’s always their mobile phones that give them away. They can’t resist taking the damn things with them wherever they go as if they’re a part of their own bodies. Criminals are so stupid. It’s almost as if they want to get caught.’

  And the clever ones never are, I thought.

  ‘Anyway, like you said to, we examined Bradbury’s black Nissan, but there was no damage on it, not even a scratch.’

  ‘It could have been fixed. It’s been long enough.’

  He shook his head. ‘We can always tell. There are minor changes to the paintwork of the repaired bit compared to the rest. He would have had to have the whole vehicle resprayed and, even then, there would still be telltale signs in the door recesses and also in the boot and the engine compartments. No, we were certain the Nissan was not the car that hit yours.’

  I sat silently in the wheelchair and waited for him to go on.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘we did a check on his phone and, sure enough, it showed that he’d been in Banbury around four o’clock on the day of your accident.’

  ‘It was not an accident.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right – your non-accident. We get so used to describing every road-traffic collision as an accident. Difficult to forget sometimes.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, the cell-site records show that his phone was switched off for most of the afternoon but he did turn it on for a while when he was in Banbury to make a call to his office. Maybe he forgot, but the phone wasn’t switched off again until later, and it was still on when automatically passed from a mast in Banbury to one close to Hanwell village at twenty-six minutes past five.’

  ‘The exact time I was on my way home from Waitrose.’

  ‘Exactly. So if he wasn’t driving his Nissan, what was he driving?’

  ‘Could have been a tank if the force of the impact was anything to go by.’

  ‘Anyway,’ the DS said, ignoring my flippancy. ‘Next we checked if
his wife had a car, but she doesn’t. So what other vehicles did he have access to? And, sure enough, the first thing we tried came up trumps.’

  ‘Which was?’ I asked eagerly.

  ‘I remembered him saying in the Coroner’s Court in Oxford that he was an officer of the High Court. And, if I recall correctly, he was rather pompous about it.’

  No kidding. Ever since I’d first met him, Joe had used that phrase to anyone who’d listen, always using the same patronising, self-righteous air, as if it somehow gave him greater importance.

  ‘So I contacted the High Court,’ said the DS. ‘And they told me that, yes indeed, they did have someone called Joseph Bradbury registered on their books as an enforcement officer, although his registration was currently suspended because he’s been arrested for fraud.’

  ‘So it’s definitely him, then.’

  ‘No doubt about it. But he hadn’t been either arrested or suspended on the day of your acc— . . . incident. He’s attached to one of the west London firms that deals mostly in private rent arrears. We’ve checked the firm’s records and, guess what, he signed out one of their vans on that particular Wednesday. Not that that in itself is incriminating. He signed out a van on most days in order to do his job, which was to enforce High Court writs. Enforcement officers have the power to seize goods from debtors up to the value of the outstanding debts, so he would need a van to transport them.’

  He paused and I nodded for him to go on.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It transpires that the van that Joe had that day was involved in an altercation at one of his jobs. At least, that’s what he claimed. He told his office that someone drove straight into the front of it while he was waiting outside some premises for the occupier to return. Apparently, it’s not that unusual for their vehicles to be attacked. Seems some of the debtors can turn really nasty.’

  I wasn’t surprised.

  When you have absolutely nothing with which to pay your rent, it must be devastating when some heartless court official arrives in a van to take away the few possessions that you actually do own. It explained why Joe Bradbury’s demeanour was so hard. Over the years, he must have developed a skin as thick as a rhinoceros against the pleading of those in desperate need.